How to Get the Most Out of Sharing Your Memoir In-Progress
A critical step for a brand-new writer is sharing your memoir in progress with others. There is nothing like a reader to help you develop a healthy critical sense of your work. This article is especially for the writer who cringes at the thought of sharing his/her writing. Those others you will share with might […]
Five Takes for Writing with Good Grammar
Memoir writers sometimes ask, “Is writing with good grammar important?” Yes and no. To anyone beginning to write lifestories, I would caution, “Get your story down on paper and don’t worry about “good grammar”—at least, not at first.” (more…)
Show Up and Do the Writing!
Show Up and Do the Writing! That’s how you get your memoir finished. Inch by inch it’s a cinch: yard by yard, it’s hard. (more…)
Should You Write With An Audience in Mind?
While some people decide to write a memoir according to structure—healing memoirs, investigative memoirs, etc—as I wrote in a previous post, others write with an audience in mind. (Writing with structure in mind often calls for writing with audience in mind, also.) Sometimes the audience is of specific people but many other writers, while they […]
4 Tips For Making and Using a Core Memory List to Write More Efficiently
The Core Memory List is a list of the crucial relationships and events which have shaped your life. It contains just ten or fewer items. Use it to write more efficiently. This is because Core Memory Lists are about the relationships and events which, had they not occurred, your life (or your mother’s or father’s, […]
How to Have a Successful Book Reading–Author Book Reading Tips
You can have a great book reading by following several guidelines. I would call them best practices of doing a public reading of your memoir. They are now somewhat natural for me now but they were originally studied and rehearsed. You may know some of them intuitively and others you can learn. (more…)
How to pick up and finish your memoir at last
There are writers stop writing and then do not know how to re-connect to the writing life. Writers who have stopped writing may want to write again, to pick up their memoir, but what has happened is that the train of thought, the feeling, and the sensibility that went into the creation of those previously-written […]
Is theme important in memoir?
Theme influences choices for every element in the story: plot development, characterization, and setting. Is theme important. You bet it is! (more…)
Write Your Lifestories into Your Photo Albums
Photos are the driving force behind the story told in most albums–no photo, no story. It shouldn’t be that way! Your photos are obviously important. They are a terrific visual record—but the photos do not pinpoint the story. They don’t tell the date, don’t tell who was there, don’t tell what happened before or after […]