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Do you find yourself wandering along with your memoir writing and not achieving your memoir-writing goals?  Do you have a sense that you might have accomplished a bit more writing than you have?

At regular intervals, it is traditional to review how the past went for you and to recommit to goals for yourself for the coming months. (A goal is a wish with action steps and a timeline.) These goals need to be written and reviewed periodically.

Studies have shown that people who set goals in writing have a better outcome vis-à-vis accomplishing what they set out to do. Here’s a report on one such study. (The famous Harvard goal-setting study so many of us have heard of apparently never happened, but the concept of goal setting is clearly important and is explored in the linked article.)

22 Memoir-Writing Goals especially for you!

(more…)

Today, I am urging you to sit back and enjoy this virtual memoir tour in which I read an excerpt read from my memoir French Boy/A 1950s Franco-American Childhood.

Here’s some necessary background: I did not learn English until I went to grade school. My brother had preceded me in school where he had learned to speak English.

While this excerpt can be thought of as a cute story, I included it in my memoir because it supports the necessity of bilingual education. This sound pedagogy is too often under attack! My own life was greatly impacted by the thoughtful bilingual education I received.

Enough preamble: You have a choice of going to YouTube to listen to the reading on the virtual memoir tour or you can read the text of the video below.

_____

The night before starting first grade, because Billy was one of the “big boys” who was going into the second grade, I asked him the big question on my mind. I needed an answer.

“What happens at school if you can’t speak English?”

“The sisters hit you,” he answered from the other half of our double bed, “if you don’t speak English to them.”

I began to howl and scream. Soon my mother was next to us, asking what the matter was, and I told her what Billy had said. “Is that true?”

“Your father and I would not send you to a school where you will be punished for not speaking English.”

She then said to my brother, “If you tell him things like that again, it’s you who will be punished.” After she left the bedroom, I could hear her telling my father I had been crying.

Our room was dark. From his half of the bed, my brother whispered, “She had to tell you that because she’s mama, but it’s not true.”

The next day, with great apprehension, I set out for the unknown. My father, who had driven us to the school in the truck, admonished Billy to look after me. (At that point, how confident could I be about my “protector!”) After we had exited the truck cab, the two of us walked up the schoolyard and climbed the steps to the porch. On either side of the entrance door, there was a bench and, to the right and to the left of these, were groupings of four windows for each of the four classrooms. I sat on the bench at the side on which the door opened. From inside, I heard footsteps approaching. Someone was coming towards us. I leaned against the wall of the school to make myself small. By the time I heard the door bar being pushed down to open the door, I was in full terror mode.

A young nun stuck her head out the door, and looking directly at me, she said, “Bonjour, petit garçon.”

In the next couple of years, I learned to speak English in a smooth and painless manner.

Here is this week’s FREE video e-course which I have prepared especially for you.

~ Get Your Book Read By More people

~ Promote Your Memoir Effectively for Maximum Sales

~ You Are the Expert. Take Charge of Your Publishing.

To link to the video of me reading this story, click HERE.

And remember: “inch by inch, it’s a cinch; yard by yard it’s hard.”

Good luck writing your stories!

Today’s focus reminds you that your stories take place in some context. This is the setting of your story.

There are two general sorts of settings.

  • the physical setting that is tangible
  • the abstract setting that consists of family, culture, and the era, etc. This setting tends to be ethereal.

Some of the writers I have worked with failed to appreciate that they grew up in a setting that is different from the one in which other people may have been raised. Perhaps you grew up in a suburb and feel that there is nothing to say about that as everyone knows about what the suburbs are like, but if your reader grew up on a mountain farm, your setting will prove to be somewhat—or quite—foreign. Of course, suburbs themselves can vary greatly.

Tell us about your setting: better yet, show us. We need to smell the food cooking in the kitchen, see the view out of the window, and walk or ride to school with you.

You get the idea!

Setting can also include religion, language used at home, socio-economic status, etc. Your setting is essentially everything and anything that is part of the background of the people in your memoir.

Obviously, some settings are very important while other settings are not. For instance, we do not need a floor plan of the house you grew up in. More important might be what the furniture or the appliances tell us about your people—their socio-economic status, their taste, their willingness to live with second-rate things, or their insistence on top quality.

As a memoirist, you are tasked with describing the different settings so that your reader can “see” where your story takes place and can understand your characters more fully via the settings.

Good luck writing your memoir.

DL: this post—Three Pillars of Starting a Memoir Right—introduced a YouTube video which turned out to be the most popular of all my videos. Today, I would like to share both this post and the video. If you haven’t done so already, please share the post and the video and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

_____

Writing a memoir requires a lot of time and energy—but you can do it. You can succeed in writing a memoir. Many people just like you have succeeded in doing so already. Today I am offering you my three pillars of memoir writing.

I want to share a system with you for getting started on writing a memoir. I call it the three pillars of memoir writing.

As with so many projects you might undertake, you can reinvent the wheel or you can plug into a system that has been shown to work. My Memoir Network has been helping people just like you to write personal and family stories since 1988 and our proven system can help you, too, to write a memoir.

The system that I have found to be best for launching new writers—and many practiced writers, too—has three parts to it—three pillars of memoir writing.

1. When writing a memoir, create a memory list. It’s a strong part of the pillars of starting a memoir right

(more…)

Don’t worry. This memoir-writing task does not call for drawing skills as you eschew creating memoir stick characters.

The term “stick character” refers to a drawing of a person by someone with no talent who draws lines for arms and legs. Stick Characters don’t entice the reader much and they don’t do justice to your people. You will do better without stick characters burdening your memoir. Develop your characters fully. Your characters are, after all, the people in your life. They are/were complex in life and ought to be complex in writing. Write them into your text clearly and forcefully. If you need help, there are many sources available for coaching and editing.

You can make your people (characters) more “real” by

  •     including both positives and negatives about them.
  •     letting your reader “hear” your people speak in dialog.
  •     using all five senses to describe your people.
  •     not being afraid to present contradictory views (from other characters).

 Review something you wrote recently and look for details you failed to include about that person. Perhaps you will choose to include something they did or how they walked or what they once said to you. In this way, page after page, you will make your characters more multi-dimensional.

In almost everything you do in life or in writing, pacing ranks right up there in importance. The tortoise knew how to pace himself and won the race.

The hare, on the other hand, needed to view this post before setting out on the race which he eventually lost despite the gift of speed nature had given him!

Pacing your memoir is generally an acquired habit.

Pacing requires some planning and getting used to. The tortoise understood this and took off at a slow but steady pace.

Long-distance runners pace themselves for an eventual victory at the finish line. They don’t opt to be head-of-the-line on mile five or ten or fifteen. They know to settle on a speed for each portion of the race so that they can finish first.

How do we apply the concept of pacing to your memoir structure?

Every memoir is, of course, different but there are some basics that everyone needs to master and apply.

In your memoir, you are trying to say something you consider to be important. In many cases, it is this important message that has led you to start to write. Most of us don’t write memoir to make a lot of money—that would be nice but it’s not likely. We write to share an experience.

But, something happens in the writing. Perhaps you become entranced with an event that now seems particularly interesting to you. Why not explore it, you think and you soon go off on a tangent. Important stuff perhaps but not central to this particular memoir.

“But this is important to understanding my story,” you say.

Perhaps you are writing about a business failure and what you learned from it. Your wife, or perhaps it was your husband, was your partner. So, who was this partner of yours who was also your spouse?

You begin to write about when you were dating. How your world changed then. And you go on for 25 pages. Very interesting stuff, very romantic—at least to you and the truth is it has little to do with your business failure.

What we need to read about is your business. Unless your spouse was a direct cause of the collapse, let’s leave the courting out of this story.

While it may be appropriate to write about why you believed you and your spouse were a great team to begin a business until you realized it wasn’t so great a team. Perhaps you both had the same strengths and the same weaknesses so entire parts of the business were not being taken care of.

Writing about your courtship is waste of memoir space, a failure of pacing your memoir. As I have expounded elsewhere, kill your little darlings, your favorite stories that don’t belong in your memoir.

Your memoir demands appropriate pacing.

We read memoirs for many reasons. One of course, is to have a “good read.” But, I also believe a crucial aspect of a memoir reading is education. You are making a point in your memoir not merely being entertaining.

We readers also want to learn how to handle life situations. Because of this, your book on a businessfailure will not appeal to the high school boy whose entire life revolves around sports. It probably won’t appeal either to a businessperson who has been running a successful, profitable venture.

So, who will your book appeal to?

Your book will probably appeal to someone starting out who wants to avoid problems or it will appeal to someone whose business is shaky and wants to know what to do or at least what to avoid. Thirdly, it might draw a person in who has failed at a business and is now looking for additional insight before launching another venture.

With this in mind, your commitment to outlining your courtship with your business partner—your spouse—is not what people want to read.

It’s a little darling that is getting in the way of your theme.

It is not what is heading in a direct line to your conclusion.

What’s the most important part of your story? 

We don’t particularly want to know about the quirky dates you had or your taste in music, but we are likely to want to see the two of you discussing the future and about how both of you had once had a desire to launch a business. That much is appropriate and necessary to understand your partnership.

Some text will be necessary to show the early stages of the company, but soon you will need to kaleidoscope into the early challenges. How did you choose to meet them and with hindsight can you share what early mistakes might have made?

Right pacing in a memoir refers to the inevitable exposition of the story as it leads directly to its crisis and turning point.

 Everything else is a distraction and deletes from proper pacing.

pacing your memoir

To view this article on video, click here.

And remember: “inch by inch, it’s a cinch; yard by yard it’s hard.”

Good luck writing your stories!

—

Below is an e-course I have prepared for you to look more deeply at pacing your memoir time and energy.

~ FAULTY PROCESS IS—WELL—USELESS

~ TIME HACKS FOR WRITERS

~ HOW TO MANAGE YOUR MEMOIR WRITING 

~ MEMOIR WRITING PROCESS

~ Today’s video:  FOCUS MEMOIR WRITING ENERGY AND TIME.

Today is Monday, and it’s a great day to write a bit on your memoir!

Keep the reader interested by using plotting whenever you can, but you don’t need to go gaga about plot—just include enough. Remember: you are not writing a thriller.

Exactly what makes an action interesting is evidently subjective. What might interest an older, retired woman dedicated to promoting social action is likely to be utterly boring to the teenage boy who spends all his free time—and some time when he should be studying and doing his homework—playing basketball. Yet, both would insist that a story needs to be interesting if they are to continue to read. It’s just that they don’t agree on what “interesting” is.

The key take-away here is: a memoir needs to be interesting to its natural audience. What action/plot do the people who would most appreciate your memoir need to keep reading? Your action can be entirely and extremely external (e.g., a flight through a city in a get-away car) or internal (doubts and hesitations). 

The Stephen King fan who is focused on action would find a Virginia Woolf novel which is focused on characterization extremely boring while a Virginia Woolf reader would find a King novel a bit gaga in its too-much action and excitement. Either group would find the books of their author interesting and those of the other writer boring.

Many people confuse dramatic action with dramatic development. The distinction is crucial and it will help you to write a much more interesting memoir. Even laden with inherent dramatic action, a story without dramatic development can prove to be quite uninteresting.

Your memoir will most likely not have one action. There will probably be many.

Understanding “theme” and its role in your memoir is another core task that will both simplify and clarify your message—i.e., your theme. Your theme is perhaps what has motivated you to start your memoir project. There is likely something you want to say about life—your life. Your theme can also be called your message. The theme can be lofty (strive for virtue) or it can be trite (life is hard). Theme drives your story and colors your narrative. 

Everyone writes with some hope of getting a message across. But here’s the risk of trying to get a message to the reader: you can slip into “preaching.” Be wary of insisting on the “shouldas, oughtas.” They will sink your memoir and cause your audience to flee you. 

Reaching for preachiness is not part of these best memoir-writing tasks I am outlining—for a good reason. Who wants to be preached to? 

Go for theme—because frankly you can’t avoid it, but eschew preachiness. Preachiness you can avoid!

It was 2016, and I was in what I thought of as the very last days of the memoir writing process and polishing A Sugary Frosting / A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage, the early lifestory of my deceased spouse, Martha Blowen. It was a time to make sure I had written what I wanted to write and to check grammar and spelling before it went out to a copy editor.

I had promised Martha that I would write her stories so that our grandchildren would know something about her. In May 2015, I began gathering the stories she had written of her life. My intent was to create a booklet of these stories. But, to be honest, it has never appealed to me to write booklets. I like to write books. That’s what I do and that’s what I do well.

Martha Blowen

As I read through Martha’s stories, in a few instances, I understood that some were fragmentary and needed filling out. I knew the story she was trying to convey but then I had lived with her for 31 years. Would someone who did not know her—our grandchildren, for instance—understand and appreciate the tale? So, I tweaked the stories to make them more complete, more meaningful. Good work, I thought.

Then there were all the other stories that she had not written that I knew to be important to her and that I felt our grandchildren would want to know. I had heard Martha’s stories many, many times and so it was not hard for me to write them. Soon I had composed more stories than Martha had left behind. Well, why not write these down, too—so I wrote them.

Now the stories were adding up to a life, to a memoir.

Going Deeper into the Writing Process

As I am always urging anyone who works with me whether in coaching, in editing, or in ghostwriting, I created a memory list. This is a list of any and all memories related to a topic. It is both a fantastic recall exercise and an organizer for a memoir.

As you can imagine, A Sugary Frosting / A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage inevitably began to grow and grow. Soon it was well beyond the booklet stage. I continued writing, realizing I was creating a full-length memoir. As I wrote, there arose the standard question of where does the memoir end, where does this memoir of Martha’s early life come to an end. There was a natural curve to her story – and that was the life she had spent with her parents in the parsonage. After that, she lived a different life energy. (I write about life phases on my blog and why they are so important in memoir writing.)

In the polishing part of the memoir writing process, I identified two facets as interesting in the story. One was that it portrayed the story of a subculture in America in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s—in this instance, life in an Anglo-Protestant parsonage. A Sugary Frosting / A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage was also a necessary prelude to a book that I wanted to publish in the next year or two. This book, which was composed of collations of Martha’s and my journals, would be about the two years after Martha had been stricken with intraductal breast cancer and during which it progressed through her body. These journals were full of her illness, her resistance, and her time of acceptance. This was, of course, my time, too, of resistance and acceptance.

Martha died on August 18, 2008. There was a long time during which I was unable to write about her. Eventually, however, after a couple of years, I was able to resume the memoir writing process but on different book. This one was the one that sprouted from her journals and her stories. I created a book from the two journals she and I had kept.

My original intent had been to make these two journal books my next publishing project. But when I thought about it, I felt these journal manuscripts had something missing. What was missing, I believe, was a large historical context – “historical” meaning her earlier life: what context did she come out of? What influences had marked her for life?

That questioning led to re-igniting A Sugary Frosting and I set to work on it again. This time I finished it. A Sugary Frosting was published in both hard copy and e-version on March 30, 2016.

writing process

Here is a free memoir-writing e-course which I have curated just for you:

~ Faulty Process is—Well—Useless

~ Don’t Waste Your Memoir-Writing Time

~ A Pillar for More and Better Writing

~ Writing When You Don’t Feel Like Writing

~ Today’s Video: Stick with the process. Success demands it.

 

Good luck with your writing and remember to write a bit on your memoir today.

And remember: “Inch by inch, it’s a cinch; yard by yard, it’s hard.”

Good luck writing your stories!

Keep writing. Manage your time well. Your memoir is important.

Best,
Denis and The Memoir Network Team

Today is Monday, and it’s a great day to write a bit on your memoir!

Your story is not formless; it is not an amoeba. A memoir needs form. You must give your memoir the backbone your readers want and need! Your memoir calls for structure to make as forceful a statement as it can make.

Eventually, after you have written awhile, you will likely have amassed a number of vignettes, story segments, and stories and wonder about how to best organize them into a coherent and interesting memoir. You must make a statement and create a bigger picture of your story.

How will you do it? Well, one answer is that you will do it by how you organize your story. Generally, people use chronology, topics, themes, and all of the above.

The Memoir Network’s “Memoir Writing Series” will lead you through the process of putting your story together, of making some narrative structure that will keep your readers reading.

For more info on structure from our blog, click here.

Good luck with your writing and remember to write a bit on your memoir today.

And remember: “Inch by inch, it’s a cinch; yard by yard, it’s hard.”

Best of luck to complete your writing project.

Best,
Denis and The Memoir Network Team
set-goals-brainstorming-2398562_1920

22 Memoir-Writing Goals to Jumpstart your Memoir Writing

By on July 1, 2022

Do you find yourself wandering along with your memoir writing and not achieving your memoir-writing goals?  Do you have a sense that you might have accomplished a bit more writing than you have?

At regular intervals, it is traditional to review how the past went for you and to recommit to goals for yourself for the coming months. (A goal is a wish with action steps and a timeline.) These goals need to be written and reviewed periodically.

Studies have shown that people who set goals in writing have a better outcome vis-à-vis accomplishing what they set out to do. Here’s a report on one such study. (The famous Harvard goal-setting study so many of us have heard of apparently never happened, but the concept of goal setting is clearly important and is explored in the linked article.)

22 Memoir-Writing Goals especially for you!

[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

We'd love to have you access this content. It's in our members-only area, but you're in luck: becoming a member is easy and it's free.

Already a Member?

Sign In

Not a Member Yet?

Find out More
AVirtualMemoirTour-WP

Sit in on this Virtual Memoir Tour

By on April 25, 2024

Today, I am urging you to sit back and enjoy this virtual memoir tour in which I read an excerpt read from my memoir French Boy/A 1950s Franco-American Childhood. Here’s some necessary background: I did not learn English until I went to grade school. My brother had preceded me in school where he had learned […]

maine-3994041_1280

Monday Focus: Don’t ignore the setting(s) of your story.

By on April 22, 2024

Today’s focus reminds you that your stories take place in some context. This is the setting of your story. There are two general sorts of settings. the physical setting that is tangible the abstract setting that consists of family, culture, and the era, etc. This setting tends to be ethereal. Some of the writers I […]

pillars of starting a memoir right

Three Pillars of Starting a Memoir Right Everytime.

By on April 18, 2024

DL: this post—Three Pillars of Starting a Memoir Right—introduced a YouTube video which turned out to be the most popular of all my videos. Today, I would like to share both this post and the video. If you haven’t done so already, please share the post and the video and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

_____

Writing a memoir requires a lot of time and energy—but you can do it. You can succeed in writing a memoir. Many people just like you have succeeded in doing so already. Today I am offering you my three pillars of memoir writing.

I want to share a system with you for getting started on writing a memoir. I call it the three pillars of memoir writing.

As with so many projects you might undertake, you can reinvent the wheel or you can plug into a system that has been shown to work. My Memoir Network has been helping people just like you to write personal and family stories since 1988 and our proven system can help you, too, to write a memoir.

The system that I have found to be best for launching new writers—and many practiced writers, too—has three parts to it—three pillars of memoir writing.

1. When writing a memoir, create a memory list. It’s a strong part of the pillars of starting a memoir right

[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

We'd love to have you access this content. It's in our members-only area, but you're in luck: becoming a member is easy and it's free.

Already a Member?

Sign In

Not a Member Yet?

Find out More
pacing a memoir

Pacing Your Memoir Requires Planning

By on April 11, 2024

In almost everything you do in life or in writing, pacing ranks right up there in importance. The tortoise knew how to pace himself and won the race. The hare, on the other hand, needed to view this post before setting out on the race which he eventually lost despite the gift of speed nature […]

a memoir needs form

Monday Focus: Your memoir is not an amoeba: a memoir needs form.

By on March 25, 2024

Today is Monday, and it’s a great day to write a bit on your memoir! Your story is not formless; it is not an amoeba. A memoir needs form. You must give your memoir the backbone your readers want and need! Your memoir calls for structure to make as forceful a statement as it can […]