You start with a burst of writing motivation. You are super energized! You have the best motivation for writing—ever!
“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 energy 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, you stall.
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. You may even be losing the feel of what you were creating. Your commitment for writing your memoir is on the wane. You may ask yourself…
“Is this really worth my time to write?”
You have entered a dangerous path! It leads to quitting. Your motivation for writing your memoir is wavering. It is at risk of disappearing.
Don’t go down that way—at least for long!
If you want to renew your motivation for writing
Below are articles whose goal is to help you to sustain your motivation for writing your memoir 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.
In conclusion
Keep your motivation for writing strong!
[watch this video for motivation to write your memoir]
Organize Your Memoir: Life Phases
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. They are a great tool to give depth and cohesion to your memoir. (more…)
Is Writing a Memoir Important?
Let’s start with a basic question: is writing a memoir important? 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 […]
The Role of Passion in Your Memoir
Understanding the role of passion in your memoir will help you to access the emotional side of your writing more easily and enable you to stay longer and more deeply in the memoir conversation. Understanding will add balance between your will to write and the passion that prompted you to write in the first place. […]
Three Reasons Why We Tell Stories
Here is why we tell 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 […]
One Reason to Write a Memoir
I wouldn’t suggest that one ought to write for one’s descendants. That is not a good reason to write a memoir. One ought to write for one’ self. Your descendents may or may not benefit. I certainly believe that a function of memoir is to educate/inform but one can only be educated by another when […]
Don’t Use A Writing Prompt Unless…
You read the piece written from a writing prompt to your writing group or post it to a forum and people comment about how clever you are and how important it is to write with humor. “Make things funny,” they say. But… Have you plumbed the memory that would give your memoir depth? (more…)
Three Excuses for not Writing Your Memoir Today
Most of us use a certain number of excuses for not writing when we want to avoid our memoir projects. Here are a few favorites. (more…)
Thinking About Memoir Writing
Our right thinking about memoir writing projects or our right talking about them can lead to success or failure. We can be very clever about our evasive tactics and disguise them as right thinking. Here are three examples that can pass for thoughtfulness rather than evasion. (more…)
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 (more…)