Going Deeper in a Memoir: Look at “Life’s Failed Contracts”
This post is about going deeper in a memoir, deeper even than you thought you could go when you started. This may be hard, but take a look at the contracts with life we make and the terrible disappointment that inevitably comes from making them. All of us at some time or other have made such a contract with life—in fact, we make them over and over again until we finally grow up and become present to the unfolding reality. [Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]
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Vivid Characters Are Essential in a Memoir
Why Creating Vivid Characters is Essential
The people in your story are your characters. It is your task as memoir writer to bring vivid characters to the attention of your readers. You must use descriptive writing to present believable characters. Without other people, our lives and memoirs risk becoming dull. Although ideas are pivotal for many individuals, relationships are even more commanding. We are intrigued with who other people are and how they function. “Who’s that? What are they doing? Where did they come from?” These are the questions we want answered. To write a strong story, capitalize on this interest.
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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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Your Memoir: Write with Your Audience in Mind
This video is about niche writing and how to write with your audience in mind.
Many writers of memoir do not write keep their audience in mind.
It is perhaps inevitable that writers indulge time in a certain fantasy that their book will appeal to a large audience and be popular. Unless you are already famous—like Michelle Obama or Harry Windsor—or writing about an experience that was in itself very well known—a major flood or a nuclear disaster, for instance, your book is not likely to interest a large audience that would propel it into a best seller status.
Look for your Niche: Write with Your Audience in Mind
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Writing Hooks to Open a Paragraph or Chapter
“How do I start a chapter so that it has writing hooks that capture the reader’s interest?” you ask.
In this post, I give you three surefire ways to open a chapter or even the whole of your memoir. You’ll use one of these writing hooks time after time.
These three methods involve creating curiosity in your reader. This curiosity via writing hooks is easy for you to ignite so that your reader will want to read your story.
The first of the writing hooks
The first technique is to start with a conversation, but you must start with the second half of that conversation and not the first part.
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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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