Some lives do not fit in forty pages.

The guided process

Most people who want their life written have the same two problems: they do not know where to start, and they assume it has to begin at birth. It does not, and starting at birth is the single most reliable way to abandon a memoir at page nine.

What I run instead is a structured process over several months. You do not write it alone and you do not hand it over entirely. Roughly:

1. Find the spine. Two or three conversations to establish what the book is actually about — which is almost never what the person first says it is about.
2. Twelve to twenty interviews, an hour and a half each, working through the spine rather than the calendar.
3. Drafting in sections, with you reading and correcting as we go rather than waiting a year for a manuscript.
4. Two full revision passes on the assembled book.
5. Delivery as a print-ready manuscript, formatted for a printer or for submission, with photographs placed.

Twelve to eighteen months is realistic. Anyone promising you a book in six weeks is probably producing a transcript with a cover on it.

If you want to write it yourself

Then write it yourself — and I mean that. Start with the free guides, and send me 250 words when you have them. I will tell you honestly whether you need a writer or an editor or neither. A substantial number of people who write to me need neither, and get told so.

Manuscript assessment

For people who already have something: a hundred and forty pages written in 2009, a folder of chapters, a book their father left unfinished. I read the whole thing and give you a written assessment — what is working, what the structural problem actually is, what finishing it would require, and whether it should be finished at all. A fixed price, quoted before, and it stands on its own; there is no obligation to commission anything afterwards.