Your memoir has a niche audience. Writers ask me all the time: “Who will want to read my memoir?” Recently someone said, ”My memoir is probably of no interest to you or anyone else. There is no audience for my memoir!” Wondering about the available audience for your memoir is legitimate and necessary. At the […]
As you articulate your theme, ask yourself if this theme is really yours–does it reflect your present understanding of your story and of life itself?
Sometimes, years after I’ve heard from someone that he is writing a memoir, I will connect with the writer again. Perhaps it’s three or four or five years later, but the writer is working on the same memoir. I don’t get it. So I ask politely, “What has snagged the memoir?” In short…
How long does it take to write a memoir? Really? Well, I don’t actually know the answer to “how long does it take to write a memoir?” What I know is a memoir needn’t take so long to compose.
Why do some memoirs drag on? [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
When you overwrite a story by stuffing it with backstory—and many writers seem to want to tell their entire story in what ought to be a vignette—you disrespect chronology and drama and the reader’s patience.
Is hiring a memoir ghostwriter a good idea? You’ve lived a life which you feel merits a memoir. Perhaps you’ve risen from poverty to riches, perhaps you have done a first and you want people to know it was you, or perhaps you want to celebrate a lost world, a world that have since disappeared.
Finding ways to save on ghostwriting fees can be pressing when the story needs to be told but you have to cut costs. Hiring a ghostwriter (co-author) is, no questions about it, an expensive proposition. There are ways, however, to cut the costs by doing some of the work yourself. Before doing that work, however, […]
Hiring a memoir ghostwriter to write your memoir is an excellent choice when you can’t write your book, when you do not have the time to write, or when you simply choose not to. A good ghostwriter will find your voice and use it to write a book that sounds just like you.
Writers who have written a good portion of their memoir will sometimes begin to wonder if it is time to hire a professional to work with them. At this stage, they may ask me, “What’s the difference between proofreading and editing? And, how do I know which one I need?”
An outside writing space sounds great to me—and a luxury I am not willing to wait for. In fact, I have never used outside writing rooms—except for once when I borrowed a summer home for week and finished a book there as I wrote ALL day. Being there was very productive as I had nothing […]
How does memoir coaching improve your manuscript? “What does ‘My family was poor mean,” I asked a memoir writing client in a recent coaching session. “Poor?” he asked at the other end of the phone line. “What do you mean what does poor mean? Poor means poor!” “Does poor mean you didn’t have enough to […]