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The Memoir Writer’s Blog!

Perhaps you are not yet on a writing jag. It is early morning (or at least it is time for you to write so you are early in your writing for the day). You turn your computer on, sip your coffee or tea, wonder about your day and about what you might write. You could use a bit of writing motivation. You know you are going to write a portion of your memoir—or perhaps it is a memoir you are writing of one of your parents or of your spouse. Soon your RSS feed informs you there is a new post from The Memoir Writer’s Blog. You are not quite ready to start writing so you dawdle a bit and read the post. It is about technique—perhaps on beginning a section or perhaps about creating vivid character. Well, it makes sense and you decide to implement the suggestion. Or…

Perhaps you are feeling overwhelmed. You have been at this writing so long! Is it really worth continuing? You begin reading the day’s post and it is a piece of memoir, the piece about when my mother’s aunt left to go back to Canada and suddenly you realize how much you want to tell the story of your aunt who died when you were twelve and how you loved her and you begin to write that. It is out of sequence but you know you can connect it later to the rest of the story. Or perhaps, before you sit down to write, you turn to more of the stories of my mother—and are pleased to find so many excerpts from her memoir.  You want to see how I have handled her story or perhaps simply to live for a while in another era before you begin to write about your aunt. Or…

Perhaps you have been questioning whether you have enough skill in presenting action effectively and you turn to the categories of the blog and, sure enough, you find there a category labeled “action” under technique and you click on it. You discover several articles on how to create more effective action. In fact, you are reminded that action is not synonymous with “interesting” but that action like character and setting has to be better crafted. Or…

Perhaps it is not motivation or craft that is stopping you but the process itself. You have been having trouble with the pre-writing function and you check the blog categories and find several excellent articles on pre-writing and, before you do anything today, you read (or re-read) these articles on The Memoir Writer’s Blog. They ground you, and you move on to the writing you wish to accomplish today.

It is now clear to you that this blog, The Memoir Writer’s Blog, is an effective tool for you to learn to be a much better memoir writer. You turn to your spouse (or perhaps you are speaking to yourself) and say, “I’m getting a writing education from The Memoir Network’s blog. That’s why I turn to it whenever I commence to write.”

Then you forward a link to The Memoir Writer’s Blog to someone who is writing. You know the post you are alerting your friend to will have the same effect on him/her as it had on you.

So that’s how I hope you read The Memoir Writer’s Blog—as a way to create a context for you to delve into your memoir on a given day—today perhaps. Any one of the many posts can serve you as an entry point into the day’s creation.

What you’ll get

1. Regular, even daily, inspiration and motivation to write.

2. Education in both craft and process that will permit you to write the best memoir you are capable of.

I hope you won’t do this.

You can, of course, read The Memoir Writer’s Blog for entertainment, as a way of making a diversion for yourself so you don’t have to do the work that is the focus of The Memoir Writer’s Blog, but I hope you won’t do this.

We publish posts regularly on a variety of topics in The Memoir Writer’s Blog. Keep coming and keep checking the categories and tags for topics that will help you to succeed. Subscribe via the FOLLOW at the bottom right of the page where you find this entry. You will receive a notice of every new post.

In conclusion

Keep writing. Let this be the year you write and publish your memoir.

__________

successful memoir interview

8 Tips: How to Have a Successful Memoir Interview

A successful memoir interview will add depth to your memoir.

While you know much about your story, it is always beneficial to gather information from other sources to fill in the gaps. These sources can be formal research on the net or in a library or it can be reviewing letters and journals or talking with people who know parts of your story.

Here is some guidance on an important step that will ground your memoir. This step involves interviewing people.

In this post, I offer eight tips for making a successful memoir interview as part of your research.

1) For a successful memoir interview, plan enough time to be with your subject. 

 

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How to Develop a Memoir

Interview with Denis Ledoux French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood

DL: The following interview I conducted with myself is available to anyone wishing to reproduce it in a blog, on a website on in print media. We ask only that you let us know  you are using the piece.
Q. Can you tell our readers what French Boy is about and why you were impelled to write your book? What was driving you to spend the time, energy, and money to get this book out into the world?
A. I wrote impelled by a strong desire to record the life of my community—the Francophone Canadian-American community of New England. This is a book about life in Franco-America in the 1950s. It uses my life as an organizing principle. A good memoir is not only about the individual who is its presenting subject but it is about something bigger, about some whole that the memoir subject is part of. I want to celebrate our experience. I do not want the world to forget we were here.
 
Q. Can you tell us how long it took from the time you conceived the book to the time you had it published? How many years did you spend in active writing? Were there long breaks in between active writing periods? If so, what happened to get you writing again?

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pillars of a powerful memoir

Three Pillars of a Powerful Memoir

There is power in writing your story. Your memoir can transform you as it leads to understanding the energy in your life and ultimately making that energy work for you.

The three pillars of a powerful memoir I want to talk about are the old stand-bys of character, action, and setting. A story is not a journal entry. Unlike a journal, a memoir needs development.  Ranting and raving fit into a journal but not into a story—unless ranting and raving are in the dialog. Story has its own dynamics which in turn lead to their own conclusions. In writing your memoir, connect to your story as a literary form—literary here refers to in writing. There are requirements that go into the creation of an effective story—whether written or spoken. As mentioned before these are character, action, and setting.

Be Guided by These 3 Pillars of a Powerful Memoir When Writing Your Story

1. Your characters are the people in your story

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https://thememoirnetwork.com/french-boy-a-1950s-franco-american-childhood/

Press Release: French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood by Denis Ledoux

NOTE: You are invited to the book launch for French Boy! The links to attend live or via Zoom are at the end of this press release.

Re: French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood / Denis Ledoux, Soleil Press, 2024, 345 pages, photos, $19.95.

Contact: [email protected]

Release date: October 16, 2023

french boy book cover

“It was a surprise for me to discover as a child that French was not the majority language in Maine, let alone the US,” recalls Denis Ledoux of his Franco-American boyhood in his new memoir French Boy / A 1950s Franco-American Childhood. “I came to realize that my language and culture were marginal and not appreciated by the larger society.”

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publish a book

Writing with passion! How to Bring Passion into Your Story

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. ]

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publish a book

3 Decisions That Sustain Your Memoir Writing

I want to share with you three decisions you can make to help you to succeed more quickly and easily at memoir writing.

Over the last two decades, I have coached many, many writers—more writers than I can remember. In those years, I have seen some people soar with the experience—it’s as if they can do no wrong—while unfortunately, I have seen others coach with me for periods of time without making any apparent change or progress.

This experience has enabled me to come up with three decisions a person who wants to succeed at memoir writing must make. These decisions will help you to reach publication faster than you can without them.

1. You must resolve to commit to the discipline necessary to succeed.

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avoiding vaugueness

Five Tips for Avoiding Vagueness in Your Memoir

Avoiding vagueness in writing is something many writers struggle with.

When writing slips into vagueness, the reader reads and rereads the text and does not quite “get it.”

I’m sure this has happened to you. You are reading something and you find yourself wondering: “What’s the author trying to say? What’s going on here?”

Not a good place for an author to land a reader.

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how to write vividly

How to write vividly–Avoiding vagueness in writing

If you want to learn how to write vividly, use the following tips for avoiding vagueness in writing your memoir.

When a manuscript slips into a vagueness, the reader reads and rereads and does not quite “get it.”

“What’s the author trying to say here?” we ask ourselves. “What am I missing?”

Here are a few of my ideas as to why this may happen.

1. The author is not sure herself what she is trying to say. She has not lingered with this part of the story to extract from it the essence of her meaning. Once she has meaning, finding prose that might do justice to the expression of her feeling becomes easier.

Solution if this is you: journal around the story, look at your photos, take a walk to ruminate about the events you have written about, ask yourself, “What exactly am I trying to convey here? What do I really mean to say?”

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writer's block

10 Ways to Stop Writer’s Block

Why should writers have writer’s blocks? Do plumbers have plumber’s block? Do accountants have accountant’s block? 

A block is simply a failure of process. A plumber lines up his pipes and couplings and begins to work. And an accountant takes her spreadsheets out and begins to analyze them.

Ways to Stop Writer’s Block

In the case of a writer, it is a failure of a writerly process or a professional approach to one’s work that gets dignified with the name of “writer’s block”. 

I’m not one to give much credence to “writer’s block.” 

I’ll grant that there are times when the “muse” seems to be absent and has wandered off someplace else, but you can draw the muse back by strategic inducements. 

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