Episode 52: Sandra Schnakenburg

Memoir Snob

Here’s what I learned from my conversation with Sandy Schnakenburg, author of The Housekeeper's Secret:

• When you’re writing about a tragic or shocking event, one way to create suspense is to tease that something bad is coming. In the book she had a terrible accident on her bike, and at the beginning of the chapter a character calls out and tells her to be careful riding to school. From there until the moment of the crash she slows down time by including the tiniest details and specifics surrounding the moment—what time she left, her route to school, who she was meeting, why she couldn’t be late, and that first period math was her favorite. She described the actual ride, the way she rode with no hands, and later how she stood up on the pedals.

• It took Sandy 14 years to write her book, and the structure changed from a book of essays, to a braided memoir, to a chronological, compressed timeline with a hook at the beginning pulled from the midpoint of the story.

• An editor helped her to remove 50,000 words and bring the reader more onto the page by removing her analysis of the scenes. Her editor said, “Leave it to the reader. Let them decide. Let them process what happened.”

• Sandy wrote a synopsis and summary of her book before it was ever finished. She sent the synopsis to an agent and he picked her up—just like that!

• She attended the San Francisco Writers Conference, where she pitched her book all day long to writers, editors, and agents. It was there she met her editor and book publisher.

• If you want to publish a book your story needs to have a universal theme. Once you have that and can really communicate that, then you need to figure out how to distribute it. Then you need a good publicist. (Sandy interviewed twenty-five publicists.)