You can write a memoir! When you are facing a challenging undertaking, it is wise to seek help. If you were attempting to run a marathon, you would study up on the endeavor and be sure you are doing things right. Perhaps you would join a running club or a website that offers you a programmed course. You would talk to others who have run marathons and perhaps hire a trainer. How about if you undertake to write a memoir? While some people do succeed at writing an interesting and meaningful memoir on their own, the fact is most people need (more…)

You Can Evoke Emotions in Your Readers. Here’s How. Instilling your memoir with enough emotion to stir up a response from your readers is do-able. It is undeniably one of the most important results an author must set out to achieve. A memoir seeks to move a reader and without evoking emotions, a memoir cannot move a reader. The beauty of writing is, of course, that you have a great freedom of approach, but there are some basic tips and techniques that, if well implemented, will make it much easier to breathe some emotions into your memoir. The subject of (more…)

For other posts in the My Eye Fell Into the Soup series, Click Here. Wanting to Run Away From Cancer November 10, 2006 Denis: So very hard. Terror. Wanting to run away—but there’s no “where” to run to. Some of the office work must continue. It seems like such an irrelevant thing to do, but there are deadlines our clients have invested in, deadlines that keep revenues coming. If Martha’s cancer crisis lasts for a long time, we will need the income. I have made a list of a few things that must get done, and in the early morning, (more…)

In a previous article, I highlighted four business memoirs that I helped bring to life. Each book was a significant one not only because of its subject matter but also because of its length. Each business memoir ranged from 300 to 400 pages, making them into hefty accounts of lives well lived. How do you go about writing your business memoir? In this post, I would like to show you the process of writing your business memoir with a co-writer/ghostwriter. It’s probably safe to say most people who are gifted at business are generally not as gifted in writing. There (more…)

Over the years, I have had the pleasure to collaborate on a number of memoirs which highlight the lives of men and women who have attained a significant result in their work life. Why would somebody want to write a business memoir? People write business memoirs for some of the same reasons people write any other kind of memoir. People want to honor the world from which they sprang. Sylvester Myers, a black man from West Virginia, wrote From Coal Fields to Oilfields and Beyond because he wanted to give witness to how a black man came from modest background (more…)

Steps for turning a journal into a memoir

I have been slowly revising my latest book My Eye Fell Into the Soup. This book is the first of a two-book set depicting the two years that Martha and I lived with her cancer illness. I have described some of the writing process elsewhere.

There was a time when writing / organizing / revising this so-personal manuscript was difficult, very difficult, but that is no longer the case. When I was first working on My Eye Fell Into the Soup, I would take it up for a few days and then put it down for weeks.

Revision is not as emotionally draining as creation

Now 8 years after Martha’s death, I am doing in-depth revision and it has proven to be very technical. The feeling part is long past. There’s something about checking the clarity of antecedents to pronouns, about making sure that characters that are so familiar to me are sufficiently explained, about going to an internet dictionary to ascertain that my word choice is indeed the best choice that takes feeling out of the process.

Turning journals into memoirs: are revisions permitted?

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Martha kept a breast cancer diary, and we published it as her memoir. The following is excerpted from her memoir My Eye Fell Into the Soup. Additional excerpts have been published. Martha began writing a journal before I knew her, and she wrote consistently for the 31 years we were together. My own habit of writing a record of my life began in my early twenties—in 1970. We might have said, as did Anaïs Nin in the first volume of her published diary, “I needed to live, but I also needed to record what I lived.” Sometimes, usually on the (more…)

Martha Blowen, my partner in life and in work, died on August 18, 2008, from metastasized breast cancer. The following is from collated excerpts of journals we both kept at the time. (Before she passed away, she gave me permission to share her entries.) The memoir is called My Eye Fell Into the Soup, after a dream in which one of her eyes fell into a cauldron. She later interpreted this to mean she was not paying attention to her health. [This is written about elsewhere.] As with most people, I suppose, the cancer diagnosis was a shock. The italicized (more…)

DL: Martha Blowen, my partner in life and in work, died on August 18, 2008, from metastasized breast cancer. The following is from collated excerpts of journals we both kept at the time. (Before she passed away, she gave me permission to share her entries.) The memoir is called My Eye Fell Into the Soup, after a dream in which one of her eyes fell into a cauldron. She later interpreted this to mean she was not paying attention to her health. [This is written about elsewhere.] As with most people, I suppose, the cancer diagnosis was a shock. The (more…)

Writing your memoir is a marathon. Getting memoir writing help is valuable for strengthening your writing skills.

A Memoir is a Marathon. Can you do it?

By Denis Ledoux

Evoking Emotions in Your Readers

By Paul Bates

Wanting to run away from Cancer

By Denis Ledoux

Writing a business memoir can happen with a co-writer.

A Co-Writer Can Make a Business Memoir Happen

By Denis Ledoux

Business Memoir: What’s Special About Writing One?

By Denis Ledoux

Turning a Journal into a Memoir

By Denis Ledoux

I have been slowly revising my latest book My Eye Fell Into the Soup. This book is the first of a two-book set depicting the two years that Martha and I lived with her cancer illness. I have described some of the writing process elsewhere. There was a time when writing / organizing / revising […]