Like many memoir writers, your memoir writing time is perhaps not long. Then you need to move on to the numerous chores that are attendant on keeping a life and a home going. You feel some urgency to write deathless prose because of the short time allotted.

But some days, even your short writing period seems too long.

Perhaps you open a file and find there 200 words you had written, say, several days earlier. Then you think, “OK, today, I bring this vignette to completion,” but it seems that you can only write another few hundred words before you feel the impossibility of improving the text. It is so pathetic!

You decide to move on to something else—anything else but this dreadful text on the screen before you! It seems to be only trash. Any junior high school writer could do better, for heaven’s sake! So you repeat to yourself, “I better move on to another story. Let this ‘meretricious melodrama’ incubate for a while longer.”

You open another document.

“What do you know, here’s a story fragment that already has 500 words. I’ll pitch right in with some editing. Get those five hundred words into shape.” By the time you get to the end of the text, you are able to grind out a few hundred new words and, by the time that is done, it has become the end of your writing time and, with great relief, you realize you can move on and still call yourself a writer—but barely.

But wait, don’t walk away discouraged.

Calculate the number of pages you have written—this week, this month. Even snippets, if you show up and do the writing, add up to many pages over time. While none of this “forced” writing is likely to be deathless prose and you do not know how much—if any—of it will survive into a finished memoir, it is nonetheless always easier to rewrite and edit than to produce a fresh text. So–

Show up and do the writing. Be kind to yourself. Keep at your work and you’ll produce some text to serve as a basis for a memoir. With this turtle commitment, you will finish your story. All of us wish we were rabbits, but alas we are not.

Remember: “Inch by inch, it’s a cinch. Yard by yard, it’s hard.” And…

Show up and do the writing!

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Sometimes to help you show up and do the writing, what you need is a writing coach to hold your hand and encourage you and sometimes you need a writing coach to point out technical solutions to your writing problems and sometimes you need a  writing coach to keep you honest (which will connect you to your source of inspiration). Click here for more info on coaching and then call 207-353-545 to book your complimentary session. In even is so short a time as a half hour, you will be amazed at the movement you can achieve with coaching.