How to Make Writing Easier
Why is writing so hard? Why does what you want to write become so difficult the moment you sit down to write? Where are the words you need to convey the excitement or the dread or the anticipation. You are shocked to realize that what appears on the computer screen has no pizzazz! This is […]
Organize Your Memoir: Life Phases
Life phases are one way in which you can organize your memoir. Life phases are the emotional and psychological cycles or phases that have marked your life. They are a great tool to give depth and cohesion to your memoir. (more…)
Point of View in a Memoir, Part 1
Point of View In a Memoir Is Important. I recently completed my mother’s memoir, We Were not Spoiled. It was a work of love that took me many years to bring to closure as I had other work to do to support myself that filled my days. Finally, she got to be quite a bit […]
Avoid Writing a Chronology: 4 Tips
Is writing a chronology of a life enough? Dates and facts are necessary to life writing in the same way route numbers are necessary to maps. It’s not only that dates and facts provide interesting information but that they keep your readers on the right path as they make their way through your life story. […]
Is Writing a Memoir Important?
Let’s start with a basic question: is writing a memoir important? Okay, why do we tell so many stories? Stories fascinate us all our lives. As children, we loved to be told fairy tales and to hear, time after time, the tales our parents told us about what we did and said when we were […]
Do you need action in a memoir?
Action in a memoir is essential—even if internalized! Action in a memoir usually happens in the usual place—outside the memoir narrator. That is easy to grasp: “The boy ran by.” When you use flashback scenes in which you remember someone and what they did way back then—these are not interiorized actions, these are memories of […]
The Role of Passion in Your Memoir
Understanding the role of passion in your memoir will help you to access the emotional side of your writing more easily and enable you to stay longer and more deeply in the memoir conversation. Understanding will add balance between your will to write and the passion that prompted you to write in the first place. […]
What to Write About in a Memoir
“What to write about in a memoir?” is a basic question. The right answer will keep you writing and the wrong may lead you to believe that writing a memoir is to hard and not for you. My answer to what to write about in a memoir is always to write about something important to […]
One Reason to Write a Memoir
I wouldn’t suggest that one ought to write for one’s descendants. That is not a good reason to write a memoir. One ought to write for one’ self. Your descendents may or may not benefit. I certainly believe that a function of memoir is to educate/inform but one can only be educated by another when […]