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. […]
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 2
The following is the second installment of a three part series on the use of myths and archetypes in memoir writing. In the first part of Your Life as a Myth, I wrote about both archetypal patterns in general and about the martyr archetype. In today’s post, I write about the orphan and the prince-left-at-the-pauper’s-door. […]
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 […]
Going Beyond Family Myths to What Really Happened
Family myths aren’t always true. Your family myths may be stories your people choose to tell about themselves regardless of what really happened. Myths are stories we tell about how the world seems to us to be organized. Most of us are familiar with the religious myths Greeks and Romans told as they sought to […]
Use this instead of a writing prompt…
As readers of the blog know, I’m not a great fan of using a writing prompt. Sure, they get you to writing something and many will insist, “Writing something is better than writing nothing…” (more…)
Use an archetype of your experience to revive your memoir
Can an archetype of your experience refocus your memoir? One begins a memoir with a sense of the uniqueness of the story. “It simply has to be told,” you realize excitedly. “The world needs to hear about this.” Then as you write week after week, month after month, and sometimes year after year, that uniqueness […]
Should You Write With An Audience in Mind?
While some people decide to write a memoir according to structure—healing memoirs, investigative memoirs, etc—as I wrote in a previous post, others write with an audience in mind. (Writing with structure in mind often calls for writing with audience in mind, also.) Sometimes the audience is of specific people but many other writers, while they […]
When You Must Have The Photos You Don’t Have/How To Journal Without The Photos, Part II
The Memory List will suggest topics to write about, but what follows is additional tips you can use when you don’t have the photos. (more…)