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Notice Gaps In Your Collection of Photos?

As you organize your photos for your albums, you notice gaps in what you photographed–in other words, the photos you don’t have. You remember events that you didn’t even photograph at all– perhaps you weren’t there or perhaps you were too busy to take photos.

You can ask around to find if anyone took photos you might have copies of. And what if no one has photos to record a time or a person in your life that you simply must memorialize? What to do? (more…)

Our right thinking about memoir writing projects or our right talking about them can lead to success or failure. In this post I want to alert you to how 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. 1. I’m just not thinking about memoir writing right today so I’m better off not writing. Perhaps this means “I’m not producing brilliant insights?” Or perhaps this means “I’m afraid of being superficial.” This thought is perhaps associated with perfectionism. Regular—even if not brilliant—writing (more…)

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…)

Fiction and memoir writing—what’s the difference? I have been reading a memoir that has been doing well here in Maine (it’s by an excellent Maine writer)–I can’t vouch for its reach in the rest of the country. It was published by Houghton Mifflin Harcourt so I can only presume it is receiving support elsewhere.

It’s an interesting book, very well-written in terms of style and organization, but my nagging doubt (more…)

Keeping The Memoir Writing Conversation Going Can Be Difficult Unless You keep Yourself Motivated. Without motivation, you will stop writing. Period. Here are suggestions I hope you will find helpful to “keep your nose to the grindstone.” 1. Read professional writing journals. Poets and Writers is good motivation from cover to cover. Other people read The Writer’s Digest or The Writer. I receive the Maine Writers and Publishers Alliance e-newsletter—The Peavy—every week. It’s a membership newsletter and comes chock full of news about what other writers are doing, readings schedules, and announcements of book publications. If you have an ounce of (more…)

Questions On Memoir Writing

The following interview with me appeared in the Nov. 19, 2010, Oral History Education blog, and was later published in 2013.  Over the years, these questions on memoir writing still rank as some of the most common questions I receive, and I have to say, the answers haven’t changed either–enjoy!

1. How did you get started in your profession of memoir writing?

I started writing autobiography-based fiction. Some of these have won literary awards, and, while I like that, I feel the most satisfaction from helping readers who are stimulated to tell their own stories after reading my work. This happened in 1988 when my first collection of short fiction, What Became of Them, came out.

After I had read for a group of senior citizens, I was overwhelmed by their eagerness to share their stories with me and each other. That’s how I began helping people to write their memoirs.

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Many writers suffer from writer’s block, yet few understand its possible causes. Memoir writing certainly has its difficulties which can create it. There are a number of reasons that contribute to difficulty in writing. 1. In memoir writing, “writer’s block” can be the result of dealing with uncomfortable material. Perhaps you haven’t admitted to yourself the importance of your topic or you are not yet telling the truth about it. What are you evading? What is the worst consequence that could happen to you if you write this story honestly? 2. Perhaps you are writing your story from someone else’s (more…)
Get More Show and Less Tell in Your Memoir There are ways to rework your stories so that you can minimize “telling” and maximize “showing.” The biggest “telling” offense against more show and less tell is perhaps the overuse of descriptive adjectives and adverbs. Adjectives and adverbs often tell the reader what to feel or how to interpret the story instead of evoking that feeling and interpretation. While adjectives may seem to add color and movement and insight to a scene or description, they are often simply a lazy way to write. This is especially true of descriptive adjectives like beautiful and kind (more…)

Editor’s note: We came across this guest article published by Justine Kuntz back in 2013, and were so taken with her story of retiring to memoir writing that we decided to publish it again. We hope you enjoy it as much as we did and that it inspires reflections on your own life and memoir.

Eight years ago as a retirement project for church, I introduced memoir writing at St. Gregory’s Episcopal Church in Boca Raton, FL. Earlier, after twenty-two years of teaching English, I chose to flee the regimen of teaching and accepted a position in the business world. The new position required learning more about computers than what I had used in the classroom but that turned out to be a blessing in disguise when I fully retired nine years later. While in business, I had missed teaching, so developing a curriculum for memoir writing made me feel at home once again and helped ease me into retirement and doing what I loved most—teaching.

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Don't let writer's blok stop you

Thinking About Memoir Writing

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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

Motivation to Complete A Memoir

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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…)

publish a book

Ten Questions On Memoir Writing

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(The following interview appeared in the Nov. 19, 2010, Oral History Education blog.) How did you get started in your profession of memoir writing? I started writing autobiography-based fiction. Some of these have won literary awards, and, while I like that, I feel the most satisfaction from helping readers who are stimulated to tell their […]