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As soon as you begin to think of writing a memoir, you are involved in the writing process. You have begun to be a writer—even if only with a small “w.” Welcome to the “gang.” (We memoirists are all in this together.)

This “Writing Process” category covers a range of material. It is a compendium of disparate materials that together will help you to write more easily and deeply.

Writing a memoir takes skills that you may not now possess. This category, as all of the blog on the Memoir Network site, will help you to acquire what you need to know to write with more skill and pleasure.

As elsewhere, all the articles are included chronologically in the parent category. Like every writer you have challenges that might leave you baffled as to how to respond. Scanning the list will reveal to you posts that you need to read now for answers to the questions that are stumping you.

What you’ll find in “Writing Process.”

If you are just starting out, we have posts on pre-writing. In fact, if this topic interests you at your current stage of memoir writing, go directly to the subcategory called “Pre-writing.”

At the other end of the writing process, we have posts on completing a memoir. These articles are both scattered chronologically in the parent category or they can be found under the subcategory “Completion.”

In between beginning and completing, we have many articles that will sustain you in your writing.

In conclusion

These articles on writing process will help you, the aspiring the memoir writer, at every stage of your commitment to produce an interesting and meaningful memoir for yourself, your family and—perhaps—for the world.

memory recall

5 Memory Recall Tips

Memory recall, or recalling the details of our life stories, can be a challenge. Devising a Memory List (pg. 41 of Turning Memories Into Memoirs) is the first best thing you can do, but if you want additional ideas, here are five memory recall tips for remembering more than you might have thought possible. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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sensory details

Why Sensory Details Bring A Memoir To Life

Successful stories are full of sensory details (colors, shapes, textures, smells, sounds, flavors. When your stories portray a vivid world (“three sweet-scented roses”) rather than a vague one (“some nice flowers”), you make it easier for readers to take the leap of faith into the world of your writing.

Abstraction kills a story

If your story has abstract and vague wording like “After a while, absence from home made fidelity difficult for him and he committed adultery…,” your readers will be less interested in (and less swayed by) what you have to say than if your narration is filled with concrete details. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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finish a memoir

9 Ideas to Help You Finish Your Memoir

When your writing is stalled and you find it difficult to finish your memoir, turn to your writing journal for help. The following are suggestions for what you might ask yourself in your writing journal. They are taken from the How to Write to the End—Eight Strategies to Deal With Writer’s Block, a book on successfully dealing with writer’s block. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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jog your memory

(More) Better than Prompts: Five Tips to Help You “Jog Your Memory”

When starting on a memoir, it can be difficult to remember all the stories and memories you would like to include. You naturally want to jog your memory.

When you are intent on writing “from the inside out” as we at The Memoir Network hope you will, there are some useful techniques you can use—to add to compiling your Memory List and perhaps even to stimulate it.
[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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sharing your memoir

How to Get the Most Out of Sharing Your Memoir In-Progress

How sharing your memoir will help

A critical step for a brand-new writer is sharing your memoir writing 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.

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writing

Show Up and Do the Writing!

To your dismay, you have been writing your memoir in snippets. In the mornings, when you show up on your laptop, you face, as does every writer, a demanding master: a writing stint for the day.

Oh, how you wish it were the end of your scheduled writing period!

Like many memoir writers, your memoir writing time is perhaps not long. Then you need to move on to the numerous chores that are attendant on keeping a life and a home going. You feel some urgency to write deathless prose because of the short time allotted.

But some days, even your short writing period seems too long. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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archetype of your experience

Use an archetype of your experience to revive your memoir

Can an archetype of your experience refocus your memoir? “My memoir writing has grown tedious,” you bemoan. “I thought what I was writing about was exciting when I began writing. It was exciting then. I could remember so much of what happened. It was compelling. And now as the time I lived this experience recedes into the past, as the vivid memories become less vivid, I am finding it hard to continue to write. Should I give up?” [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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audience in mind

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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Work of Writing a Memoir

How to pick up and finish your memoir at last

Are you wanting to finish your memoir? How do you pick it up and finish a memoir that you started some time ago?
There are writers who 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 stories have now been lost. They are no longer in that realm where writing a memoir is something they can do easily.
The source of their inspiration has dried up.

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