Your Memoir: Write with Your Audience in Mind
Before you start your memoir, write with your audience in mind by answering your readers’ questions. How do you do that? Try this exercise. (more…)
Writing Hooks to Open a Paragraph or Chapter
How do you start a chapter with writing hooks that capture the reader’s interest? Try these 3 methods create curiosity in your reader! (more…)
Self-Editing Tips for Memoir Writers
Follow these self-editing tips to save time (and mistakes!) on your memoir manuscript before you send it to a professional editor. (more…)
Don’t Worry About a Thing / Katherine Sullivan
Denis Ledoux: At The Memoir Network, we had the pleasure of working with Katherine Sullivan for several years as she edited her memoir, Don’t Worry About a Thing, with one of our editors, Frances King, and focused on book production with Sally Lunt. Because of her insightful articulation of her life experience, I am delighted […]
Too Much Backstory–Are you making memoir writing more difficult than necessary?
When you overwrite a story by stuffing it with backstory—and many writers seem to want to tell their entire story in what ought to be a vignette—you disrespect chronology and drama and the reader’s patience. (more…)
9 Tips for a Fast Start Writing Your Memoir
To help you to get a fast start writing and to write your memoirs more prolifically–and even bring them to a finish in the form of a published memoir–I offer these nine suggestions. They are tried and true tips that bear repeating and repeating. (more…)
How Long Does It Take to Write a Memoir?
Sometimes, years after I’ve heard from someone that he is writing a memoir, I will connect with the writer again. Perhaps it’s three or four or five years later, but the writer is working on the same memoir. I don’t get it. So I ask politely, “What has snagged the memoir?” (more…)
How to Write a Memoir for a Broader Audience: 4 Tips
Would you like your memoir to attract a broader audience? While family and friends are a worthy readership for your memoir, are you one of those many writers who aspires a larger public? Writers will admit, if pushed, that they would enjoy a public response to their efforts. Your story can appeal to strangers—if you […]
Writing Feelings into Your Memoir
How to write feelings into your memoir is a rather important topic. Recently on the Forum, David wrote about not accessing the feeling side of his memories, of writing a memoir that, if I am understanding him right, was all details and facts. Below is my response which can serve as a stand alone article, […]