It is finally September, the season of transformation, and the leaves aren’t the only thing that’s changing. In book inc’s Memoir Incubator, we have finally reached the end of our designated writing time. Since the first week of March, my fellow writers and I have had a word count goal of 2,500 words a week, with a few catch-up weeks here and there. That way, if we could keep up with the schedule, by the end of August we should have hit the 50,000 total word count goal.

For some of us, that hasn’t been the case. Life has gotten in the way: sickness, vacations, unexpected life events. But no matter what our year looked like, we all know it’s crunch time now, and we are trying to claim every possible free second as potential writing time.

In the last few months, I have faced many setbacks in my writing. In addition to reliving some of the most traumatic moments of my life in order to recount them vividly in my memoir, I have also faced a battle between the structure of my memoir and its content. These two facets of a memoir are deeply intertwined: how you structure your book influences what you choose to include, and what you include influences how you order your chapters. But should you write in past or present tense? Do you alternate between memories in an essay style, or do you tell the story chronologically? This has been a struggle for me while writing, and it has often thrown me off. Usually, I can sit down and write a scene smoothly, because I am used to telling stories in a shorter format. But now I pause and think, should I really include a flashback here, or will this confuse the reader? Should I go back and add it earlier in the book? Agh! The questions are endless.

Additionally, I have spent a lot of time thinking through and writing out the order of my memoir, and some of that time should have been spent simply writing the memories I want to include. The Save the Cat! beat guidelines have been extremely helpful in this respect, as they outline common plot points that will have the desired effect on readers.

As September arrives, we are shifting our focus from being writers to being readers, and we are learning how to give feedback in the most helpful way. While the first part of the class has included meeting as a whole class, this portion involves breaking into pod groups of three or four. In these groups, we will complete our Reading Rounds, where we will read each other’s first drafts and provide helpful feedback. Naturally, most of us are very nervous about this, as much of it is still very flawed and possibly even trauma word vomit. To address our nervousness, one of the PALS and the executive director of Project Write Now, Jennifer Chauhan, compared our first drafts to babies: they need to be treated with care, like the fragile, young beings they are. These drafts are extremely vulnerable, and much of it has not been reviewed or heavily edited to get the story on the page. The reader needs to recognize that and go in with the mindset that they will not be looking over perfect, polished work.

Jennifer explained that our feedback should encourage the parts of the memoir that work best, and if we are confused about something, we should frame it as a question so the author can choose what to do instead of receiving unsolicited advice. We also discussed that we can guide our pods in the direction by explaining which kind of feedback would be most helpful to us, such as whether or not we want line-level edits, if we want the reader to focus on scenes that made them feel something, or if we want them to recognize where there are gaps in the story. The goal is to incorporate this feedback when we go back for our second draft after a few sets of eyes have been on it. Jennifer was also clear that these reading rounds should not be editing rounds, because we are simply holding our classmate’s baby and showing them love and respect, not telling our classmate how to parent their newborn.

As Memoir Incubator inches toward a close, I am excited to hold my classmates’ babies for a moment and leave them with thoughts that make them feel proud of what they have accomplished!

Are you interested in writing your memoir or novel in a year? Apply now for book inc’s 2027 Book Incubators.