The Role of Passion in Your Memoir
Understanding the role of passion in your memoir will help you to access the emotional side of your writing more easily and enable you to stay longer and more deeply in the memoir conversation. Understanding will add balance between your will to write and the passion that prompted you to write in the first place. […]
What to Write About in a Memoir
“What to write about in a memoir?” is a basic question. The right answer will keep you writing and the wrong may lead you to believe that writing a memoir is to hard and not for you. My answer to what to write about in a memoir is always to write about something important to […]
Journal Writing for the Memoir Writer
Journal writing is an effective practice for the memoir writer. It is a spontaneous and generally free-flowing activity and so can be very helpful to you in loosening up both your thinking and your writing type (the two usually go together). Your journal is an opportunity to bypass the familiar rules that govern much of […]
A Memoir Writer Is an Artist
A memoir writer is an artist. If you are writing your lifestories, you have begun to do the work of the artist, to create as an artist creates. Although you may not think of yourself as a maker of art, you are engaging in the artist’s process of creating order out of chaotic reality. (more…)
Three Reasons Why We Tell Stories
Here is why we tell stories. Stories fascinate us all our lives. As children, we loved to be told fairy tales and to hear, time after time, the tales our parents told us about what we did and said when we were babies, as well as the stories about their own childhoods. As soon as […]
Writing About Difficult Times in a Memoir
Writing about difficult times in a memoir is necessary. As I have thought of Mary, I have wondered how I would write this life. It does not seem, form my outside perspective, to have been an easy one. (more…)
One Reason to Write a Memoir
I wouldn’t suggest that one ought to write for one’s descendants. That is not a good reason to write a memoir. One ought to write for one’ self. Your descendents may or may not benefit. I certainly believe that a function of memoir is to educate/inform but one can only be educated by another when […]
Create a Salon–A Temporary Writing Group
An afternoon or evening with writers can be a stimulating experience. We have so few opportunities to meet with people with whom we share an understanding of an important subtext of our lives. (more…)
Don’t Use A Writing Prompt Unless…
You read the piece written from a writing prompt to your writing group or post it to a forum and people comment about how clever you are and how important it is to write with humor. “Make things funny,” they say. But… Have you plumbed the memory that would give your memoir depth? (more…)