A simple question that isn’t, but one to assess often as you write

{940 words — 4-minute read}

You’re writing a memoir, and this question comes up: “Who is your audience?” This is not as simple a question as it may seem. It’s multi-layered, with your answers and focus being unique.

This post addresses part of the question — that is, your audience as you progress through the writing of your memoir. Later, with your memoir completed, there are a whole new set of questions to ask as you address your target audience from a marketing angle.

The first layer, that first audience, is YOU. If you can’t keep this audience engaged, you’ll never finish the book. And if somehow you do finish, the fact you aren’t engaged will likely be obvious on the page. Your book won’t be engaging. If you are engaged and drawn in by the memoir that you’re writing, you will be spurred to keep writing to the finish line.

Moreover, writing a memoir is often a growing, learning experience. The process of writing a memoir will help you put things in greater perspective, reveal things you never realized before, and maybe even make sense of your life.

Look outward now, but let’s still stay inside you. If only one other person were to read your memoir — a reader you construct in your mind, not a real person — who would YOUR IDEAL READER be? Until you are well into completing the first draft of your memoir and feeling ready to share it with anyone else, keep this as your primary focus when thinking of audience.

At this point, I leave the discussion of your Ideal Reader to a separate post, which follows this one. But there is an audience that some (but not all) memoirists will have in this early writing phase — the ALPHA READER. This is someone you share your writing because, well, you share most everything you write, however raw, with them. They may be a spouse or partner. They may be a best friend. They may be a writing friend or coach or a writing group.

There is one thing the Alpha Reader most often is NOT; that is, they are NOT the audience for your memoir as a story. So let’s leave that aside as a separate issue. (I’ll add a separate post about Alpha Readership some time in the future.)

As you expand your vision of the sphere of your eventual audience, understand that this is part of your writing process; it’s nowhere near part of your sharing process.

As you get well into your first draft, take a step outward to the audience of FAMILY and FRIENDS. If you’re writing a memoir with elements that will upset those close to you, you have to keep this in mind . . . in the end. During this first-draft process, write honestly; be as hard-hitting as you need to be to get the most accurate, truthful narrative expressed. Only later should you decide how much to include and whether you must pull your punches.

Next, what COMMUNITY may find the most interest in your story? This is sort of a genre question, though not exactly. Science fiction authors and romance writers use very different tropes, language, and tone. You don’t write a memoir filled with references to popular singers and groups if you’re writing a work that will be most appreciated by investors and people in business. How many C-Suite executives obsess about who the Backstreet Boys, Amanda Palmer, Ross Lynch, BTS, Kendrick Lamar or Drake are? Flipping the coin, a memoirist telling her tale of fandom for boy bands and K-Pop probably isn’t best served by name dropping Andrew Carnegie, Warren Buffett, Jeff Bezos, and Malcolm Gladwell.

Then finally — and only as you move beyond your first draft and into editing — think about THE BROADER PUBLIC, and even THE WORLD. Keep in mind that, once published to the broader public, anyone can acquire your memoir. Are you comfortable that your work will be accessible to all? Or do you wish to create barriers that will make an in-crowd appreciative but limit readership? Or do you prefer to go even farther and restrict your audience to the private sphere? There’s nothing wrong whichever way, just a choice.

We may even add NOW and the FUTURE. This can affect the language you use, the examples you give, the references you make. Let’s say you’re focused on a primary audience living with a whole set of cultural references, you can use examples that may leave readers scratching their heads 50 or 100 years from now. But if your memoir is meant to weather the test of time. . . . Well, I played that game in the Opening, when I mentioned joining a “club whose members include Julius Caesar, St. Augustine, Henry David Thoreau, Stephen King, Mary Karr, Joan Didion . . . and Snooki.” A reader in 2100 will read that last name in bewilderment. Some names weather centuries and millennia; some names blow by in a decade or a year, such as one or all of those musicians I cited.

Audience is a continuum, one that you assess and reassess as your memoir develops. It starts with completely private (an audience of one — yourself), can stop anywhere along the way, and may go all the way to the World. You can find success in your journey wherever along this continuum you land. If outside forces, or even your own momentum, cause you to land partway along, that is not failure.

Having looked at the target audience for your book — this is crucial especially until you’ve completed a first draft of your memoir — forget about everyone other than You, your Ideal Reader, and (maybe) family and friends. One caveat: Though these constitute your target audience, for now you should be the only reader, unless you have a spouse/life partner who is deeply entwined in your project.

{This column was adapted from A Memory Mosaic, my memoir-plus.}