How to structure your memoir is today’s Monday Focus topic. Read on to learn how. Your story may begin as a formless collection of vignettes and stories. You may be writing as memories come to you. That is not a bad way to start to write. Spontaneity taps into the unconscious. But, your stories must not remain without an organizing principle. When you structure your memoir, you give it the backbone your readers want and need! Your memoir calls for structure to make as forceful a statement as it can make. Eventually, after you have written awhile, you will likely (more…)

Today is Monday, and it’s a great day to write a bit on your memoir! This must-do memoir-writing task asks: how much do you really know and do you have to tell everything you know? That is the challenge of writing the truth. Memory is often false, flattering, and failing. This makes telling the truth harder than it might have seemed firsthand. ~ You may never have known the truth. From the get-go, you may have been guessing. Guessing is sometimes necessary and has its rightful place in memoir writing but guess as little as possible and as a last (more…)

Today, I am urging you to sit back and enjoy this virtual memoir tour in which I read an excerpt read from my memoir French Boy/A 1950s Franco-American Childhood. Here’s some necessary background: I did not learn English until I went to grade school. My brother had preceded me in school where he had learned to speak English. While this excerpt can be thought of as a cute story, I included it in my memoir because it supports the necessity of bilingual education. This sound pedagogy is too often under attack! My own life was greatly impacted by the thoughtful (more…)

Today’s focus reminds you that your stories take place in some context. This is the setting of your story. There are two general sorts of settings. the physical setting that is tangible the abstract setting that consists of family, culture, and the era, etc. This setting tends to be ethereal. Some of the writers I have worked with failed to appreciate that they grew up in a setting that is different from the one in which other people may have been raised. Perhaps you grew up in a suburb and feel that there is nothing to say about that as (more…)

DL: this post—Three Pillars of Starting a Memoir Right—introduced a YouTube video which turned out to be the most popular of all my videos. Today, I would like to share both this post and the video. If you haven’t done so already, please share the post and the video and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

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Writing a memoir requires a lot of time and energy—but you can do it. You can succeed in writing a memoir. Many people just like you have succeeded in doing so already. Today I am offering you my three pillars of memoir writing.

I want to share a system with you for getting started on writing a memoir. I call it the three pillars of memoir writing.

As with so many projects you might undertake, you can reinvent the wheel or you can plug into a system that has been shown to work. My Memoir Network has been helping people just like you to write personal and family stories since 1988 and our proven system can help you, too, to write a memoir.

The system that I have found to be best for launching new writers—and many practiced writers, too—has three parts to it—three pillars of memoir writing.

1. When writing a memoir, create a memory list. It’s a strong part of the pillars of starting a memoir right

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In almost everything you do in life or in writing, pacing ranks right up there in importance. The tortoise knew how to pace himself and won the race. The hare, on the other hand, needed to view this post before setting out on the race which he eventually lost despite the gift of speed nature had given him! Pacing your memoir is generally an acquired habit. Pacing requires some planning and getting used to. The tortoise understood this and took off at a slow but steady pace. Long-distance runners pace themselves for an eventual victory at the finish line. They (more…)

Today is Monday, and it’s a great day to write a bit on your memoir! Keep the reader interested by using plotting whenever you can, but you don’t need to go gaga about plot—just include enough. Remember: you are not writing a thriller. Exactly what makes an action interesting is evidently subjective. What might interest an older, retired woman dedicated to promoting social action is likely to be utterly boring to the teenage boy who spends all his free time—and some time when he should be studying and doing his homework—playing basketball. Yet, both would insist that a story needs to be (more…)

Understanding “theme” and its role in your memoir is another core task that will both simplify and clarify your message—i.e., your theme. Your theme is perhaps what has motivated you to start your memoir project. There is likely something you want to say about life—your life. Your theme can also be called your message. The theme can be lofty (strive for virtue) or it can be trite (life is hard). Theme drives your story and colors your narrative. Everyone writes with some hope of getting a message across. But here’s the risk of trying to get a message to the reader: you can (more…)

It was 2016, and I was in what I thought of as the very last days of the memoir writing process and polishing A Sugary Frosting / A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage, the early lifestory of my deceased spouse, Martha Blowen. It was a time to make sure I had written what I wanted to write and to check grammar and spelling before it went out to a copy editor. I had promised Martha that I would write her stories so that our grandchildren would know something about her. In May 2015, I began gathering the (more…)