Of the hundreds of memoir writing posts on the Memoir Writer’s Blog—more than 500 as of now and growing—some have proven to be favorites with memoirists. Below are those articles which ranked as the top most-visited posts according to Search Engine “opens.”
We hope you enjoy reading—and benefiting from—these best memoir writing posts as much as our other writers have. And…
Once you have read them, why not go on to read the other hundreds of posts? Think of the Memoir Writer’s Blog as a catalog of university-level instruction designed especially for you. You can participate anytime you are ready to learn more. This is just-in-time-learning at its best. It doesn’t get much better. But…
You must pitch in.
Without putting in the effort to read these memoir-writing posts and others carefully and study what you read, there’s not much learning that can go on. So, dig in. The beginning of wisdom is understanding what you don’t know and doing something about learning what you need to learn.
All of our memoir writing posts are free to you and they are laser-focused so that you get the info you need when you need it.
Others have succeeded.
We know it’s not easy to be a good memoir writer, but becoming one is not beyond your ability. Thousands of people we have worked with—people just like you—have done just that.
You can learn to write an interesting and meaningful memoir, but you will need more skills and more knowledge that you may now possess.
Remember: skills and knowledge can be acquired. You can master memoir writing—and you can do it starting now by reading our memoir writing posts.
In conclusion
Your memoir readers will thank you for taking your writing seriously enough to study the process to become the best writer you can be.
Good luck and keep in touch.
Three Tips for Effective Memoir Pre-Writing
Before you begin to write your memoir, there are a number of non-writing tasks which you must undertake—this phase of compiling your lifestory is called memoir pre-writing, and it is essential to writing better stories. People often think of pre-writing as a waste of time, but it is not. It will get your stories written more quickly and more interestingly. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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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 an audience in mind, also.) Sometimes the audience is of specific people but many other writers, while they do have a specific audience in mind, are really writing to a group according to their interest.
“I want to write for my kids and grandchildren. I want them to know who I was,” one sort of memoirist will realize. While another will think, “I want to my children and grandchildren to know me, too, and I want to place my life in a greater context. I’m hoping to have readers beyond my kin, readers who are interested in a larger picture of what life was.” [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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How to Organize Your Memoir: Four Ways
Eventually, after you have written awhile, you will likely have amassed a number of vignettes, story segments, and stories and wonder about how to best organize them into a coherent and interesting memoir. You will likely want to make a statement, o create a bigger picture of your story.
How will you do it? Well, one answer is that you will do it by how you organize your story. Below are four ideas to organize your memoir.
Remember: These suggestions do not refer to the sequence in which the stories are written but rather to how they can be ordered after they have been written.
Here are four ways you can organize your memoir.
1) Chronology
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How Many Memoir Types Are There?
There used to be one and not several memoir types.
The one kind of memoir genre was that written by famous people about the important events in history that they had taken part in. Mostly, these accounts were about how wonderful they were and how important their roles in history had been. Oftentimes, these memoirs were about excoriating their political or business rivals and actually provided little emotional or psychological insight into the protagonist other than s/he was a “good guy.”
More
Today, we have more kinds of memoir types—or genres—than we could have imagined even only several generations ago. The Memoir Writer’s Blog has a whole category devoted to types of memoir,
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