[00:00:00] This is the Vanessa Barrington Show.
[00:00:05] Writing a memoir is one of the most courageous things a person can do, and it's also one of the most complicated. So if you ever, ever thought, I wanna write my story, but I just don't dunno how to do it without hurting someone, this episode is for. Today we are talking about how to write a memoir that is honest, powerful, and fully yours, even when other people are part of your story.
[00:00:29] All righty, let's jump in.
[00:00:31] Hi, I'm Vanessa Barrington, also known as the book doula, founder for Healing House Publishing, psychic Medium, and a woman on a mission to heal the world through stories. If you're a healer, coach, creative or expert, I help you turn your. Story into a published book and a global movement that builds authority, impact, and legacy.
[00:00:53] This is not a writing podcast. It's a show where I explore voice, truth, spirituality, and what it really takes for you to trust yourself and share your story with the people who most. Need it. This is the Vanessa Barrington Show.
[00:01:08] Welcome back to the Vanessa Barrington Show. I am so glad to have you here.
[00:01:12] Thank you for listening. I wanted to start today with a question, and I want you to really sit with it for a moment. How long have you been carrying your story? Not writing. Not sharing it, just carrying it. That quiet, knowing that you've been through something you've survived, and knowing that you feel this very deep pull to be able to share your story and that it could help someone, that it's meant to be more than just something that happened to you.
[00:01:40] If you are listening to today's episode, you probably already know that you are meant to write a memoir. You've known for a while, but something keeps stopping you. I want to name the most common thing that I hear from women exactly like you, and it's this. I wanna write my story, but my story involves other people and I'm worried that I'm gonna hurt someone.
[00:02:01] So I wanna find a way to write it without damaging anyone else. Now, for you, maybe it's a partner, an ex, a family member who hasn't done the work. Maybe it's someone that hurt you, someone you love. Someone who would be deeply uncomfortable being named in your truth. And so what happens is the book stays inside you year after year waiting.
[00:02:27] Here's what I wanna offer you today. The fact that your story is tangled up with others. People's stories is not a reason to stay silent, okay? It is actually one of the most important reasons to write because your healing and the healing of the women who will read your story does not require anyone else's permission.
[00:02:47] Okay? Even though you may feel like it, it does. Today I am gonna walk you through exactly how to write a memoir that is full, honest, and powerful, even when other people are in it. And I wanna make it clear this is not a conversation about revenge, okay? This is a conversation about truth telling as a sacred act of service.
[00:03:06] Okay? The thing is, and the first thing I want to clear up here, because it stops most people more than anything else, is the idea that writing your memoir is something that you are doing to other people. So a memoir, first and foremost is told through your point of view, through your experience, filtered through your nervous system.
[00:03:25] It is inherently subjective, and that is not a flaw, okay? That is actually the entire point. Your job. As a memoirist is not to document the objective truth, it is to share your felt truth. What was true for you in your body, in your life at that moment. The people in your story are not characters that you are responsible for protecting.
[00:03:49] As I think it's Anne Le says, if people didn't want you to write bad things about them, they should have behaved better and. You are not responsible for protecting others. They're part of your landscape, and you can write about them in a way that is truthful without silencing yourself. Okay? Now there's a legal note that I wanna mention here.
[00:04:11] And of course you can change names. You can change identifying details. You can change locations. Most published memoirs do this, okay? It does not compromise the emotional truth of your story. The memoir tradition. If we think about Brene Brown, Glennon Doyle to Untold spiritual healers is built on women telling the truth that the people around them preferred not to say, okay, there is a spiritual contract in writing your truth, and the women who need your story.
[00:04:40] Cannot find it if you keep it locked inside. The memoir is not for the people that are in it. It is for the person that will read this story in 10 years and feel like for the first time someone else has lived what they are living right now. Okay? And that's part of the reason why the story won't leave you alone as well.
[00:04:59] While it may feel uncomfortable to do it on some level, you know that this story is calling you forward because you know it has a purpose. You know, it's meant to help other people. So I want you to write three sentences right now. No one will read them that name, the thing that you are most afraid to put in your book, and I want you to notice what happens in your body when you do that.
[00:05:21] The thing is, as a concept, is not an autobiography, okay? You are not documenting your whole life, okay? You are illuminating a particular narrative arc. It is a period, a transformation, a reckoning, a memoir is told through the lens of a particular perspective. Okay? So there's three questions that you can ask yourself that really will help anchor what you are doing in terms of this story and these.
[00:05:45] Questions become the backbone, I suppose, of why you write what you write. The first question you wanna ask is, who was I at the beginning of this story? The second question you wanna ask is, what happened? That changed everything for me? And then the third question you wanna ask is, who am I now? What do I know that I didn't know?
[00:06:04] Then the transformation is the book. It's not the events. The events are the vehicle. Okay? And this is why. That concept of, well, I wanna write about my childhood is not yet a memoir. The question is, what did your childhood reveal or break open or transforming you? What is it that you know now as a result of having the childhood that only you could have had?
[00:06:26] So for healers and coaches, your memoir is often also a framework. Okay? The thing that you survived becomes the thing that you now teach. That is not a coincidence. That is the book. Okay? When I work with clients as a psychic medium, I often see the memoir they're meant to write before they can see it themselves.
[00:06:44] There is an energetic shape to each person's story. A through line that the mind sometimes tries to over complicate. If you are stuck in structure, like if you are finding it hard to figure that out, it is often because you're trying to include everything, and the book does not want everything. It just wants the essential threads.
[00:07:02] Okay? Your job is to find that thread, that macro idea, and follow it. Really. Now you don't need to write your whole life. You need to write about the part that changed you and the trust that the right reader will recognize herself. Completely in that moment. You need to spend time on the macro idea, and that is part of the reason why, you know, if you wanna find out more about how to uncover that macro idea, go back to some of my previous episodes, but it's really important that you also understand that this is a key part of this process.
[00:07:34] I wanna address the practical side of riding with care rather than censorship. Because I know that some of you are nodding along and you may consider yourself a bit woowoo and you know, right, that you're meant to be doing this, but you still have a very specific and real concern, like, what do I actually do about the people who might recognize themselves in my story?
[00:07:59] If you're in that place, I wanna flag something. It's nuanced and it's important. Okay. There is a difference between writing with care and writing with self-censorship care means that you are thoughtful about how you portray others. Self-censorship means that you are raise yourself to protect them. Now, there are really practical tools that published memoirs use, such as composite characters where you might combine two or more people into one.
[00:08:30] Changing names. I've talked about identifying, uh, details, whether it's like their profession or their location or their appearance, their gender, all of those sorts of things. The other thing I think as well, especially if you're writing about trauma, is really ensuring that you show what happened and how it felt, rather than blaming anybody.
[00:08:50] So you take all the emotion out and you simply report, so to speak, on the scene and what happened and. Recognizing as well that by nature of you writing a book like this, you're not a journalist, okay? You're not required to consolidate someone else's feelings. You're allowed to bring your own subjectivity into your writing.
[00:09:10] But also, I would flag that being a great writer does require you to somewhat step back out of your own car, car, so to speak, and be as fair and balanced as you can be. Many riders, particularly first time worry about getting it wrong. And you know, the thing is about memory is it's a very slippery, like, memory is a slippery thing.
[00:09:32] And if we are worried about getting it wrong and and worried about those memories and misremembering conversations and all of that sort of stuff. I wanna just invite you to recognize that standard memoir practice acknowledges this, right? That's why you have the disclaimer at the beginning of your book that this memory reflects your own experiences, your own memories, and other events or other people like might be represented differently.
[00:09:58] I have sat with many women who have asked me through my medium ship. Work whether the people in their stories would be hurt, hurt by them telling the truth. And what I often notice and what I receive is this, the people who truly love you are not afraid of your truth. The people who are afraid of your truth are often afraid of their own, and they're also benefiting from the fact that you are silencing yourself and that is not your burden to carry.
[00:10:28] Okay? I would say to you, look at where you're giving your power away. And the fear of hurting someone with your truth is often the voice of the person that you were before you knew your story had value. That voice is not your editor, it is your wound. Okay? So something that you might like to do here if this is something that you're struggling with, is identify that person that you are most your most worried about and write them a private letter.
[00:10:53] Like you don't ever have to send it, but tell them what you need them to understand. Tell them what it is that you want to say about what it is that happened to you, and it will free you to write what is important to you. Before I close this episode, I wanna name something really, honestly, because I think that it is the thing that most people dance around and I, I'm not interested in dancing.
[00:11:18] You probably get that sense from me as a book coach. To me, it's so important that you speak your truth every year. You don't write your book. Someone who needs it does not find it. That is not abstract. That is a real person in a real moment searching for exactly what you know, exactly what you've been through and coming up empty.
[00:11:40] The version of you that never writes the book does not escape the pool to write the book. Okay? You just carry it heavier. Year after year, the unwritten thing that becomes part of the background noise. A quiet, persistent, I should be doing this, I should have done that is is gonna continue and it's only gonna get worse.
[00:11:58] I want you to think about what another year of you not starting this is going to actually cost you not in money. In identity, in authority, in the version of you that you are delaying yourself in becoming and stepping forward. You'll either have the book in five years, or you'll still be thinking about writing it.
[00:12:16] And the fact is like there's a reason that 80% plus of the population say they wanna do it, and a lot of people don't. 'cause the thing is those five years are gonna pass either way. Right? But the moment that you say, you know, I'm ready. You step in, you will be amazed with the right support and structure, how quickly it can flow for you.
[00:12:36] So many people that come to me say, I cannot believe I waited so long. Like the readiness they were waiting for never ev ever arrived. It was simply a decision that they said, okay, I'm gonna do this. I'm actually gonna do this. There is an energetic cost to not writing your book that most people don't. A, don't even have an awareness of, and B, don't talk about.
[00:12:57] It's not dramatic. It is subtle, and it shows up as a low level of dissatisfaction that you cannot name. It's a sense that something in your work is incomplete. It's a quiet withholding of the full version of yourself. From the people you serve and your book is not separate from your life's work, it is actually the amplifier for it every year.
[00:13:18] Without it, that amplification does not happen. The version of you that does not write this book does not disappear. She, she just carries it heavier. So something that I would invite you to do here is ask yourself, honestly, if I look back in five years and I still have not written this, what will that have cost me?
[00:13:36] Not in money, in identity, in impact, and write it down. You need to look at the consequence of not taking action because honestly, there's always a benefit to us staying stuck and until you can acknowledge how it's benefiting you, but what it's costing you, you won't tell the truth. Hopefully that helps you just to start to understand, you know, there is so much we could go into with this episode.
[00:13:59] If this is something that you've resonated with, leave a review, let me know, and I'm happy to dive more into this because I know this is an area that people find very, very tricky. I know and I recognize it's a real challenge to write your story and to know that you're gonna put your soul on a platter, so to speak, for the world to judge.
[00:14:16] If you walked into this episode feeling like your memoir was too complicated, too tangled, too risky to write, I hope that you are walking out of this conversation knowing something different. Your story told in your voice does not require anyone else's blessing. Okay? It just requires you to show up at the page and if today has confirmed for you what you've quietly known for a while, that this is the year, this is the season.
[00:14:42] This is the moment. I do not want you to close this episode and go back to waiting. Okay? Now the book Do signature program is gonna be opening very, very soon, and this is exactly where I take. Other creatives just like you, healers, coaches, spiritual entrepreneurs, story, Cali carriers, people that have that drive to wanna share their story and change the world.
[00:15:03] I take them through the entire process of how to write, edit, publish, and then promote the book. So when you join me in this program, you're really getting the structure, the support, the strategy, and the energetic dimension of authorship that no one else is talking about. The wait list for the program is open right now.
[00:15:22] I'm gonna head the I'm, I'll put the link in the show notes. If you would like to be the first notified when doors open, make sure you go and get yourself on that list. And if this episode gave you something today, will you share it with one other person that you know is carrying a story or has said that they wanna write a book one day?
[00:15:40] Because they may not know that they may this yet and you do. Okay. I wanna thank you finally, so much for being here. I hope that you gained something from today's episode. Love having you guys here with me. I wish you all the best with your writing. Let me know how you go and, and finally, I just wanna really implore you, please don't let others, or an unintended consequence that hasn't even happened yet, or a fear of the future that hasn't happened, or something that happened in the past that no longer is in your reality.
[00:16:10] Continue to drive your creative process. You can move through this fear. The only way through it is to actually go through it. Wishing you all so much success with your writing. If this episode resonated with you, I'd love for you to leave me a short review. Much love, and I'll see you guys next week.
