Writing Your Memoir One Story at a Time—It Adds Up
Make Writing Your Memoir Less Daunting
Writing your memoir does not have to be an intimidating task. Envisioning your autobiography as a series of stories makes the sizable task of writing the stories of a lifetime tolerable and ultimately enjoyable. Lifestories, written singly just as they are told, one by one, add up—sometimes effortlessly—to a memoir.
Whenever I have written a book, I have written it several pages at a time. Were I to ask a beginning writer, “can you produce a 140-page story for me?” most would blanch and then protest, “I can’t write that much!” When I ask people if they can write a 3-, 4-, 5- or even 7-page story, most will answer, “Sure I can do that.” [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Writing When You Don’t Feel Like Writing
Writing a memoir is not easy. As I have written so many times—no one has ever promised it would be. This is especially trying when you don’t feel like writing. Au contraire…
Memoir writing can be difficult. Among the biggest of the difficulties is discouragement. How easy is it to write when you don’t feel like it and are sure you are producing junk words? In case you haven’t guessed (but I’m sure you have been there done that)… [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Don’t De-value Your Characters by Using Cliches and Stereotypes
Cliches and Stereotypes
Don’t devalue your characters by using cliches and stereotypes. This will undermine the unique and personal feel of your memoir. Cliches and stereotypes place people in categories. As short-hand ways of writing and speaking, they reflect ready-made thoughts and adversely affect the ways we relate to our families and friends as unique individuals.
- “She was a mother-hen; You know how mothers are!”
- “My father had a heart of gold.”
- “Those were beautiful days when we were happy.”
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Mine Your Family Stories
There is a rich lode of stories that you can tap into quickly both for their historical content and for what they tell you about how members of your family wanted their young to be. These are “family stories.” [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Writing a First Draft: Why They’re Called “First”
When you are writing a first draft: nothing can rightly be called a first unless there is a second. First grade implies second grade; first class implies second class; first book implies (we hope) second book, a first draft implies a second draft.
That is why first drafts are called first drafts. A writer must expect to write a second draft, and a third even. No one can sit down and churn out countless pages of prose that don’t need rewriting. Jack Kerouac claimed he did it with On the Road, but we know now that he was stretching the truth. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Three Tips for Effective Memoir Pre-Writing
Before you begin to write your memoir, there are a number of non-writing tasks which you must undertake—this phase of compiling your lifestory is called memoir pre-writing, and it is essential to writing better stories. People often think of pre-writing as a waste of time, but it is not. It will get your stories written more quickly and more interestingly. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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3 Tips for Picking Up Your Memoir Again—and Finishing It!
Re–read Your Lifestories
Have you struggled with picking up your memoir again and not quite knowing how to get back into it? Rather than castigate yourself, why not simply set some time aside to re-read your memoir?
The following suggestions are from the Write to the End–Eight Strategies to Deal With Writer’s Block! an ebook on successfully dealing with writer’s block. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Three Points Not to Forget When You Write Your Money Story
This post originally appeared in That Money Girl blog on November 26, 2013 as Your Money Story…Pack It With Power
There is power in writing your money story. Your money story can transform you as it leads to understanding the money energy in your life and ultimately making that energy work for you.
In this post, I write about three features you must utilize in the writing of a money story. These are character, action, and setting. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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3 Tips to Revive and Finish a Memoir—Without Eviscerating Yourself
All of us struggle to some extent to produce writing content that will finish a memoir. Writing is often difficult. It takes time and energy—both of which the laws of entropy suggest we ought to preserve as they are constantly being diminished.
We find many compelling and valid reasons not to write: “the house is a mess”; “I ought to go to the gym while there aren’t many people there”; “my sister and I haven’t talked in a long time.”
Of course, all of these reasons are valid but, ultimately, they are all excuses. So… [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]