Have you struggled with picking your memoir up 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 Pick Up Your Memoir Again—And Finish It! a course on successfully dealing with writer’s block.

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.

All the suggestions point towards re-reading all your memoir stories, vignettes, anecdotes and snippets on hand, to do so slowly and thoughtfully, and to linger with them before picking up your memoir again.

At this point, you must re-acquaint yourself with your manuscript, to appreciate its strong and weak points, to grasp where it needs to be further developed and where text can be excised.

Follow These 3 Tips for Picking Up Your Memoir Again

Below is the first half of a list of suggestions for rereading your lifestories. (The second half will follow in a subsequent post.)

1. Gather your stories in one computer file or folder.

After you have collected all your stories in one folder, paginate them in their right order or place them in one document. Don’t overlook your desktop or your documents list, but check carefully to discover if you have stories that have strayed from a folder where they should be but are not.

Alternatively, print your stories out and place them in a three-ring binder. Being of the waste-not-want-not tribe, I have sometimes printed these working copies on the backs of printed pages stored in a scrap-paper bin so if this works for you, try it too! To be honest, anything goes because this is a process of gathering your stories so that none are lost. Finding a system you’re going to stick with will help you to re-acquaint with and take ownership of your memoir once more!

2. Find the order of your stories.

How should your stories go together—that is, “follow” each other—at this point? If you haven’t been focused on writing a beginning-to-end memoir but have been generating lifestories, which are stand-alone pieces, then not to worry. Writing stand-alones is a method many people make use of to get their memoir started.

Place your stories into an order that makes sense to you. This arrangement may not be your final choice; for now, it is just a working sequence that will get you evaluating your stories.

Generally, the friendliest order for the reader—and usually for the writer—is chronological. First things to happen go first; second things, second, etc. You can do this in your digital document or, if you prefer to print stand-alone ones, then organize them once the stories have been printed.

This is the process of making some sense of the plethora of stories you may have written.

3. Print your stories.

Having set your stories in chronological order (or your preferred order), why not print them out? Having them in hand is likely to provide you with more of the experience of being the reader rather than that of being the writer. Being the writer again during this task would afford you no new insight.

Now you’re in a good position to approximate the experience of an appreciative reader rather than that of a defensive writer. Because you have not been working on your stories for a while, they have most likely grown “cold” on you. This is ideal because now you can experience them more from the viewpoint of the reader you hope one day to entertain and instruct; you are structuring an opportunity to experience your stories more objectively.

Having printed them out and placed them in your three-ring binder, sit down with a cup of something and settle into a long read.

Follow these tips for picking up your memoir again. This is the process of re-acquainting yourself with your memoir.

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