Listening to your memoir yields dividends. As writers, we have often experienced of writing what we feel has to be deathless prose. Later, perhaps a week or a month later, when we pick up our own manuscript again, we realize that our deathless prose is perhaps closer to deadly prose. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
Using specific words in a memoir enables you to write a story with details that establish character and setting. Concentrate on nouns and verbs and discard any adjectives or adverbs that aren’t specific to the description, and your memoir will pull your reader in. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
You can use visualization in your memoir recall to write your memories in more detail. There are powerful tools you can use to assist when you are visualizing. When you learn to use visualization in addition to these tools, it can help you come up with more details for your memoir writing. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
When you write in quantity for your memoir, you will amass an amazing amount of stories, vignettes, scenes, dialogues, and short descriptions. All of these can be written anywhere and quickly on paper, on the computer and even the backs of napkins and scraps of paper. In this activity, you’ll start writing short pieces to weave together later for your story. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
To write better, memoir writers need to be memoir readers. Do you read other memoirs? Do you think it helps to study how they wrote their memoir in order for you to improve your own writing? To be a better writer, you must immerse yourself in the memoir genre, particularly in the area you are writing. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
When you include feelings in your memoir, your reader’s interest is heightened and they are drawn into the story.
Make a list of different words to describe the feelings that you will want to highlight in your memoir. Put these words in your memory list both to draw from as you write and to keep you focused. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
It’s important to gather details for a memoir and use them effectively to draw your readers in. The use of vivid sensory details helps your reader not only “see” but engage all of their senses to be fully immersed in the story. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
The bigger picture in a memoir is essential for your reader (and you!) to better understand the period of your life you are writing about. A memoir that is set in the historical context of your time, even with just a few references to events, broadens your personal story into a larger story for your readers. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
Writing the setting as a character of your memoir will tell us a lot about you and the people who were in your life. Many fiction writers give setting the prime role of character in their novels. As a memoir writer, you can also think of setting as a character in your memoir. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
What you will do today is travel to the place that figures in your story. This is the setting of your memoir. If you can do so physically, that is great.
If however, you need to travel to the setting of your memoir in your mind – because it is too far away or because somehow it no longer exists, you can always get there in your imagination. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]