Show Don’t Tell Your Characters, or Don’t Describe Your Characters–Show Them!
The old adage “Show, don’t tell your characters!” is as true as ever. It is one technique that will always improve your writing. I admit that there is some great writing that makes a precedent for “tell,” but as a rule, “show” is more effective.
1. Your computer and its keyboards are your movie camera. Show Don’t Tell Your Characters.
In a film, a director ( that’s you!) doesn’t have an actor go on screen to tell the audience that someone is angry. Instead, he shows the character in a scene where anger is in action. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Five Tips for Avoiding Vagueness in Your Memoir
Avoiding vagueness in writing is something many writers struggle with.
When writing slips into vagueness, the reader reads and rereads the text and does not quite “get it.”
I’m sure this has happened to you. You are reading something and you find yourself wondering: “What’s the author trying to say? What’s going on here?”
Not a good place for an author to land a reader.
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10 Ways to Stop Writer’s Block
Why should writers have writer’s blocks? Do plumbers have plumber’s block? Do accountants have accountant’s block?
A block is simply a failure of process. A plumber lines up his pipes and couplings and begins to work. And an accountant takes her spreadsheets out and begins to analyze them.
Ways to Stop Writer’s Block
In the case of a writer, it is a failure of a writerly process or a professional approach to one’s work that gets dignified with the name of “writer’s block”.
I’m not one to give much credence to “writer’s block.”
I’ll grant that there are times when the “muse” seems to be absent and has wandered off someplace else, but you can draw the muse back by strategic inducements.
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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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12 Reasons People Quit Writing a Memoir
I have been asking myself what are the reasons people quit writing a memoir and how to help them persevere. I have drawn the following list from my experience with the people who have begun to work with me and then stopped writing.
The answers to why people quit are so varied! Here are some I have come up with as I have pondered the topic. Below is a list that contains both very valid reasons and some that I consider simply wimpy. If you find yourself harboring feelings that I bring up as triggers for quitting, I hope you will address them before they take hold of you.
Reasons people quit writing a memoir
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Self-Editing Tips for Memoir Writers
The self-editing tips I’m sharing with you in this post will save you a lot of time and mistakes! Whether you are self-editing as you write or are going through your manuscript one last time before sending it to a professional editor, you’ll find these tips to be super helpful for better self-editing.
While I am offering you the steps in a linear way—mentioning one thing and then another—in practice as you go through your manuscript, you’ll do well to be aware of all of these steps at one time. That is, you are looking to edit everything.
Of course, you will on various occasions perhaps slight one element of self-editing or another, but when you realize this, you can go back and re-edit.
Going through each of these self-editing tips on your manuscript will take a while. I even recommend that you do it several times and even perhaps a month or two in between times. What this does is distance you emotionally from your manuscript. When you return to it, you’ll read it as the reader rather than as the writer.
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9 Tips for a Fast Start Writing Your Memoir
Ever wish you had the secret of generating a fast way to fast start writing your memoir—or most any other book?
A proven way to start writing is to follow a set of steps that will help you get into the writing habit. When I wrote and published A Sugary Frosting / A Memoir Of A Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage, I appreciated the efficiency and effectiveness of my writing process all the more. A Sugary Frosting is the story of the first 20 years of my deceased wife’s life. She had written a number of her stories but died before completing a memoir. When I took up the task, I followed what I consider to be “best practices” of memoir writing.
Below I offer them to you to help you get a fast start and to write more prolifically—and even bring it to a finish in the form of a published memoir.
Here are my nine “best practices” for memoir writing. They are tried and true and bear implementing today.
1. Set up a regular writing time. This will get you a fast start writing your memoir.
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Writing Process Steps—Linger With Your Story
One of the writing process steps is to linger with your story. Many, and perhaps most, people write too fast. I don’t mean that they end up with a text characterized by sloppy grammar, spelling problems and chronology issues—although that may be the case, of course.
No, what I mean is that they push through the process of writing their stories much too quickly. They end up with only a part of the story they could have written had they lingered.
So many times in my workshops, I have found it easy to tell those manuscripts that have been lingered over from those that have not. As somebody’s face reveals Irish ancestry or Italian heritage, a piece of writing reveals its past.
There is a quality to a piece that has been rushed that is easily discernible to anyone who has learned to write more slowly. So…learn to linger with your story.
One of the essential writing process steps
1. When you don’t take the time to linger with your story, you generally are unable to feel the full import of your memoir.
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22 Memoir-Writing Goals to Jumpstart your Memoir Writing
Do you find yourself wandering along with your memoir writing and not achieving your memoir-writing goals? Do you have a sense that you might have accomplished a bit more writing than you have?
At regular intervals, it is traditional to review how the past went for you and to recommit to goals for yourself for the coming months. (A goal is a wish with action steps and a timeline.) These goals need to be written and reviewed periodically.
Studies have shown that people who set goals in writing have a better outcome vis-à-vis accomplishing what they set out to do. Here’s a report on one such study. (The famous Harvard goal-setting study so many of us have heard of apparently never happened, but the concept of goal setting is clearly important and is explored in the linked article.)