You start with a burst of writing motivation. You are super energized!
“By gosh, this memoir is going to get written and it’s going to be good!” you tell yourself. And the writing flows for the first while. Your writing motivation remains high. You write regularly and you think about how to make your memoir better and better. At last, you feel like you are a “real writer!” Then…
A day—or two or three—goes by without any writing. Then that “not writing” repeats itself the next week.
“But that’s ok,” you tell yourself . “I’m just taking a few days off.” But…
The few days off eventually become many days off and the memoir begins to seem a bit less interesting.
You realize you aren’t making much progress. Your writing motivation is on the wane. You ask yourself…
“Is this really worth my time to write?”
You have entered a dangerous path! It leads to quitting.
Don’t.
Below are articles whose goal is to help you to sustain your writing motivation for the long run of creating a memoir.
No one said it was going to be easy—just that you can do it. The fact is…
Many people just like you have written interesting and meaningful memoirs and so can you.
If you have stopped writing because of a holiday, a vacation, an illness, or lassitude (read: “It’s too hard! I want it to be easy!”), make today—now—be the time you pick up your memoir writing again and write to the end.
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When you are writing a first draft: nothing can rightly be called a first unless there is a second. First grade implies second grade; first class implies second class; first book implies (we hope) second book, a first draft implies a second draft.
That is why first drafts are called first drafts. A writer must expect to write a second draft, and a third even. No one can sit down and churn out countless pages of prose that don’t need rewriting. Jack Kerouac claimed he did it with On the Road, but we know now that he was stretching the truth. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
Have you struggled with picking up your memoir again and not quite knowing how to get back into it? Rather than castigate yourself, why not simply set some time aside to re-read your memoir?
The following suggestions are from the Write to the End–Eight Strategies to Deal With Writer’s Block! an ebook on successfully dealing with writer’s block. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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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Why does what you want to write become so difficult to do the moment you sit down to write a memoir? Where are the words you need to convey the excitement or the dread or the anticipation of your life experience? After writing a while, you are shocked to realize that what appears on the computer screen has no pizzazz! This drivel is not what you had in mind when you thought with excitement of writing your memoir. So why is writing with passion so hard sometimes? [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
All of us struggle to some extent to produce writing content. Writing is often difficult. It takes time and energy—both of which the laws of entropy suggest we ought to preserve. Here are a few writing processes to help you write today and every day. While the following are not exactly self-motivation, they have gotten […]
Why is writing so hard? Why does what you want to write become so difficult the moment you sit down to write? Where are the words you need to convey the excitement or the dread or the anticipation. You are shocked to realize that what appears on the computer screen has no pizzazz! This is […]
Life phases are one way in which you can organize your memoir. Life phases are the emotional and psychological cycles or phases that have marked your life.
Every life proceeds in irregular and unpredictable phases. We can go along with our lives for a long time without much change, thinking that we have arrived at a resolution of the great “who am I?” question, and then unpredictably and perhaps quickly find ourselves dealing with totally different emotional and psychological challenges. Often, it is only in looking back on our lives that we are aware of these life phases.
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Okay, why do we tell so many 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 we were old enough, we told stories about ourselves for our parents and for our friends. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]