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I'm looking for resources that explain the story structure of a spiritual trial memoir. I read The Plot Whisperer on the advice of my developmental editor and really liked it, and I'm hoping for something like that but as it applies to the religious book market.
I hope this is the right forum for this kind of question... I feel like the "Spanish Inquisition," those idiots who couldn't find the right sketch in the Monty Python episode. People are being nice to me, but they're like, "Uh, hi, we don't do that in this thread-"
Allow me to explain further: I have written an 80,000-word fatherhood memoir about the super-premature birth of our son, who was not expected to survive. In fact, the doctor was telling us at first that he would not provide treatment to him. As my developmental editor explained, a memoir is basically a novel, it's just that it really happened, and it needs a plot question asked at the beginning that isn't answered until the end. The plot question I centered the memoir around was "am I really a father?" This was especially important when it was highly trained nurses and a whole load of super-complicated machines keeping our son alive. There was also a religious component to the story as my wife and I are quite active in our religion (Eastern Orthodox Christianity) and we do believe miracles were involved here. But, we didn't develop or change a great deal in our religion during this time, nor was our marriage strained, so I decided to focus it on the fatherhood question first and had a minor subplot on a religious question.
But, as luck would have it, the thing has went to 175 agents last year (everybody in The Writer's Market and Publishers' Weekly who deals with memoir) and I got a few requests for additional materials but in the end no takers.
Now I am thinking of repurposing the book around "will my faith survive" as the central plot question. At least I will repurpose the first four chapters so that I can start querying religious-book agents. But I don't know a great deal about the religious non-fiction market, and I am looking for guides and such on structure. Something like "The Plot Whisperer." And, I am looking for ideas on how to make a spiritual memoir in an obscure denomination (Eastern Orthodoxy) appeal to the larger Evangelical/Catholic market. And I'm not out to proselytize here.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Eric
I hope this is the right forum for this kind of question... I feel like the "Spanish Inquisition," those idiots who couldn't find the right sketch in the Monty Python episode. People are being nice to me, but they're like, "Uh, hi, we don't do that in this thread-"
Allow me to explain further: I have written an 80,000-word fatherhood memoir about the super-premature birth of our son, who was not expected to survive. In fact, the doctor was telling us at first that he would not provide treatment to him. As my developmental editor explained, a memoir is basically a novel, it's just that it really happened, and it needs a plot question asked at the beginning that isn't answered until the end. The plot question I centered the memoir around was "am I really a father?" This was especially important when it was highly trained nurses and a whole load of super-complicated machines keeping our son alive. There was also a religious component to the story as my wife and I are quite active in our religion (Eastern Orthodox Christianity) and we do believe miracles were involved here. But, we didn't develop or change a great deal in our religion during this time, nor was our marriage strained, so I decided to focus it on the fatherhood question first and had a minor subplot on a religious question.
But, as luck would have it, the thing has went to 175 agents last year (everybody in The Writer's Market and Publishers' Weekly who deals with memoir) and I got a few requests for additional materials but in the end no takers.
Now I am thinking of repurposing the book around "will my faith survive" as the central plot question. At least I will repurpose the first four chapters so that I can start querying religious-book agents. But I don't know a great deal about the religious non-fiction market, and I am looking for guides and such on structure. Something like "The Plot Whisperer." And, I am looking for ideas on how to make a spiritual memoir in an obscure denomination (Eastern Orthodoxy) appeal to the larger Evangelical/Catholic market. And I'm not out to proselytize here.
Any thoughts?
Thanks,
Eric