A Road Map for Your Writing Journey with The Memoir Network
Writing has a series of stages and, like all long-term projects, it has more effective processes and less effective ones.
How to distinguish between the one and the other when you are new to writing a long piece?
Here’s the first stage which I call Planning. It consists of…
1. Getting the “lay of the land.”
This overview of The Memoir Network will get you quickly to where you need to be to write your best memoir. Take a moment to review this page to ascertain you are making best use of your time and of the resources we offer. Then come back to finish this note.
2. Reading and studying each of the Writing Guides.
Commit to studying the Writing Guides as they come to you every two weeks. We call them “a workshop in print” because they provide an opportunity to learn so much about how to write and how to think of yourself as a writer.
Because you are a member of The Memoir Network, the Writing Guides come to you free. Make sure that they show up in your email inbox and not in your spam or junk box—they are anything but!
You may come to The Memoir Network with some writing experience and so you may undervalue the worth of the Writing Guides to your development. Let me say they provide an in-depth course that will prove developmental to anyone.
Memoir writing has its own distinctive requirements and, like all disciplines, it benefits greatly from study, practice and repetition.
Read and study the Writing Guides and then read and study them again. And…
Print them out and place them in a three-ring binder where you can access them easily. In that way, you get to read and study them again.
Repetition is the basic to all mastery.
Assessing early on the level of your memoir-writing education that will bring you satisfaction can be a help to you as you plan your writing future.
CLICK HERE for Memoir Goals – How to Set One That’s Right for You
3. Reading memoirs and memoir how-to
There are many excellent writing books you can read at this stage. I will simply suggest one that I am intimate with: Turning Memories Into Memoirs / A Handbook for Writing Lifestories.
This is a grandaddy of memoir books as it was first published in 1992 and has proven its value over the years as it has appeared in three editions and seven printings. After reading that flagship book, any book in the memoir store will serve you well.
Having some theoretical knowledge of writing will prove invaluable in directing you to write the best memoir you are capable of. Checkout our other titles—both print and audio.
4. Memory listing
The Memory List is a mainstay. It will facilitate your writing in a way that will have you thinking of it as a “magic bullet.”
Try our Memory List Question Book 101 or our Write Great Memory Lists 101.
5. Scheduling your success
Create a daily and long-term writing schedule. What gets listed and dated gets done. We have an on-line course to help you to get your use of time on your side.
6. Understanding your basics—at last.
The Memoir Education area is an excellent free area where you will access much that will help you speed up your journey to your memoir’s publication, but sometimes the best thing you can do is to stop and get the basics under control.
Are you writing from a position of feeling you are faking it or struggling? That your current “success” is due to writing your favorite stories, the ones you have already shared many times? But you cringe when you think of all those other stories you need to write—and then you cringe even more when you think of organizing them into an interesting and meaningful memoir!
Do you remember being in school and not doing well at a particular subject? It might have been math or history or physics. Every month, you seemed to be slipping back, or if you were keeping your grades up, you realized it was all due to memory and not to understanding. One day, you resolved to review—essentially start over again—from the beginning of the semester. Slowly, you went through what the teacher presented and what was assigned in September. Then you did this for October, etc. Eventually, even if the subject didn’t become your favorite, it began to make sense. You also began to notice your grade rise as did your sense of satisfaction.
What to do if the same is true of your memoir writing?
To accelerate your writing progress, perhaps you need to give yourself a break to review and practice the basics of memoir writing. We have a ten-week online course to assure that you finally really, really get to write successfully.