How to Write a Memoir for a Broader Audience: 4 Tips
Would you like your memoir to attract a broader audience? While family and friends are a worthy readership for your memoir, are you one of those many writers who aspires a larger public? Writers will admit, if pushed, that they would enjoy a public response to their efforts. Your story can appeal to strangers—if you […]
Writing Feelings into Your Memoir
How to write feelings into your memoir is a rather important topic. Recently on the Forum, David wrote about not accessing the feeling side of his memories, of writing a memoir that, if I am understanding him right, was all details and facts. Below is my response which can serve as a stand alone article, […]
Writing An Old Family Story
I was one of those fortunate children to have known well both sets of grandparents. My Ledoux grandparents lived upstairs for most of my growing up while by Verreault grandparents lived 10 miles away. Because of this, I’ll admit writing an old family story is somewhat easy for me as I heard so many of […]
What would support for writing your memoir look like for you?
While some people succeed at writing an interesting and meaningful memoir on their own, the fact is many people need both more technical expertise than they now have and more emotional support for the long effort they are undertaking. Many find the task of writing a memoir—however urgent and compelling—to be somewhat daunting and, if […]
Slow Writing is the Literary Relative of Slow Cooking
With all the blog posts I have read about learning to write faster—I have even heard of “how to write a book in a weekend, I want to take a moment to re-emphasize the value of writing slowly and carefully. Perhaps, what I would like to stop a moment to ponder is the literary relative […]
A French-Canadian Legacy Podcast with Denis Ledoux
Listen to this podcast on writing memoirs on the French-Canadian Legacy Podcast. Denis Ledoux talks about writing memoirs in general and the memoir he wrote with his mother We Were Not Spoiled. If you’ve had any interest in writing down your story or someone else’s, this is an amazing episode to listen to.– Louise Simoneau […]
Memories of My Grandfather
My grandfather William Ledoux would be 133 years old were he alive today. I would like to take a moment to honor his life by sharing some memories of my grandfather. His early years He was born in Lachine, Québec, on February 17, 1889, the oldest of what would be a family of six children. […]
Meeting My Ancestors in New France
DL: This is an excerpt from Here to Stay an account of the lives of my seventeenth-century ancestors in New France. Everything in the book is factual or a reasonable surmise (and referenced as such). ___ This book is not a history of New France. It is about some of my ancestors who came here […]
Develop the Setting: the Somewhere of Your Story
Writers seem to grasp that every memoir needs well-developed characters and actions, but the same is always not true when they are asked to develop the setting of their memoir. Develop the Setting The term “setting” is generally understood to refer to the physical “where” in which your memoir takes place. This can be a […]