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.
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.
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?”
22 Memoir-Writing Goals to Jumpstart your Memoir Writing
Do you find yourself wandering along with your memoir writing and not achieving your memoir-writing goals? Do you have a sense that you might have accomplished a bit more writing than you have?At regular intervals, it is traditional to review how the past went for you and to recommit to goals for yourself for the […]
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, […]
Slow Writing is the Literary Relative of Slow Cooking
With all the blog posts I have read about learning to write faster—I have even heard of “how to write a book in a weekend, I want to take a moment to re-emphasize the value of writing slowly and carefully. Perhaps, what I would like to stop a moment to ponder is the literary relative […]
Down to Basics: Vignettes, Scenes, and Dialogs
Basic units of memoir writing: Vignettes, scenes, and dialogues are at the core of any memoir. Here are some ideas for writing them more quickly and elegantly.