Hi storytellers!
You may know that we’re running a reader survey right now, and the winner of our reader survey drawing will get a free coaching session. But what if you don’t need coaching?
You can get your [podcast] name in lights.
Photo by Sudan Ouyang on Unsplash
Here’s how.
Complete our quick survey (three minutes, really)! Include a short testimonial about the newsletter or the Sound Judgment podcast. Make sure to tell us the name of your podcast or other creative work and we’ll shout it out in a future issue of this newsletter or on a podcast episode.
The deadline to complete the survey, get your name in lights, and be entered into the drawing to win an hour-long coaching session is next Wednesday, January 31. Don’t miss it.
The memoir dilemma: Should you tell your own story?
A distant streetlamp shines its piercing light through a narrow, unfortunate gap in the old blinds. Slowly you come to a familiar awareness: Damn, I’m awake. You reach for your phone, knowing what it will say before you turn it over. 3:00 a.m., on the dot. Again.
You become aware of the wrinkles in the sheet underneath you. Seeking comfort, you shift in bed, squeezing your eyes in resistance to the inevitable.
But it happens anyway: Your mind returns to a momentous event, a traumatic one, one that shaped the trajectory of your life. Should you use your life as story fodder? Is this experience yours, alone, to share? What would happen if you share it as a podcast, on the page or on the stage? How could you frame it in a way that matters to thousands of strangers?
And then the writing in your head: “I would start with this scene. This sentence.”
You get excited. This could work.
But then, the inner critic — the one that is so freaking loud at 3:00 a.m. — speaks. But why? Why does your experience mean anything to anyone else? Does it? How?
Sleep is off the table. Time to make coffee.
* * *
Photo by Tim Foster on Unsplash
Sharing a personal experience, especially a traumatic one, is a particularly popular scripted podcast form. Memoir done well often shoots to the top of the podcast charts or the bestseller list. It moves us, leaves us breathless, inspires standing ovations and prompts us into conversations and confessions of our own. Sometimes memoir creates change.
But memoir produced without first grappling with why your experience matters to others can sound cheap, sensation-grabbing, and empty. As listeners, readers, and viewers, we are bombarded with confessions.
There is a fine line between transformative and indulgent.
Moreover, stories of heartbreak — and heartbreak makes an appearance in most of these — are hard to choose to listen to these days, because the world is showering us with trauma. (No thanks, the listener says, I’d rather watch a sitcom.)
Given the circumstances, why make memoir?
The decision to make the private public isn’t an easy one. Nor should it be.
In the first episode of Sound Judgment, Season 4, I explore this question with producer Maribel Quezada Smith, who shares her extraordinary experience with life and death in The Pulso Podcast piece, “The Latino Experience of Fertility: A Story of Pregnancy Loss.”
It took Maribel two years to write and produce this remarkable story about the birth of her son — and the death of her daughter. Her story succeeds, in part, because she identified something fresh: Miscarriage and other forms of pregnancy loss are particularly common in the Latino community, Pulso’s audience. And so is the incredible societal pressure to bear children, setting up an impossible, often hidden, conflict.
That her story succeeds in transforming, not indulging, is evident in the piles of grateful responses she received from listeners who shared her experience, but who had never heard their story reflected out loud. Shame and secrecy had dogged their lives. Maribel’s story brought in the light.
Along the way, Maribel had to answer several questions for herself about motivation, format, theme, mood, and point of view. She had to decide which private moments to capture on tape, and how much she could bear. To whom did she owe privacy? Which scenes and reflections would create momentum — and which pieces, dear to her, would she have to leave out?
Follow Sound Judgment, the podcast, now, to hear our surprisingly joyful, uplifting, and illuminating conversation when it drops next Wednesday.
Here’s a taste.
To get the most out of this Sound Judgment episode, first listen to Maribel’s episode.
And write to me! Tell me about the memoir you produced and why, or the memoir you’re working on now, or the one you haven’t started yet but that wakes you at 3:00 a.m. Which questions have you been grappling with? I’d really like to know.
And please share this with another storyteller in your life.
As always, it’s a joy to be with you.
Elaine
P.S. Now go fill out our survey!