You Don’t Have to Rush To Complete a Memoir
Writers will sometimes tell me that they are blocked and can’t seem to get back into writing. I have a surprising answer for them: don’t write just now to complete a memoir. It’s ok to be stalled for a while.
Let me give you a little scene in which I came to the viability of this conclusion.
One summer when I was serious about gardening, I went away on a late June trip. It was a fun vacation with my family, but the trip fell at a time when the garden seriously needed daily weeding, hoeing, and watering. As you can imagine, when I returned home, I found my garden overrun with weeds. The vegetables that I had so carefully planted were just about choked out, so I was, to say the least, challenged seeing the overgrown mess of weeds.
Rather than tackle the job immediately, however, which would certainly have been reasonable, I made a counter-intuitive decision: I spent time across several days just sitting on the edge of the garden, envisioning how I wanted the various parts to look once my work of cleaning up was done, imagining the lovely vegetables I would have.
Action will come.
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Write to the End: Complete Your Book Manuscript
A Suggestion on How to Complete Your Book Manuscript
May I present a surprise blocking solution to complete your book manuscript: don’t write just now.
Learn how to continue writing to the end.
Here is an example of what I mean: one summer when I was serious about gardening, I went away on a late June trip. It was a fun vacation with my family, but the trip fell at a time when the garden seriously needed daily weeding, hoeing, and watering. As you can imagine, when I returned home, I found my garden overrun with weeds. The vegetables that I had so carefully planted were just about choked out, so I was, to say the least, challenged seeing the overgrown mess of weeds.
Rather than tackle the job immediately, however, which would certainly have been reasonable, I made a counter-intuitive decision: I spent time across several days just sitting on the edge of the garden, envisioning how I wanted the various parts to look once my work of cleaning up was done, imagining the lovely vegetables I would have.
Action will come.
After three days of on-again, off-again scrutinizing and visualizing, my time for action had come.
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9 Ideas to Help You Finish Your Memoir
When your writing is stalled and you find it difficult to finish your memoir, turn to your writing journal for help. The following are suggestions for what you might ask yourself in your writing journal. They are taken from the How to Write to the End—Eight Strategies to Deal With Writer’s Block, a book on successfully dealing with writer’s block. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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How to pick up and finish your memoir at last
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