The Problem With Writing Prompts
Is there a problem with writing prompts? This is my issue with writing prompts: they tend to lead to isolated stories, stories that are searching for humor, searching to be shared with a group that is perhaps looking for entertainment. They are not, by and large, searching for meaning lost in the morass of your […]
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…)
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 […]
Your Memoir: an Arrest of Disorder
When I read the quote above, I did not have to make much of a leap to sense that the words “An arrest of disorder” apply to the task you and I undertake when we write memoir. More than anything perhaps, we want an arrest of disorder. Disorder seems to be everywhere in life. And […]
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 […]
Journal Writing for the Memoir Writer
Journal writing is an effective practice for the memoir writer. It is a spontaneous and generally free-flowing activity and so can be very helpful to you in loosening up both your thinking and your writing type (the two usually go together). Your journal is an opportunity to bypass the familiar rules that govern much of […]
Writing About Difficult Times in a Memoir
Writing about difficult times in a memoir is necessary. As I have thought of Mary, I have wondered how I would write this life. It does not seem, form my outside perspective, to have been an easy one. (more…)