How to Write a Memoir with Bestselling Author Joanna Penn

THE LAST TIME I interviewed her for QWERTY, I opened by saying that it’s possible that Joanna Penn is the hardest working writer on Earth. Well, now I’m sure of it. Considered an authority on writing fiction, writing nonfiction, marketing, making a living in writing, as well as the future of creativity, Joanna is a New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of thrillers. She writes inspirational nonfiction for authors and is an award-winning creative entrepreneur, an international professional speaker. In other words, she makes books her life. Now, she has written a memoir, and she is here to talk about how to write a memoir and so much more. Listen in and read along.  

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Joanna Penn: Thanks so much for having me, Marion, and I’m thrilled to be talking with you again.

Marion Roach Smith: Well, it’s wonderful because this memoir is beautiful and you go on the road for three walks, you do it solo and at a pace the English call “bimbling,” a relaxed gait. You’re a pilgrim and you’re taking three ancient walks. So you begin in September 2020 and as you say in the opener quote, “I was not okay.” But then who was that time? And we’re locked down. We’ve been so since March of that year, and prior to this, you’ve been really mobile. You like to get out in the world, and you say that these forces combined with the restrictions to your mobility turns you into, “a ball of rage. I could not control the pandemic,” you write, “but I could walk out my door with my backpack.” And you do. It is a deeply compelling opener. And my question is, when you set out this ball of rage, did you know you were going to document this experience and write a book? And if so, how did you prepare for that?

Joanna Penn: Well, yes, and it’s so interesting, isn’t it, reflecting on things later, and I guess that’s part of what memoir is. But I’ve been talking to you and reading your work for many years. You’ve been on my show and I’ve been sort of moving up towards a memoir for a long time. But with these books, I actually thought I was going to write a travel log or a travel guide to these types of walks. So I do have a podcast called Books and Travel, and I thought, “Oh, well, I’ll go on this walk.” The first one was The Pilgrim’s Way, and somehow I will make that into maybe a guide because there aren’t very many guides to these walks, and I’d always wanted to walk the Camino de Santiago, but it was the pandemic, so we could still walk in England at that point.

So yeah, I set out to write a travel book and then it’s so interesting and I feel like this is something that happens with travel, but also with memoir is how much repetition there is. And when I got back and looked at my notes and in terms of preparing, so I always write a journal on my travels, whether it’s fiction or book research for this. So I write my journal every night, but I also carry my phone in my pocket. I take tons of pictures of completely random things like leaves and style and things I won’t share on Instagram because they’re not pretty, but they’ll be useful for notes later.

And I also have notes app on my phone and I will just do sort of one-liners as I go, just little things like dog walkers saying hello in the middle of nowhere, or little things that remind me to write about them later. So I did all that and then, but when I got back, I looked at my notes and what I didn’t feel better. I think that was the main thing after that first pilgrimage, I was like, I’ve just walked like 180 kilometers and I do not feel better. So clearly, and again, you talk about this like a transcendent change, I had not had a transcendent change with one pilgrimage, so I had to do some more. And that’s kind of how I learned along the way that this wasn’t a series of travel books. This was more of a memoir.

Marion Roach Smith: That is just so helpful. And right from your title Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways, you intrigue us. The word “pilgrimage,” of course, “lessons learned,” “solo,” “three,” and “ancient,” it just sets us up, you sweep us in. And that’s what titles have to do. We immediately wonder about the three pilgrimages so close together and we are swept in since one of these was only last year. So it all feels terribly fresh and it’s all there in the title, but it works. So my audience is writers. Tell them, please, how do you put a good title on a memoir?

Joanna Penn: Well, it’s so funny because this was originally called “Untethered,” something like “Journeys in Search of a Home,” because I thought that was going to be my memoir and it was going to be a much bigger thing about a lot of travels I’ve had over my life. And again, as you talk about go small with your writing, and I then sort of was thinking about this travelogues, and then I looked at it and I was like, “Okay, these are three pilgrimages.” But essentially this is more a pilgrimage is a search, it is a walk from A to B. It is a longer sacred path usually. And there were so many things that made it more about pilgrimage and more about the specific walks that I did. So I had these different titles. And then as you say at the subtitle, I was, again, originally it was going to be more of a travelogue.

So Part One, the Pilgrims Way, Part Two, the Cuthbert’s Way, et cetera. But then again, I looked at the repetition and I was like, “Do you know what? You only need one chapter on pain. You don’t need pain three times in the book.” And the Pilgrims day, look, the repetition of the Pilgrims day is both a blessing and the difficulty, one of the challenges of pilgrimage, especially the longer ones like the Camino de Santiago, it is the same every single day. And again, you don’t need that repetition in any kind of book. It’s like, “Yeah, okay, that’s pretty boring.” So again, it was sort of cutting down over and over into what is really useful for a pilgrim, both either an armchair pilgrim, because you don’t have to go on pilgrimage to read this book. But also I think for me, this is a book of my heart.

And so often memoir is a book of your heart, which means you are super not in love with it, but you are so connected with it, it’s so personal, it’s so vulnerable that you want it to be read by people who it will land well with. I think that’s probably the way to put it. So by calling it Pilgrimage, and I am very clear in it, I’m not a Christian, I’m a seeker. And so by using the words that I did, I was aiming to attract readers who wanted that kind of experience. And I’ve been so grateful that I titled it as it is. This is not a mainstream memoir, this is not a mainstream book. But that’s fine because I feel like that’s the future, I mean, of publishing. That’s the future of business is that we need to go super, super niche and aim to appeal to those people who really want what we are putting out there in the world.

Marion Roach Smith: Absolutely, and you make this really good point. You just made the point about how you’re a seeker. This was not for you a seeking religion. You define yourself as a seeker. So this book really called for you to define yourself for your personal spiritual development. It’s fascinating, textured, and multi-platform as we now say. But in the story, you redefine pilgrimage, I think, so that you kind of make room for people who seek without seeking religious answers. And when writing about yourself, you touch on the questioning and the evangelical and all the aspects of what might happen, but you end with these two great sentences: “I may have lost my religion, but I am still a seeker. I am still a pilgrim.” Did you realize this on the trail or while writing or editing this book that you were still a seeker?

Joanna Penn: Yeah, I mean, I think anyone who questions whether God exists of any kind and who has some sense of the spiritual, I feel like again, this touches those people who know that they feel this way and people either do or they don’t. They either feel like… For example, when I was doing the crossing over to Lindisfarne, Holy Island, it’s a tidal crossing. So twice a day the sea goes out and you can walk across the sands. And I mean, even getting goosebumps thinking about it was one of the most spiritual experiences of my life. And the seals were singing at that point, and it was timeless. It was like I could have stepped out of time and been on this island a thousand years ago with the monks who built the island there and the Vikings who came and raided it. And it was just this moment.

And when you have that sort of transcendent moment of, “Oh my goodness, there’s much more to this world than just my physical footsteps in the sand and my feet on this earth.” And so I guess I know I’m a seeker. I knew I was a seeker, but I didn’t know how this book would land with those who are religious. And I have absolute respect for people of a particular faith. And what I love is that people have emailed me of different religions, mainly Christian obviously, and said that they found it useful for their own faith journey. And that also people who are just questioning or looking to be in nature. I think for me, the two main things are being in nature, like that walk across the sands and being in cathedrals or churches, chapels where faith has almost seeped into the walls and you can feel closer to the people who believe things over generations.

And so both of those things kind of open up the world when you feel small. And to me, feeling small and insignificant is actually really good because it gives you perspective on life. And when you feel like, oh my goodness, as we record this, there’s all this war going on and terrible things always happening. And if you just think, “Look, all I have to do is take another step today. I just have to walk across the earth, my tiny little footsteps, and I don’t have to do anything else,” that can actually be very comforting in these difficult times. Yeah, and the seeking goes on for sure. In fact, all my fiction as J. F. Penn resonates with this search for whatever, and I don’t expect to ever find it. It’s just life, isn’t it?

Marion Roach Smith: It is just life, isn’t it? But you brought up a really interesting point about fear, about fearing what people who are very religious might think, about fearing people’s responses. And I think that that’s a very big obstacle for so many writers who want to write memoir. So let’s just talk into fear for a minute. So you got a great response it turns out from people of all faiths, from people of different faiths, and I’m so glad. When did that fear kick in though? You say you set out to do a travel piece and it turned into a memoir. So at what point did the fear kick in? How did you speak to it? What do you do with it? What other fears did you have? Just do fear for a minute if you would please.

Joanna Penn: Well, I think we all have a particular fear that comes up over and over again. For me, it is fear of judgment, fear of what people will say about me behind my back, or as well as fear of bad reviews and just fear of judgment, and you are not worthy. I guess that’s a sort of self-doubt. Fear of failure to a point. But I actually had thought this would only sell like 20 copies, so I was ready for that. But the judgment was a big one, and I feel that with almost all of my books, I feel like, “Oh, goodness me, if people hate this, they’re going to attack me.” And that’s a very primal fear for humans because we’re a social species, we need to be in the tribe, and if the tribe casts us out, that can be terrible. So yeah, I definitely felt fear of judgment.

And then in terms of facing that, I think a lot of it is, again, people like you who’ve been on my show and talking to a lot of memoir writers who just say, “If you are not afraid, then you are not putting your heart on the page and you are not being vulnerable enough for this to count, almost as a memoir.” I could just write another travel… If I had written just a travel book, then would I have been afraid? And would I have really put my heart on the page? Probably not. And so I talk about how I was a Christian as a teenager and lost my faith, and I talk about mental health in the book and going through perimenopause and how difficult that was and the post-COVID suffering and a lot of things that I hadn’t really talked about.

And in fact, I did get some people say, I just didn’t know you were going through that over several years because I hadn’t really talked about that stuff in public because who knows when it’s appropriate. But yeah, so I guess I knew that I would have to overcome it, but I think also because I’ve been writing now for over 15 years, I know that this feels the same every time. And I know that if I can get past it, then it will be less. The fear is always greater than the actual thing, basically.

Marion Roach Smith: Yes, I think so. And I think you used the most important word here is the vulnerability, because I have never read a single word of yours from which you preach or you tell us what to think. There’s a vulnerability particularly in this book, and that I think writing from vulnerability will temper the fear to some degree, because you’re not acting like a know-it-all. You’re not taking a position of power. And also it’s so appealing to the readers. So I love that answer. And let’s talk about organization.

We had an email exchange during the time that you were writing, and you told me that you had a hundred thousand words of material over the two and a half years of writing and organizing Pilgrimage, and you described it as chaos to wrangle. And I loved that. I was thinking of getting a tattoo that says, “It’s all chaos for you to wrangle, Marion.” But I don’t think I will, but I get asked every day by writers waiting into projects just how to organize their material. And I think people don’t anticipate how much material there will be. So did you organize these notes differently for a piece of memoir than you do when you’re writing one of your travel books or you’re writing one of your thrillers? Did you use some tried and true method? How do you wrangle copy?

Joanna Penn: Yeah, so my first big tip is Scrivener. Scrivener is an amazing piece of software. It’s only like $50 for lifetime access. It really is amazing. And what is amazing about it is you can drag and drop things around. So my first… And in fact, I had an untethered Scrivener project. I had a sort of first pilgrimage, first Pilgrims Way one, and then I started a new one for this. And basically the first thing I did was copy and paste everything into there from all my old projects and just dump it all in. And like you said, I had a hundred thousand words of a complete mess. And what’s nice about Scrivener is you can just put a load of one-liners as well. So for example, I knew that physical pain and mental pain and this type of thing would be a question. Also, I got a thing because I was solo low walking, the fears.

So a lot of women asked me, “Aren’t you afraid of walking alone?” Which was just devastating to me that women would have to ask that. So I knew I had to answer that kind of question. And then in that chapter, I also covered a whole load of other fear, like fear of illness. I was walking during COVID and all of that kind of thing. So I kind of created these big chunks and then just dumped everything under that and eventually I had to then work through. But what I also like about Scrivener is you can change the colors of the areas. So I would make them yellow if I’d had a look at them, and then I would print each one out and I would hand scribble on them and I would edit them again. And I mean, realistically, even though I wrote the book quite quickly, in the end, it feels like I’ve been writing it for a decade because there are things in there that have come from previous aspects of life.

And again, I think this is probably true for memoir. As you are writing the thing that you thought you were writing, these other things come up and then you’re like, “Okay, that fits in there, or that doesn’t necessarily fit in there.” And then essentially from there, I edited a lot of the repetition out. As I said, I organized it and dragged and dropped things in different places. So the three parts of the book are before you go, and then the actual pilgrimage and then the return, and that’s a very important part of pilgrimage, is that return to life. This is not a book about vagabonding, whatever. It’s not about traveling forever. It is about coming home and finding the gold in that pilgrimage. And so the organizational, I would just say to people, you do have to think about it as a very messy process, and when you work on it too much, you’ll just feel like it’s all out of control.

So you need to give it much more time than you expect. I thought I could have knocked this out more quickly and I probably could have done if it was a travel book. But yeah, I feel like this needed the time that it took in order to make it the book it needed to be. And only when I was happy did I then work with an editor. And I mean, as someone who works with a lot of authors, what you don’t want is the hundred thousand words of mess because that is not your job to figure out someone else’s mess.

Marion Roach Smith: Yeah, it’s not.

Joanna Penn: It’s their job.

Marion Roach Smith: Thank goodness. Yeah. So you suggest in this lovely book that we might benefit, we might need a walk as well. And I think it’s a great suggestion. I mean, post-COVID or wherever we are in on everyone’s mind is what we’ve lost. If we’ve gained anything, how in the world to find time to appreciate what we may have gained? So you provide a companion workbook and a lot of memoirs would benefit from doing that. So just give them a couple of words about why and how to have that kind of courage maybe, or just to have that determination or that generosity. What’s the workbook idea coming alongside a memoir?

Joanna Penn: Yeah. Well, I guess in a way, this is a cross genre book, and I tend to write these in general. So as well as having memoir chapters, it has quite practical chapters about planning your pilgrimage and what to take with you, but also these bigger questions, like what am I escaping from? What am I seeking? What am I curious about? So it has practical and more bigger questions of life, I guess. And I think partly I wanted to do it for business reasons because I am an author who runs a multi-six figure business, and when I was going to launch it, I was like, “Okay, if I want to create a bundle that my fans will like, a workbook is always a really good thing to do.” As a publisher, it’s cheaper to print, obviously, because it’s got questions and pages in as opposed to a lot of texts.

It’s a companion book, so people will often buy two. People love workbooks. So if you’re thinking about the reader, they often want to write and reflect on things. Personally, I just like writing in a blank journal, but some people really love to be prompted with questions. So it was a kind of combination between wanting to serve my readers and also wanting a business product that would make my… I did a Kickstarter that would make that more attractive to people to buy a bundle in order to just offer different products. So I would say to people, “If it’s a memoir that really is sort of very personal and there’s no questions that other people might have, then maybe it doesn’t suit that.” But if it is something where at the end of each chapter you could ask questions of the reader, and that’s what I did, the every chapter has questions, and then the workbook is all those questions in one workbook. So yeah, I think it really will depend on what type of memoir. I mean, you probably wouldn’t recommend that for everyone, I guess.

Marion Roach Smith: No, no, no, but I like the distinction, and you mentioned Kickstarter, and I know there’s something new cooking with you, and it relates to the fact that you said earlier, and I love this, that you went on one walk and it didn’t release you. So let’s go on two more. So what did writing this memoir release you to do, if you wouldn’t mind telling me what you’re doing next?

Joanna Penn: Yeah, so what was funny, and again, I probably didn’t really realize it until you said it, which was this kind of idea of going small and taking chunks. In fact, you said on an interview on my show in June 2023 that an author might have six to 10 memoirs in their life.

Marion Roach Smith: Yes, that’s true.

Joanna Penn: And I was like, “Whoa, okay. That’s really major.” Because, and if you take these different angles on your life, then you can write different things. And what happened was, I’ve had this book boiling for over 20 years when I first studied Jungian psychology at university, and the idea of the shadow, Jung’s shadow, which is that sort of unconscious side of ourselves, the parts of us we push down and repress and all of that. And so I wrote this year after, again, I have hundreds of thousands of words on this particular topic, but this Pilgrimage book released me into writing my darkness. So the book I have just finished, the Kickstarter is Writing the Shadow: Turn Your Inner Darkness into Words. Yeah, it is. And it’s so interesting because I go even further into a lot of my dark side, and when we say dark, we’re not talking about horror.

I haven’t been abused. It is not that. It’s for example, the creative wound that many writers feel. I was told as a child at school, and I write in this new book, I was told, “You can’t write things like that. Nice girls aren’t like that.” And I never thought I was creative, and my transformation as an author now with over 40 books and writing a book on that very darkness they told me to repress. And so yeah, I wanted to thank you actually kind of publicly because it kind of helped me to realize that I could tackle some of these other aspects in a topic that I’ve wanted to write for so long and I didn’t know how, and the reason I didn’t know how was because I wasn’t making it personal enough. And now I have a very personal book.

Marion Roach Smith: That’s wonderful. Yeah. I tell people to write from one area of your expertise at a time. And so when you think of it that way, and we probably all have a dozen areas of expertise as defined by after something you’ve been through. So after these three walks, you were released to write something about this darkness that you had been educated about, really literally formally educated about, but you were ready then to write that and looked at that way. You can have a writing life, which is what you have 40 books.

I want everyone to stop and pay attention to that. You need to stop writing that one big book that starts with your great, great, great-grandfather and ends with what you had for lunch today. First of all, you’re never going to finish it because there’s always lunch tomorrow, and second of all, no one’s going to read it, but look at what you’ve just done here with these two memoirs. They’re very different. One kind of begat the other one, made room for the other. That’s a wonderful thing to know. Talk to me a little bit about the Kickstarter. How does that work?

Joanna Penn: So if people don’t know kickstarter.com, so it’s a crowdfunding site and what that means, it’s essentially pre-ordering. And so I’ve done two, I did one for Pilgrimage and I’ve just finished writing The Shadow, and I made around $70,000 US dollars on these Kickstarter. Yeah, I know. Which is basically the best launches I’ve ever had in my life. I’m an independent author, so I own all my rights. Basically what it is you offer the books in the different formats. For this one, I have a special hardback with gold foil and black ribbon, lovely hardback and Pilgrimage has photos in and all this. And then there’s the workbooks, there’s audiobook, the ebook, the large print, all the different formats, and then other things like writing classes, there’s some consulting, that kind of thing.

And then you have a short launch, which I really like. It was two weeks, and essentially you do all your marketing in that period. Everyone orders the book, basically pre-orders it, and then you get the money two weeks later. So hear me everyone, you get the money two weeks later, and that is awesome. You also get the direct relationship to readers and listeners, which you don’t get if you go through, obviously if you go through a publisher or even if you sell on Amazon or whatever, I have that direct relationship to my readers and listeners. It’s more like that thousand true fans model. And in fact, this one I had over a thousand backers, so it really feels like my community and other people who heard about it coming out to buy. So I really recommend it for things like memoir, especially if you have an audience already, because again, you can do these beautiful books. You can get the money and then order the books so you can do special editions. This is my first gold foil edition, which I’m thrilled about.

Marion Roach Smith: I love it.

Joanna Penn: I know, and it’s good for books that don’t fit into standard categories, which again, a lot of memoirs. So yeah, I think it’s not new. I mean, crowdfunding’s been around for ages, but it’s becoming more and more common with authors. And Kickstarter actually has a specific publishing hub. So yeah, have a look on it for books that you might be interested in, for sure.

Marion Roach Smith: I think it takes away a lot of the terror. I think people have this vision that if they independently publish… They still have this vision. They’re going to be spending all their time addressing individual copies of their books to individual readers. We’ve gone so far beyond that because Kickstarter has this publishing division. You just said it, and it does the work with you for you, and it allows you to get the money in a short period of time. As opposed to traditional publishing where if you’re one of the few that gets an advance, it’s set out to you in four different parts. It’s not the big… You hear that somebody gets a million dollar advance, it’s a lot of money, but a third goes to taxes, 15% goes to your agent.

The way I’ve gotten advances is actually in third to get a third upfront, a third on handing it in and a third on publication. So if it takes you six years to write a book, even if it was a million dollar advance, do the math take out for taxes, take out for the agent, take out over time, you can really start to have a salary. You might like to look at it that way, but this way you’re getting paid then. And I think that it’s very deeply inspiring. I’m so glad that you brought up the Kickstarter part because I think we have just lost all sense of… Still haven’t gotten to that place where people love the idea of the indie model, and you are the indie model, completely.

Joanna Penn: Well, I think what’s nice as well is now the Kickstarter is done, so I’ve made this money, but I haven’t even started publishing it elsewhere. So this is the very beginning, and these are evergreen books. I think, again, these are not… People will find these books for the rest of my life and 50 years after I die or whatever, the life of copyright. So it will just keep on selling. So this is almost the end of the first launch, but now I can put it up everywhere. These books are available on all the different stores. So the life of the book has almost only just become, but you’ve already earned good money. And I mean, you mentioned the million dollar advance. I mean, that barely happens anymore. Most people I know get a $5,000 advance.

Marion Roach Smith: Yes, and that’s just really true. If you get an advance at all, they’re very low. It’s a very rare thing for someone to get a big advance. And everybody misunderstands what that means. I think. They think they hand you a million dollars. Uh-huh. No. It doesn’t happen like that.

Joanna Penn: Yeah. But I also think just with memoir in particular, I mentioned the book of your heart and with a book of your heart, if you license it to a publisher or somewhere else and they don’t do a good job, you have lost control of that book. And I think that’s the heartbreaking thing for people. If this is such a personal book and then it doesn’t hit well and then they can’t do anything with it. Whereas if you own your rights and you control your book, you can do whatever you like with it. You can put a new cover on, you can relaunch it, you can control what happens with that book over time. And so again, it is definitely an option even if you are working with publishers on other types of books. With memoir, maybe think about doing it differently because you care so much.

Marion Roach Smith: Yes. Because you care so much is exactly right. And so as we wrap this up, which I would prefer we never have to do, but we have to because I know you’ve got other things to do. I just want to know a little bit, just a moment worth of knowledge about do you market memoir differently than the rest of the other books that you’ve written and published?

Joanna Penn: Yes, I think I have, because I really have stressed the personal aspect of this. So the other thing I’ve done, I think you have to find the area that works for you best. So we are podcasters. I have the Creative Pen podcast. And so what I did is I took some of the most personal chapters and I put them on my podcast, so that people could actually listen to me talking about it. And I also did a really big podcast tour talking about it and doing interviews. And I shared the most personal stuff from the book because this is another tip for people in general with marketing, give it all away.

Tell everyone everything, don’t hold back because then they want to read it, they want to hear more, and you’ll reach different things from different people. So yeah, I think I really just gave of myself as much as possible with every interview I did. Obviously, I did blog posts and I did some other marketing, but it was mainly, it was sharing the emotion of the book and trying to touch people who might appreciate that. And again, a bit like with Pilgrimage, with Writing the Shadow, both of those titles, whether you are interested or not. And I think that’s a good tip to keep in mind. When we’re marketing, we’re not trying to push our book on people who don’t want it. We’re trying to attract the people who know that they want it, they just didn’t know about it yet. That’s kind of the tip.

Marion Roach Smith: Yes, that is the best tip you could leave us with. Thank you, Joanna. As ever, it’s an education for me, and it’s a complete joy to talk to you.

Joanna Penn: Thanks so much for having me, Marion.

Marion Roach Smith: You’re welcome. The author is Joanna Penn. The new book is Pilgrimage: Lessons Learned from Solo Walking Three Ancient Ways. Get her books wherever books are sold. Go to her website and see everything that she does at the creative pen dot com. Listen to her podcasts. They’re remarkable. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY Subscribe. Wherever podcasts are available, QWERTY is produced by over at studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Jacqueline Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project, where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

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