How to Organize Your Memoir: Four Ways
Eventually, after you have written awhile, you will likely have amassed a number of vignettes, story segments, and stories and wonder about how to best organize them into a coherent and interesting memoir. You will likely want to make a statement, o create a bigger picture of your story.
How will you do it? Well, one answer is that you will do it by how you organize your story. Below are four ideas to organize your memoir.
Remember: These suggestions do not refer to the sequence in which the stories are written but rather to how they can be ordered after they have been written.
Here are four ways you can organize your memoir.
1) Chronology
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Memoir Writing Needs Inner Work as well as Outer Work
Whether as a coach or as an editor, when I have engaged with writers, I have often found similar presenting problems— I don’t have time, I never had a good grammar education, I have so many stories to tell I don’t know which one to start with. Frequently, these “reasons” writers present for not writing […]
Turning a Journal into a Memoir
Steps for turning a journal into a memoir
I have been slowly revising my latest book My Eye Fell Into the Soup. This book is the first of a two-book set depicting the two years that Martha and I lived with her cancer illness. I have described some of the writing process elsewhere.
There was a time when writing / organizing / revising this so-personal manuscript was difficult, very difficult, but that is no longer the case. When I was first working on My Eye Fell Into the Soup, I would take it up for a few days and then put it down for weeks.
Revision is not as emotionally draining as creation
Now 8 years after Martha’s death, I am doing in-depth revision and it has proven to be very technical. The 
feeling part is long past. There’s something about checking the clarity of antecedents to pronouns, about making sure that characters that are so familiar to me are sufficiently explained, about going to an internet dictionary to ascertain that my word choice is indeed the best choice that takes feeling out of the process.
Turning journals into memoirs: are revisions permitted?
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Eight Reasons to Share the Inner You
Our lives are composed not only of facts and dates but also of dreams, expectations–realized or denied–and hopes. You are not alone in having lived an inner life. Others too have experienced much of what you felt and dreamed for yourself and are likely to identify with some, or even much, of what you say. […]
Three Tips For Creating an Effective Writing Schedule
It’s time to commit to creating an effective writing schedule.
You’ve already taken several steps in lifewriting. You have begun to write your stories and memories. Perhaps the summer got in the way of your perseverance or perhaps it was something else—an illness, a temporary job, travel. Now you need to recommit to memoir writing by creating an effective writing schedule for yourself.
Rather than think in the general terms of “I’ll write as much as I can” (who are we kidding here!), base your writing schedule on a specific time or a page quota.
1) Decide how much time per week you want (or have) to devote to writing schedule.
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Word Redundancies
As writers, words are our most-used tools. (Other important tools include punctuation, grammar, the visual aspect of a text layout.) Each of our tools, too, ought to be respected for their best use. Avoid word redundancies.
Writer’s Block Is Often Caused by Lack of Discipline
Some people successfully use the notion of writer’s block to convince friends and family that, while they’re real writers, they just happen not to be producing–but a person can do this only for a while. Remember: you can never successfully use writer’s block to get your stories written!
Four Tips for Writing a Better Memoir
To write a better memoir, make use of the core memory list. The extended memory list does not make value judgments about the quality of your memories. The core memory list, however, distinguishes between two sorts of memories— the important from the unimportant.
Your Subject—Where Write With Passion Starts
“What to write about in a memoir?” is a basic question. The right answer—which I believe is writing with passion—will keep you writing and the wrong may lead you to believe that writing a memoir is too hard and not for you.
My answer to what to write about in a memoir is always to write about something important to you—not what you think is important to others.
Why are you writing? What is it that you hope to get from this effort of creating a memoir? You are about to devote a lot of time and energy to this task. Be sure it is for reasons that will keep you writing with passion. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
“What to write about in a memoir?” is a basic question. The right answer—which I believe is writing with passion—will keep you writing and the wrong may lead you to believe that writing a memoir is too hard and not for you.
My answer to what to write about in a memoir is always to write about something important to you—not what you think is important to others.
Why are you writing? What is it that you hope to get from this effort of creating a memoir? You are about to devote a lot of time and energy to this task. Be sure it is for reasons that will keep you writing with passion. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]