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Archive | Strategies for Successful Writing

In this Strategies for Successful Writing category, you will read about processes and props you can implement to increase your success as a memoir writer.

While it would be comforting to think that “wanting to succeed” would be sufficient for success, it simply is not. Nor are best efforts, enthusiasm, and working hard.

You must master the craft—that is, the craft of memoir writing. Success for a memoirist is indexed both on the writer’s experience of best writing practices and ability to access feelings deep inside as well as on the reader’s experience. (The reader after all has to bring much to the story experience.) You don’t however have much control of the reader’s response, but you do of your writing.

Best Practices of Strategies for Successful Writing

As in all professions and trades, there are “best practices” for memoir writing that facilitate and improve your writing experience and your audience’s reading experience.

While no one would contradict that memoir writing is an art and requires intuition and sensibility, it is also a craft that relies on best practices of successful memoir writing.

In conclusion

The posts below will help you to write better narratives. But, don’t stop there. Read your way through the entire Memoir Writer’s Bog. Be sure to read How to write a memoir: our 21 Best Memoir-Writing Tips to get you writing your memoir—quickly and well—and getting it into the hands of your public.

As one of the most fundamental strategies for successful writing, let’s be sure to emphasize that when writers do not complete their memoir, they cannot be called successful. So…keep writing until you finish.

Good luck with your writing.

best memoir writing practice

A Best Memoir Writing Practice

When learning to write memoir, it can feel awkward and uncomfortable as you learn the process, just like in learning to swim. We often see people who are not comfortable swimming flail about in the water, their heads reaching up high, desperately, to catch a breath of air. They usually execute strokes too fast. This […]

time for writing

Your writing is your work–Schedule first your time for writing

To make time for writing, you have to be serious about the principle that your writing is your work. You must act on it and take it as seriously as your paying job.

This is low-hanging fruit for time management: honor your writing schedule!

You do not show up at your work when you feel like it—nor do you write only when the feeling comes over you!

If you are working as a nurse or a therapist or a business office administrator or whatnot, you do not show up at your work when you feel like it or when you are inspired. You have certain hours whether you work full-time or part-time during which you are expected to show up at the job. The same is true of your writing. You show up for your writing schedule.

If you write when you “get to it,” when you “feel like it,” when inspiration moves you, you will likely do little writing and almost certainly not complete a book of memoirs. If you were being paid for this memoir “job,” your boss would fire you. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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setting writing goals

Setting Writing Goals That Work For You: Better Time Management

I have a goal for this post. I want to help you to develop and articulate your writing goals for the next three months—that is, 90 days. You can start your three months today, at the beginning of the next week or at the first day of the next month, but don’t put off setting writing goals. It is a prime tim management skill.

Three months is taken from the business model which uses quarters—three months—to implement plans. It is a useful way to set goals for three months. Three months both give you time to accomplish something and is not too long that you get distracted or discouraged.

What exactly is a goal?

A goal is a wish with a schedule and a deadline. If you don’t have a schedule and a deadline, what you have is a wish and not a goal. You are free to dawdle and pine away that your memoir is not getting written!

Let’s work at setting memoir-writing goals and planning to achieve one of these in the next three months.

[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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difficult painful memories

Difficult, Painful Memories Can Make a Memoir More Psychologically Astute.

We all arrive at adulthood with some difficult painful memories. In this post, I offer you procedures for dealing with and healing those memories.

First of all, writing about painful memories should not be an occasion to re-traumatize yourself. Stop for the moment if you feel overcome, but if you feel ready to write about a painful time, begin by writing all the details of the memory. Details need not be significant. If there was a cup of coffee on the table, mention it. You will find that little details help bring your memory back.

Yes, difficult, painful memories are disturbing.

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fear of revealing too much

Banish Fear of Revealing Too Much: Be a Bigger Presence in Your Memoir

The fear of revealing too much of ourselves in the memoir we are writing can be paralyzing.

We wonder: “What will people say? How will people react to what I am revealing?” So…

We hold back in our writing. We stop ourselves from personal revelation, from sharing secrets.

The fear is founded—it’s not always a friendly world out there. And, of course…

[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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commit to finishing your memoir

Commit to finishing your memoir

Today, I am offering you a dynamite coaching session. If you read through this post and check the links, you will have an experience that will set you up for success—when you commit to finishing your memoir.

Ahead of you is a week available to make progress on your memoir. By next week at this time, will you have written an encouraging number of pages on your memoir or…

Will you be regretting the week, saying, “Well, you know how it is…life got in the way! Ha ha!”

The choice of results is yours to make.

How are you going to use the coming week? Will you “try” to use it well – and find on Friday that you have let so much get in the way that you wrote very little in a week’s time? Or…

[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

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