Telling the Hard Truth in Your Memoir–Are You Holding Back?
Your memoir needs to tell the truth about life—yours—and sometimes that requires exposing yourself getting “naked.” Getting to the truth in memoir is not about being cruel but about adding meaning and depth to your life story.
Don’t Pass On Reaching A Larger Audience – 4 Tips
While family and friends are a worthy readership for your memoir, it is possible to reach a larger audience. Here are four tips to enable anyone to do so..
Before Sending a Manuscript To An Editor / Part 3: Time Sequencing and Flashbacks
A writer can tweak the use of time in a memoir to bring a manuscript to a higher level of finish before sending the piece off to a professional editor. In this section, I write about time sequencing: specifically, cause and effect sequencing and flashbacks.
Instead of A Writing Prompt – Five Tips for Creating a Memory List
People who are writing a memoir will sometimes say, “I want to write my stories but I have forgotten so many details. Is there any way I can get them back? Should I use writing prompts?” There is one tool above all others that makes the experience of life writing successful. That tool is not […]
How to Write a Significant Memoir
That our memoir is insignificant is about the last thing we memoir writers ever want to read about our magnum opus. How do we write a significant memoir? What separates a significant memoir from an insignificant one? I’ll give you a hint: it’s not fame it’s not the scope of the arena of the action. […]
Hemingway’s “One True Sentence” Can Save Your Memoir
A “one true sentence” can save your memoir. I have found the “one true sentence” effective in focusing both my own memoir writing and in the writing of people I have coached and edited.
Your Life as a Myth Part 3
The following is the third installment of a three-part series on Your Life as a Myth, using myths and archetypes in memoir writing. In this first post of Your Life as a Myth, I wrote about both archetypal patterns in general and about the martyr archetype. In the second post, I wrote about the orphan […]
Your Life as a Myth Part 1
In your life as a myth, we discuss myths as the stories we create to express how we perceive the world and life. How we live our lives is determined by the myths we live by, but our lives also reveal our myths to ourselves and to the world. What are your myths? Look at […]
Three Tips for Effective Memoir Pre-Writing
Before you begin to write your memoir, there are a number of non-writing tasks which you must undertake—this phase of compiling your lifestory is called memoir pre-writing, and it is essential to writing better stories. Pre-writing can include…