AWP: A Numerical Reckoning

By Brian Watson

Morgayne Kelley and Brian Watson

A couple of months have passed since I attended the 2023 AWP Conference in my beloved Seattle. The serotonin high has worn off and, after a glorious vacation, I am at home and settling back into my writing practice. Time to reflect.

Although I was intrigued by Allison K Williams’ post here on the Blog that described the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Programs) Conference as an event easily simulated at home, I ignored that advice. I went for the full, in-the-flesh experience with a complete lack of expectations. As my three days at AWP unfolded, however, I began keeping count of a few things.

∞

patience expended by my husband throughout the AWP long weekend as he fretted about my time spent away from home in advance of our trip to Japan. (We left Seattle the weekend after AWP.)

Thirty-thousand six-hundred four

steps taken during the conference. This includes walking from the car to the light rail station, from Westlake Center to the convention center, and back three times, plus hurrying from session to session each day.

Thirty-four

photographs taken. I originally met Morgayne Kelley (pictured with me) during a virtual writing seminar in May of 2021, and even though we both live in and around Seattle, this was the first time we got to meet in person, and it was glorious.

Twenty-seven

escalator rides. The new Seattle Conference Center is stunningly beautiful but it’s six stories tall and there was AWP activity on every floor. Even with motorized help, it took forever to get from session to session, anxiously racing the clock.

Seattle Convention Center

Twenty-six

hours spent comfortably wearing a mask.

Twenty-one

notes taken on my iPhone, ranging from two words (the name of a publisher in British Columbia) to 175 words (notes from the session on podcasting).

Ones that stand out include:

-Subjunctive memoir as speculative non-fiction

-Grief annihilates the person you were when your beloved was alive

Nineteen

business cards given to other people. It’s a small number, I know, when taking the 13,000 attendees into account, but I’m an introverted extrovert. However, I did not offer business cards to my writing idols—I couldn’t possibly summon the courage to present myself in card form.

Twelve and six-tenths

miles walked over the three days. Surprising, given my predilection for sitting at home.

Eleven

new Twitter followers. This proved (to me) the value of my business card.

Nine

elevator rides. Elevating was faster than escalating, but there were long lines, and my inner New Yorker is impatient.

visits to the book fair on the ground floor. I had a list of publishers and magazines to visit, and the book signings I ABSOLUTELY had to be there for. The poet Chen Chen and Edgar Gomez, author of High-Risk Homosexual, were highest on my list.

hugs shared among writing friends.

Eight

presentations and panels attended.

Two of my favorites:

• The Future of Queer Publishing. Hearing how independent publishers were making space for other rainbow-dwellers inspired me to no end.
  
  
• The Future of Queer Aesthetics: How to Write Authentic LGBTQ+ Characters. Venita Blackburn had the room in stitches when she said: Maybe try the second person. Never mind that. Don’t be crazy. This panel gave me hope for a future where I try my hand at fiction.

Seven

staircases ascended. I am very much an escalator person, but here again my inner, impatient New Yorker took over.

Six

authors signed books for me. The phrase, can I fanboy?, worked wonders, even after waiting patiently for Matt Bell to exit the washroom. Chen Chen signed his two poetry collections, and when I asked after his chapbook, he retrieved his own copy from his bag and signed it for me on the spot.

Five and four-tenths

average hours slept in the nights leading up to the event. Excitement woke me at three or four AM all week long.

Five

times I said, with full sincerity, you inspire me.

new writing friends made; our yet-to-be-told stories lighting our eyes.

Three

negative COVID-19 home test results, after receiving an exposure warning on my iPhone Saturday night.

magazine publishers I thanked for previously sharing my work.

publishers I spoke to about submitting my memoir and proposal, all of whom encouraged me to submit, asking me to remind them that we met at AWP.

Two

authors who complimented me on my nails.

overpriced lunches consumed at the conference center.

One

person told me that I had inspired them.

author recommended I pitch my memoir to their publisher after hugging me.

moment when I realized that I finally understood the why for writing my memoir: I revisit the past to correct the present because I can help others do the same. Young queer people need the power I discovered within me, and I can teach them how I did it.

time I cried.

Zero

regrets.

———

Brian Watson (@iambrianwatson on Twitter and Instagram) has been a leader and mentor within the gay community both in the United States and Japan for more than thirty-five years. His craft essays and book reviews appear in Brevity and Hippocampus, and his first creative nonfiction essay, “Bending Time,” was selected by White Enso for their nonfiction award. A subsequent essay, “Unfolding,” was named a finalist for the Montana Prize for Nonfiction. His memoir-in-progress is Crying in a Foreign Language: The Deity that Answered My Plea. Find his other writing here.

A Review of Melissa Febos’ Body Work

By Brian Watson

I wasn’t expecting my mother’s question.

She knew that I was working on my memoir; I had called early in September 2021 to let her know that a publishing company had requested the manuscript—an exciting turn of events that later led to a kind rejection from the publisher.

I had given her a very rough outline of the manuscript. How I had grown up gay, how my failure to process my father’s death when I was fourteen affected me, my choice to move to Japan in 1988 in the hope of escaping the HIV-AIDS pandemic in the United States, and how my ten years in Japan unfolded me.

Can you send me a copy? I want to read it.

Imagining my mother reading about my roughshod sexual education (my first adolescence as a frightened queer kid) and emotional evolution (my second adolescence where feelings were finally allowed to join the physical) had me suddenly nervous. But I ordered a copy of the manuscript from the local print shop and mailed it off.

My stepfather called first, telling me he loved it and couldn’t wait for it to be properly published. My mother, he said, was still reading it, going more slowly.

She called at some point between Thanksgiving and Christmas, that point in the year when, by law, family drama must occur. I overstate it, of course, but the conversation included this moment:

You write very well, Brian.

Thank you, Ma.

I like it. But I have to tell you something, and I don’t want you to take this the wrong way.

Yes?

I had to skip over parts of it. There were things I just didn’t want to know.

That’s okay, Ma.

It reassured me to know that, as close as she and I had become over the years, we still had mutually respected boundaries.

There are some details in a grown child’s life that no parent is meant to know, especially when that grown child has the kind of early adulthood pastimes that I had.

I didn’t write a memoir to free myself, though in the process I did.

The first few pages of Melissa Febos’ Body Work: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative hit hard, and I started to vibrate, emotionally. My first adolescence, the ten or so years before I left for Japan, was an awful combination of urgent sex and fear. Fear of grief—my father died when I was fourteen—and a fear of exposure as a gay man to my family.

I had put some raw content on the page (and revised it and revised it) and it unnerved me. And it was more than my learning how to cruise other men in Manhattan at age fifteen. It was a trauma I was walking back through. I had concerns beyond the writing and its impact on me, however.

Anyone who writes the story of their individual trauma, and especially those of identities that have been historically oppressed and abused, is subject to the retraumatization by ongoing perpetrators: the patriarchal, white supremacist, colonizing nation(s) in which they must live and learn to heal.

I have taken classes with other writers of memoir, I have taught a few as well, and I hear the fear. Women, queer people like me, Black Americans, and other people of color? We were vulnerable to trauma even before we started writing. Were we about to allow others to dig deeper in our wounds?

Shortly after [Abandon Me] was published, during a post-reading Q & A, a woman stood up and asked me, ‘Aren’t you ashamed?’

Another fear that I and other writers of memoirs share is blowback. Within the traumas we write about, there are often specific persons we can point to as those who victimized us or who intensified the trauma. People love to share the Anne Lamott epigram, If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should’ve behaved better. I’m partial, myself, to one of the lines that Allison K Williams has taught me to use, I can’t wait to read your memoir, Aunt Martha.

Memoirs have the potential to burn bridges, to destroy relationships. I feel this keenly as I write.

…I wanted to be able to tell both stories. That felt more fair. Still, I felt the violation of that narration. [The other person’s] version was not my story to tell.

Telling my story is enough. Talking about my choices, the impacts of other people on me, and my ultimate successes—getting the manipulator out of my life, finding a way to be out of the closet professionally in Japan, of all places, and discovering the changes I could make that allowed me to finally fall in a truer love—are the ways my story will reach readers, the people I want to be present for.

As memoirists, we, too, speak about the unspeakable in public in the belief that this will help others. While I know that the person helped most of all is myself, part of my own healing has come from the hundreds of strangers who have written to me, claiming that I told their story, too, and that reading it showed them that it was possible to tell.

Body Work is a work of courage. And in reading it, I was imbued with a new courage myself. What a wonderful gift to the writing community.

Thank you, Melissa.

___

Brian Watson is currently revising and querying his first memoir, Crying in a Foreign Language; Pink Lady, Fictional Girlfriends, and the Deity that Answered my Plea. Originally from New York State, he lives in the Seattle area after years in Massachusetts, Saitama, Tōkyō, and British Columbia. His recent essays have appeared in Brevity’s online blog. His other book reviews have appeared in Hippocampus magazine. He is the author of an upcoming article on marriage equality in the US and Japan for JETs on Japan magazine and was recently interviewed for a May episode of the Second Adolescence podcast. He spends his days with his partner/spouse of twenty-eight years, Hiro. Brian lives online at iambrianwatson.com and Twitter  @iambrianwatson.

A Meditation on Meditation on Writing

By Brian Watson

It started as a suggestion, a well-intentioned prescription from an online friend.

I suffer from headaches frequently, especially in the mornings. I have confounded my doctor in her search for causes. We’ve ruled out water, sleep issues, muscle issues, blood flow issues. She always asks about stress and cortisol, but stress is like a secret lover. I never know when it comes and goes; it is just there when I think to look for it. I stress about all of the usual things: work, writing, money.

And one morning I shared the headache struggle on social media. Suggestions came streaming in.

One stood out: Have you tried meditating?

I had meditated in the past, yes. Never made it a practice, I admit, because it was so difficult. Asking my brain, my nearest and dearest friend, to be silent is a task that borders on the Sisyphean. My undergraduate background in science also made me wary of the woo-woo around meditation—I know that there is good science on meditation too as well as the woo-woo.

Something shifted, however, when that suggestion was made.

I had already downloaded an app, Insight Timer, on my phone. I had tried a few sessions but wasn’t particularly inspired. I opened it again and looked specifically for meditations for queer people. Courses from one teacher, the Venerable Lobsang Tenpa, stood out. That was more than sixty days ago; I have been practicing meditation daily since then. Meditations with that teacher even inspired the title for one of my next books: My Inner Light is a Disco Ball; Authenticity Amid the Dance of a Queer Identity.

My stress levels are now noticeably lower. The headaches? They’re still with me, but my doctor now believes that the headaches are a side-effect, a reaction to a medication, and we’re testing that theory. Stay tuned.

Insight Timer recently had a major update, and the app now uses some algorithm or other to recommend other guided meditations. I still regularly listen to meditations from Lobsang Tenpa. His guided courses on queer roots and reparenting are perfect for me. But I occasionally follow recommendations, to flirt with other teachers.

One such recommendation was regrettable. It took the teacher five (out of the total fifteen) minutes to introduce himself and give background for his program. On multiple occasions he clumsily spelled out the alphabet of queer identities—lgbtqia+ is why I prefer umbrella terms like queer and rainbow-dwellers. He also repeated a mantra that lands like pabulum on my ears: love is love is love. (Queer identities also can queer the notion of love and love is love is love comes across as a cudgel, a heteronormative reassertion. Queer is more than love and our love is often as wild and queer as we are.) The nail in the coffin was hearing the teacher’s vocalizations. He apparently took inspiration from the pauses William Shatner dramatically employed as Star Trek’s James Tiberius Kirk. I’ve never been a fan of waiting three seconds for the next word in your spoken sentence.

This morning’s recommendation was different: a guided meditation from Justin Michael Williams, the author of Stay Woke; A Meditation Guide for the Rest of Us (as I later discovered). It was fun, an emotion I was not prepared to encounter during meditation. Right from the beginning, as Justin repeated a series of good morning salutations into my headset, I began to laugh at the increasing silliness, and as I laughed, Justin did as well. I had permission to laugh while meditating!

Within the first few minutes, I was inspired again. He asked me not to think about everything I had to do today, but to instead focus on what I wanted to be today. I laughed again because it’s very hard to meditate AND to be a writer. Each inspiration Justin shared was a little jolt: I want to write about this. That inspiration about doing and being made me want to write about abandoning my to-do list in favor of a to-be list, and I needed to put the mental notebook down. I wouldn’t succeed at meditating (if indeed one can ever succeed at meditating) if I was so caught up with writing ideas. I stilled my thoughts, listening more to Justin, laughing along the way, and allowed the meditation to conclude with joy.

It’s a strange thing. Once you embrace writing, inspiration can ambush you anywhere. Even in a dark room, headset on, eyes closed. I’m grateful for a lot of things my writing journey has brought me since work began on my memoir in September of 2020. I have new friends and colleagues. I have a new understanding of my voice and my potential. I more keenly feel human connections. And I am immensely, voluminously grateful for inspiration and the joy that attends my writing. And, oh yes, I meditate.
___

Brian Watson is currently preparing a proposal for his first memoir: Crying in a Foreign Language; Pink Lady, Fictional Girlfriends, and the Deity that Answered my Plea. Originally from New York State, he lives in the Seattle area after years in Massachusetts, Saitama, Tōkyō, and British Columbia. His essays have appeared in Brevity Blog and in the newsletter of the Japan Local Government Center. He spends his days with Hiro, his partner/spouse of twenty-eight years. Brian lives online at iambrianwatson.com; follow him on Twitter @BMemoirist.

The New Social Media Rules

By Allison K Williams

Social media is dead. Curated by airbrushed aspirational lives, fattened with frank capitalism, political outrage and carefully careless “authenticity,” led to the killing floor by algorithmic shopping, and stabbed through the heart by an unimaginably wealthy manbaby who—literally—can’t even buy friends.

Not an especially humane killing. Definitely not halal.

Even publishers are catching on. After the dismal sales of Billie Eilish’s book-shaped product (99.9 million Instagram followers, 64,000 copies sold), and similar ratios from Justin Timberlake, Rep. Ilhan Omar, social activist Tamika D. Mallory and TV presenter/pseudo-journalist Piers Morgan, it’s become clear: only about 1 in 5 followers is a “book person,” and most of those aren’t waiting for their idol’s book.

At The Hot Sheet, Jane Friedman interviewed longtime publishing industry veteran Peter Hildick-Smith. As Jane writes, his Codex Group pioneered pre-market testing to help book publishers, retailers, authors, agents, and tech companies—consumer-oriented research before a book reaches the market. In her interview, Peter says:

The market power shift from trade customer to book consumer has been gradual, over the last 10+ years, making it harder for many to notice the shift. But the more direct-to-consumer online sales have grown, heavily driven by Amazon, the smaller the impact of physical retail distribution and merchandising, the greater the importance of publishers’ direct dialog with the individual book buyer.

It’s not clicks. It’s not followers or even likes. It’s people. On and off social media, what moves books is the personal recommendation of someone the buyer trusts, plus author recognition and a feeling of belonging to that reader community. Bestseller-list dominator Colleen Hoover’s books sold because influencers on TikTok gave their word that reading would be a good experience—an endorsement that happened to take place on social media, not “platform”—and then she became popular herself.

The good news is, it’s not you. It’s been easy to worry, maybe I’ll just never be cool enough to get attention on social media. But everything you’ve always done to sell books is what actually works. Telling your church or temple membership. Writing a newsletter for your fifty hardcore fans. Asking your friends to tell their friends.

Endorsements.

Evangelism.

And your own Engagement.  

Evangelists and endorsements are made, not born. Both come from your own engagement, whether that’s online or in the “real world.” How do you identify readers, and the best method to reach them? How do you make the words you love to write a little more culturally relevant? How do you build your own support group, ready to lift up your work?

Social media is a place to practice writing craft, so post like a writer.

Tweak your first draft. Is the question phrased well? Is your joke funny? Threads/Bluesky/Twitter (not calling it that, sorry!) are places to write strong sentences that begin and end with a noun or verb, that have the impact of a candy heart, a punchline, a helping hand, or an emotional punch. Instagram is still a place where a micro-essay can shine. Chat forums like Reddit and Discord are places to truly engage with your audience and your fellow writers. And the good old-fashioned newsletter/blog is now Substack, where your subscribers keep you going and strangers can get to know your words and trust your voice.

Groups > Profiles

Facebook is the most useful social platform right now, but not as a place to chat with racist Aunt Tilly. Use your feed (the posts you see right away when you open the app) to keep in personal touch with friends and family. Spend your professional time in groups. Writing genres, geographical locations and cultural movements all have Facebook groups full of potential readers and colleagues. Search Facebook for your topic and your writing type, and join 20-30 groups. Ditch the ones that don’t interest you or are too fast or too slow to enjoy. Check in with the “keepers” at least twice a week to congratulate, support, and ask and answer questions.

Engagement > Announcement

You wouldn’t shout “BUY MY BOOK!” in a crowded theatre, so don’t do it online. Whether you’re advocating at a civic meeting or socializing at your book club, lift up other voices. Share resources. And yes, write thoughtfully about what you care about.

Being interested makes you interesting. Memorable. And likely to be trusted when you announce you wrote down what you think and now it’s available for purchase.

In that vein, Substack works because it’s not a one-way street. As well as a place to read your interesting and well-written words, readers can comment and respond (just like a blog) or enjoy seeing you in the inbox (just like a newsletter).

Play the long game.

Going viral is nice, but it’s not as powerful as it was three years ago. Yes, we’re all waiting for a spark. But spark only works when you’ve piled up wood and added tinder. Brian Watson writes about experiencing Japan as a young, gay Westerner, and as an older, married man with a Japanese husband. He patiently wrote about places and people he loves, in all their complexity, and then someone on Substack noticed, promoted him (endorsement! evangelism!) and grew his following “overnight.”

I co-founded The Writers Bridge with Ashleigh Renard, and joked, “Our mailing list is 2000 people and all it took to build it was delivering useful information for an hour every other week for two years!” Now, co-host Sharla Yates and I run monthly episodes for a mailing list of 3900 and growing, and we’ve shifted our focus from “platform-building” to “publishing and selling your book.” The community we’ve nurtured also interact with each other on social media and connect in person at writing events.

You don’t have to win a popularity contest. Find the real-world and online groups you actually like and where you can work through your own ideas. Follow and engage with people you enjoy talking to. Consistently show up.

Social media is dead. Long live being social, and creating media.

_______________

Allison K Williams is Brevity‘s Social Media Editor, and probably needs a new title. Want more marketing guidance? Join her for Writer Mind, Marketing Mind, a webinar about launching your words into the world (and including a custom time-and-activity plan for your own marketing. Hurray, Gantt charts!) Find out more/register now ($25)–all registrants get the replay.

Fiction? No. Memoir!

By Brian Watson

In 1994, I was in love for the first time. I glowed with an ecstatic radiance, visible from space. Newfound amorous happiness flipped a writing switch in me. Every night I sat down at my Macintosh Plus, with the massive forty-five-megabyte hard drive atop my desk, and I wrote. Disparate memories of my youth flowed together in a story that inexorably concluded in that ne plus ultra of human endeavors: true love!

But it wasn’t a memoir.

I was certain of one thing: it was right and fair to cast it all as fiction. I believed that my family and friends would prefer a veneer of invention separating them from my realities.

I secretly printed the book at my office in Tōkyō, and mailed it to a college friend in New York. She sent back corrections and marginalia, and I revised. I sent it on to my high-school English teacher and received a kind-yet-disappointing reply: An author’s first work is never their best work. Write something else.

Dreams of bestsellers waned. I packed away the printed manuscript, and as my love and I moved from Tōkyō to Kirkland, from Kirkland to Bellevue, from Bellevue to New Westminster, from New Westminster to Burnaby, and Burnaby to Kent, I lost the manuscript.

Misplacing the manuscript was not intentional. Important boxes were always opened after each move, but we’d amassed a small set of boxes with nondescript labels like textbooks and Brian’s things, and we ignored them. I wondered sometimes where the manuscript went, but never enough to mount a search.

In September of 2020 I began writing again. This time it was unabashed. A true memoir. Nothing changed. Nothing veneered.

As the first draft neared completion in December, I converted the upstairs rumpus room to a studio of sorts. To frame prints, to store books, to work on macro photography techniques. (Yes, too many hobbies!) My husband and I opened piles of boxes there, passing on any KonMari routine. We shelved everything we found. It sparked joy anyway.

In the very last box, at the very bottom, I saw the blue binder and squealed. My manuscript’s title page greeted me as it arose from its nest: In So Many Words.

I brought it down to my office and decided I wasn’t looking at it until the memoir was complete. The fiction was a virus. I didn’t want it to infect my true memoir.

Months passed. I reworked, revised, and restructured the memoir. A friend read the first half. His notes and suggestions came as I planned a brief vacation to Oregon. On an impulse, I packed both his notes and the old manuscript.

Afternoons in Portland were spent in an Adirondack chair, my iPad beside me, the notes and the old manuscript in my lap.

I started to read In So Many Words.

And recoiled.

My writing is terrible. And who are these people? I had no notes indicating which friends were assigned which fictional names. Wait! Did that really happen?

Between the melodrama and the navel-gazing, there were sparks, twinkling out at me. I remembered that I’d included an occupation: average housewife, on conference name tags in Japan, no doubt inspired by my own camp and chyrons from The Phil Donohue Show.

I stopped after the fifth chapter, unable to discern whether events themselves were fact or fiction. Did I really answer a personal ad in Jock magazine in 1988? I shook my head in disbelief. Jock? So off-brand.

And my writing made me cringe:

He and his family lived in an apartment house right on the river, and despite the fact that the location proved great for catching eels and crabs during summer vacation, and the added bonus that the apartment house had a pool, there was, between the apartment and Our Lade of Perpetual Sorrows Parish School, an immense hill which Matthew had to climb every morning in order to get to school.

As copy-editor extraordinaire Benjamin Dreyer might say, how very twee!

But with each cringe came a reinforcement.

I have grown as a writer since 1994.

I write better, with more confidence and clarity.

And that 1994 writer, fictionalized as Matthew, is one of the people I’m writing for.

My memoir calls my protagonist home to the me I now am. Where all of those boys — the confused boy, the angry boy, the lonely boy, and the desperate boy — I once was can find safety and acceptance.

And every time I feel the unneeded despair, at each doubting of my skill and talent, my reinforcements now await me:

You are not who you were.

You have grown, as you will continue to do.

You left a fictional life back in 1994 and the memoir is better for it. What a wise choice!

—

Brian Watson is currently preparing a proposal for his first memoir, Crying in a Foreign Language; Pink Lady, Fictional Girlfriends, and the Deity that Answered my Plea. Originally from New York State, he lives in the Seattle area after years in Massachusetts, Tōkyō, and British Columbia. He spends his days with his partner/spouse of twenty-eight years, Hiro. Their cantankerous old cat, Butters, has crossed the rainbow bridge. Brian lives online at iambrianwatson.com; follow him on Twitter @BMemoirist.

Wielding the Editorial Machete

By Brian Watson

I lost track of the revision count. There had been many since the first draft of my memoir. The more I worked, the more details flew into my mind. I caught my breath in May, thinking that all was good. The word count? 103,946.

Judas Priest, that’s a lot.

Part of me was proud. One hundred thousand words was a mythical goal. I have things to say — important things, of course — and the words just tumbled out of me.

A friend read a small part of it. She was encouraging, as I had hoped she would be, but her hammer fell.

“Do you really need all of this description?”

My ego fell into a thousand pieces. A crash, a calamity.

And I paused. I stepped away from the impulse to be defensive. My friend was a writer. She knows what she’s talking about. And I can listen to sage advice, gently given. Before my ego had a chance to reassemble, I looked again at the pages. I could see what she meant. She was right.

—

The memoir began as an exorcism. My old traumas and their many ghosts were siphoned out of me, onto the screen. The words poured out in an urgent rush. A Columbia River of ideas, with no Grand Coulee to dam any of them up.

Words are very important to a trauma survivor like me. I must describe everything. I must be precisely clear. You must know exactly how I felt.

But your reader is never your therapist. Nor your parent. My words, the descriptions, they were getting in the way. I loved my outpourings but yes, they walled the reader away from the crux of it all. My words were supposed to embrace the reader. The reader would then, in turn, embrace them, but with my ego still shattered, helpless, I saw something different. My words kept the reader away. The descriptions made everything opaque.

A concern lingered: What if, after I make more revisions, cut the extra words out, my voice as an author is damaged? I refused my entry into that rabbit hole of despair, took a deep breath, and began.

—

The first thing to go were summary descriptions. I laughed at first. I was certain. I already excised them all. Surely there were none left.

But I went looking, and I found them.

In a chapter that described my discovery, at age seventeen, of the glory holes in the men’s restroom at the local Sears, a paragraph began like this.

I returned to that restroom time and again for quick anonymous sexual releases. One time, however, a man had asked me to…

That first sentence had to go. Get the reader into the action. Faster. And that triple dose of adjectives there at the end of it? Cut it all.

During one of my suddenly frequent visits, a stall neighbor whispered, follow me.

The clouds parted. This is the way. Summary descriptions now popped off the page at me. I was merciless, slashing them all.

And then I saw my writing tics. Phrasing that is natural to my speaking voice. Over and over, I saw them in sentences. …to a point… …as a result…

Time to wield the editorial machete. Chop, chop, chop.

—

What else caught my eye? Redundant descriptions. The reader already knows I’m in Japan. I did not need to remind them in forty separate paragraphs of where I was.

Another thing I saw was my need to take the reader by the hand. To carefully, specifically, walk them, step by step, inch by inch, from moment to moment, scene to scene.

The reader might be interested, once, in mapping out the exact route I took to commute to work, for example, but once was enough. The reader might care, once, how I navigated my apartment, how the rooms were connected, which doors I closed as I crossed into the kitchen and sat at the table. But the reader will likely be happier just to know that I sat down.

I also began to think about adverbs. I love them. But they don’t bring that much to the party if all they do is confirm action for the reader. If instead, I save them for moments when my protagonist surprises the reader, when actions surprise — he was stubbornly elated — adverbs are more powerful. Chop, chop, chop.

—

At the end of June, the threshing, as I came to call these new revisions, the machete-way-clearing, was done. Chaff removed. Wheat remained. Thoughts made accessible. Word count? 77,518.

Did I mourn the absent words? Maybe, for the briefest of moments. But the revisions empowered me. I know that I can tell my story in stronger ways. In ways that will connect me more profoundly to readers. I took my thresher and my machete and opened the memoir up, and it felt good. And my concerns over voice were unfounded. If anything, my voice rings louder, truer.

—

Let go of ego. (It’s not as hard as you think.)

Breathe.

Thresh.

Smile.

You’ve got this!

—

Brian Watson is currently preparing a proposal for his first memoir, Crying in a Foreign Language; Pink Lady, Fictional Girlfriends, and the Deity that Answered my Plea. Originally from New York State, he now lives in the Seattle after years in Massachusetts, Tōkyō, and British Columbia. He spends his days with his partner/spouse of twenty-eight years, Hiro, and a cantankerous old cat, Butters. His website is http://iambrianwatson.com/

Witness: Selling Memoir Without Platform

Memoirists have it rough. Be a great writer. Tell a compelling story. But first, shake your tail on TikTok until a million people know who you are!

I’ve written before about how platform isn’t social media—social media is an amplifier for messages you’re already sharing in other venues, and a way to stay casually in touch with your audience and your literary community. I divide platform into two categories:

• Audience grown from the author’s entire life’s work and career, in which the book is a logical next step conveying their existing mission to the world.

• Audience created to support a forthcoming book, built from more intense work over a shorter time

Ideally, both kind of platforms build on what you already love to do and have spent your life caring about. But you don’t actually need any platform at all. Memoirs can sell with very little public presence: perhaps a few essays establishing the author’s public affiliation with the topic; an awareness of where the audience for that topic exists and how the book can reach them before and after publication; just enough social media that the author understands how to use it when the time comes to amplify their messages around the topic.

The key word here is topic.

A memoir exclusively focused on a personal story is almost impossible to sell—to an agent, to a publisher, to the reading public—without either an enormous public platform, existing connections in publishing, and/or National-Book-Award-level prose. Sorry. That’s the breaks. Work on your writing, figure out the reader takeaway, query small presses, consider self-publishing.

But a memoir centering a topic—an issue percolating through the zeitgeist; a closer look at a past cultural moment; something wrong with society that you personally experienced and impacts a lot of other people—is much more likely to gain the support of a traditional publisher.

In a topic-centered memoir, you’re not just the narrator—you’re a witness.

Your story is still important, but in the larger sense, it’s not about you. It’s about the reader, and a larger issue they’re already fascinated by, or that it’s important for them to become fascinated by, as told by someone with personal experience. Your story weaves in and through the topic, paired with research, interviews or anecdotes, with thoughtful commentary, and importance beyond your level (or lack of) personal fame.

Unlikely to sell: This dead person meant a lot to me and gosh it took a lot to move on with my life.

More likely to sell: Planning for death in a climate-crisis world.

Unlikely to sell: I tried to kill myself and recovery was financially incredibly hard.

More likely to sell: A look at our troubled healthcare system from the perspective of both caregiver and patient.

Unlikely to sell: I survived a violent crime.

More likely to sell: How our nation handles this particular violent crime is deeply wrong.

Each of the selling authors is not just the narrator, but a lens on a larger cultural concern. Their story is an example of why we should care, or an illustration of how we could handle our own situation. Not just what happened, but why it matters.

What does writing a topic-centered memoir look like before and during the writing process?

Brian Watson recently wrote about starting out with hybrid intentions but generating a personal-story focused draft:

My outline followed a unique format—one I know now is called hybrid memoir. I wanted to intersperse the things that I experienced with some thoughts about the culture as it shifted around me. There was data on the number of AIDS cases and fatalities swelled in the US. I could describe how Japan’s gay community evolved in the years before the Internet. And so much more.

When I started writing in September, however, the memoir—its original title, I Should Be Dead By Now, was grim—almost wrote itself. My first draft, completed on the last day of 2020, set most of the interspersions aside. The exorcising of memory consumed me to the tune of nearly 110,000 words.

But early readers (including me!) loved his now-few digressions on the history of gay porn, Japanese culture, and coming out in the 1980s. Watson set out to revise his entire draft, even though it felt like an enormous undertaking:

The research might have struck me as too much work when the actual, coherent transcribing of my memories was already a lot of work. Or I might have worried that those cultural backgrounds and deep-dives would bore readers.

Will it sell? We’ll find out soon (go Brian!). But many agents and editors I’ve spoken to agree: it’s much easier right now to sell a memoir with a larger cultural focus, one that illuminates something we’re all thinking about right now—or should be.

Ask yourself, how does my story reflect an important moment in our history or a problem we should all be aware of? How are my experiences reflected in and reflective of my culture, and how should that culture change? What will I need to research or investigate to support my point of view about this topic?

Traditional publishing is far from your only viable path. Maybe the memoir you personally feel called to write centers entirely on your own story. Maybe you already write National-Book-Award-level prose, or have 8M followers on TikTok (go you!). But if what you really want is to traditionally publish, to see your book in the wider world, and to reach more readers who need your words, it’s time to explore—and write!—how your story speaks to culture.

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Allison K Williams is Brevity’s Social Media Editor and the editor of books published by Penguin Random House, Mantle, Knopf, Hachette and many more. Not completely appalled by her editing style? Find out about Project Novel, an MFA year crammed into eight weeks, June-July 2024. Or just join the mailing list.