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.
The Problem With Writing Prompts
Is there a problem with writing prompts? This is my issue with writing prompts: they tend to lead to isolated stories, stories that are searching for humor, searching to be shared with a group that is perhaps looking for entertainment. They are not, by and large, searching for meaning lost in the morass of your […]
Regular Writing Practice: An Important Decision!
In this post, you will learn the many benefits of a regular writing practice.
Many people set off to write their memoirs with considerable enthusiasm. It’s a new project and it’s full of energy. This is going to be the greatest memoir the world has ever known!
How long can that last? Enthusiasm takes you only so far. Over the months and years it takes to complete a manuscript, the initial enthusiasm wanes and the memoir project that had seemed so interesting at its onset now begins to bore the writer. We begin to hear about the writer “trying to write a memoir.” Unless the writer changes attitude, the memoir will soon be abandoned.
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Avoid Writing a Chronology: 4 Tips
Is writing a chronology of a life ever enough?
Dates and facts are necessary to life writing in the same way route numbers are necessary to maps. It’s not only that dates and facts provide interesting information but that they keep your readers on the right path as they make their way through your life story. So…
Writing a chronology is already a great contribution to your family story, but you can do so much more than just include the dates and facts. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Passive Vs Active Voice
Generally speaking, the passive voice of the verb (the subject has the action done to it) is weaker than the active voice (the subject does the action) in involving the reader in your story. That is crucial because as a memoir writer you are not sharing ideas but recreating life experiences to share.
Redundant word usage
Redundant word usage is rampant!
As a writer, I am chagrined when words get misused and one particular miscreant is redundant word usage.
Here are examples:
1. “As I re-listened to these interviews again…”
2. “That just my personal opinion!”
3. “Repeat again…”
4. “As a child, I was raised by parents who…”
5. “a personal friend”
These are phrases and sentences that I read or heard today (in the space of one hour!) [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Do you need action in a memoir?
Action in a memoir is essential—even if internalized!
Action in a memoir usually happens in the usual place—outside the memoir narrator. That is easy to grasp: “The boy ran by.”
When you use flashback scenes in which you remember someone and what they did way back then—these are not interiorized actions, these are memories of actual actions.
What can be less easy to grasp is that action in a memoir can be internal to the character, happening in the character’s mind. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Your Memoir: an Arrest of Disorder
Each poem clarifies something. But then you’ve got to do it again. You can’t get ‘clarified’ to stay so: let you not think that. In a way, it’s like nothing more than blowing smoke rings. Making little poems encourages a man to see that there is shapeliness in the world. A poem is an arrest of disorder.
—Robert Frost, poet
Generating the arrest of disorder of life
When I read the quote above, I did not have to make much of a leap to sense that the words “An arrest of disorder” apply to the task you and I undertake when we write memoir. As the poet so is the memoir writer engaged in art making: the creation of meaning.
More than anything perhaps, we want an arrest of disorder. Disorder seems to be everywhere in life. And so, we take our raw material—the events of our lives and of the lives of the people who surround us—and endeavor to make meaning of it all. In short, we take up our mishmash of events, our disorder of memories, and attempt to make order—or, at the least, to create an arrest of disorder.
This rendering of order proves to be soothing. It is what we deeply wish to achieve in our lives—to have all the disparate and seemingly meaningless (or at least random) occurrences, wishes, pains somehow come together coherently, meaningfully. It all happened, we realize in an “A-ha!” moment, for some reason rather than by chance.
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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 too hard and not for you.
Write about something important to you
My answer to what to write about in a memoir is always to write about something important to you—not what you think is important to others.
Why are you writing? What is it that you hope to get from this effort of creating a memoir? You are about to devote a lot of time and energy to this task. Be sure it is for reasons that will keep you writing. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Don’t Use A Writing Prompt Unless…
A writing prompt seems like a good idea—but is it really?
You are given a writing based on a writing prompt—let’s say, “Write about something physical you were afraid of as a child?”—and you instantly start to write about the water slide at Camp Algonquin you were sent to as an eight-year old. You are not sure why you are so moved to write this story but you do not hesitate. You write about standing at the top of the slide and about Martha Cocciardi in back of you on the ladder, shouting “Get going, Patty. I want to slide, too” and, at that moment, you realized there was nothing to be done but to throw yourself at the mercy of fate and hope you survive to enter the fourth grade. You write with some humor and emotional distance suggesting “Oh, silly me! Oh, what little problems we have as children!” [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]