The Memoir Writer’s Blog is our on-line magazine. It contains a collection of over 500 stories and articles to inspire you to be a better and more prolific writer and provides the technical knowledge and practice to make this happen.
You can make a success of your memoir writing.
We ought to know: we have worked with thousands of people and have been centrally involved in the production of hundreds of published memoirs.
We’re not going say it’s easy to write a memoir, but we are most definitely going to affirm that you can do it. Huge numbers of people write and finish their memoirs every year. Many have gotten their start by studying the Memoir Writer’s Blog. These people are, for the most part, just like you, people who started to write one day and persevered to the end.
I have learned so much from your blog. There is content for every issue and need a writer might have. Thank you for being so generous with your information.
—Mark Manzone
a memoir writer who is still at it!
Let the Memoir Writer’s Blog—which is our online magazine as well as our online memoir university—help you start, write, finish and publish your memoir as it has helped many others. Go from wannabe to published writer.
Just-in-time learning
The beauty of the Memoir Writer’s Blog is that you can access the information as you need it. Our blog is “just in time learning” at its best.
Before you know it, you will have a memoir in hand—a memoir that you will be proud to share.
If you want to know about what other services we provide besides the Memoir Writer’s Blog, click here.
NB: We also offer a Memoir Professional Blog for people who wish to teach, coach, edit or ghostwrite memoirs.
Memoir Writer’s Blog Posts
The Photos You Don’t Have / How to Journal Without The Photos
Notice Gaps In Your Collection of Photos?
As you organize your photos for your albums, you notice gaps in what you photographed–in other words, the photos you don’t have. You remember events that you didn’t even photograph at all– perhaps you weren’t there or perhaps you were too busy to take photos.
You can ask around to find if anyone took photos you might have copies of. And what if no one has photos to record a time or a person in your life that you simply must memorialize? What to do? [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Motivation to Complete A Memoir
All writers face the atrophy of motivation to complete a memoir that seems to come with writing a long literary work over months and months and even over a period of years.
Let’s face it: writing can be hard and discouraging. The most interesting of topics [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Fiction and memoir writing: When Is It not a Memoir?
Fiction and memoir writing—what’s the difference? I have been reading a memoir that has been doing well here in Maine (it’s by an excellent Maine writer)–I can’t vouch for its reach in the rest of the country. It was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt so I can only presume it is receiving support elsewhere.
It’s an interesting book, very well-written in terms of style and organization, but my nagging doubt [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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What to Do to Stay in the Memoir-Writing Conversation—And Why it’s Important.
I read professional journals. Poets and Writers from cover to cover. I receive the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance e-newsletter weekly. It’s a membership newsletter and comes chock full of news about what other writers are doing, readings schedules, and announcements of book publications. Do you have…
Ten Questions On Memoir Writing
Questions On Memoir Writing
The following interview with me appeared in the Nov. 19, 2010, Oral History Education blog, and was later published in 2013. Over the years, these questions on memoir writing still rank as some of the most common questions I receive, and I have to say, the answers haven’t changed either–enjoy!
1. How did you get started in your profession of memoir writing?
I started writing autobiography-based fiction. Some of these have won literary awards, and, while I like that, I feel the most satisfaction from helping readers who are stimulated to tell their own stories after reading my work. This happened in 1988 when my first collection of short fiction, What Became of Them, came out.
After I had read for a group of senior citizens, I was overwhelmed by their eagerness to share their stories with me and each other. That’s how I began helping people to write their memoirs.
[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Three Causes of “Writer’s Block”
Many writers suffer from writer’s block, yet few understand its possible causes. Memoir writing certainly has its difficulties which can cause writer’s block.
Rework Your Story to Get More Show and Less Tell
There are ways to rework your stories so that you can minimize “telling” and maximize “showing.” The biggest “telling” offense is perhaps…
Retiring to Memoir Writing: Justine Powell Kuntz
Editor’s note: We came across this guest article published by Justine Kuntz back in 2013, and were so taken with her story of retiring to memoir writing that we decided to publish it again. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did and that it inspires reflections on your own life and memoir.
Eight years ago as a retirement project for church, I introduced memoir writing at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton, FL. Earlier, after twenty-two years of teaching English, I chose to flee the regimen of teaching and accepted a position in the business world. The new position required learning more about computers than what I had used in the classroom but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise when I fully retired nine years later. While in business, I had missed teaching, so developing a curriculum for memoir writing made me feel at home once again and helped ease me into retirement and doing what I loved most—teaching.
[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Avoid Cliches and Stereotypes
If you do not avoid cliches and stereotypes, you will undermine the unique and personal feel of your memoir. Cliches and stereotypes place people in often erroneous and certainly indefensible categories. As short-hand ways of writing and speaking, they reflect ready-made thoughts and adversely affect the ways we relate to our families and friends as unique individuals and how we write about them.
“She was a mother hen—you know how mothers are!”
“My father had a heart of gold.”
[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]