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Teach, Coach, Edit, and Ghostwrite Memoirs

Before you head down to the blog, I want to take a moment to tell you about how I became a Memoir Professional and began to teach, coach, edit and ghostwrite for people from around the world.

One day in 1989, I stood outside a conference room, listening to the chatter inside. I had been invited to speak to a group of older people about What Became of Them, my then-new book of short autobiographical fiction. Little could I know that I was pausing before walking into my future! How could I suspect I would teach, coach, edit, ghostwrite memoirs for the next decades.

After my presentation, I asked members of the audience to share their personal and family stories which my stories had been evoked. The outpouring of memories was truly amazing and that led the group leader to ask if I would be willing to lead members of the group in a memoir writing workshop.

The rest, as they say, is history—a delightful history that I have been privileged to live.

You can succeed as a Memoir Professional

If you are here on this blog archive, you must be interested in exploring how you, too, can become a Memoir Professional. Whether you are just starting out or have already done this memoir work, there is much here to support you to be successful—critically and financially—as a Memoir Professional.

When I began to offer the Turning Memories Into Memoirs® workshop in 1989, I already had many years of high school and university teaching behind me. I hold a master’s degree in education. With this background, under the auspices of grants from the Maine Humanities Council, I developed the first workshops that evolved into the curriculum that led to my success. Subsequently, I began to teach, coach, edit, and ghostwrite memoirs. So can you.

As a Memoir Professional, you will wear many hats: that of writing teacher, lecturer, businessperson, and publicist—and perhaps that of coach, editor, and ghostwriter. You will assist people from all walks of life to access the writing skills they need to make their lifestories as effective and as successful as they hoped them to be when they came to you.

Denis Ledoux’s Memoir Professional materials are an excellent, comprehensive training focused on how to start and operate a memoir business successfully.

—Robin Waldron, Memoir Professional
The Write Source, Franklin, Indiana


A rewarding venture: teach, coach, edit, ghostwrite memoirs

In this process, you will also be helping yourself to grow emotionally and psychologically as you engage in the writing process of the men and the women who will come to you. Because you are their teacher—or perhaps you are serving as their coach, editor, or ghostwriter, you will know them in a very special and rewarding way.

The articles below will help you to succeed at this important work as you teach, coach, edit, and ghostwrite memoirs.

There are more resources in our Memoir Store to help you succeed. You will find that they have been designed to jumpstart your success—financially and critically.

Memoir Professional Blog Posts

Four Paths to Profit for Your Small Business Success

Too many solo-preneurs and small business people do not think through the most lucrative paths to profit by which their companies make money. In so not doing, they leave money on the table.

How do you find these paths to profit?

1. Take a good look at your existing product and service line.

What is the person who has bought these likely to want in addition to these? Will they be able to achieve their most sought-after goal after using these products or services? Or, will your product or service only help them with part of their goal? Listen to what people are telling you as they purchase your product. What is their ultimate goal? The person who wishes to self-publish a memoir will not be satisfied with help in producing a manuscript because that is only a part of his/her goal. (more…)

Grow Your Memoir Writing Based Company – Don’t Set a Fixed Price

Always tell clients that you don’t know how much a long-term project will cost. Tell them it will almost certainly cost more than they expect. This article takes the anxiety out of setting a price for you and the client as you can grow your memoir writing-based company.

While clients will want to know how much they can expect a project to cost, and that is reasonable on their part, the fact is they don’t know the scope of the project they wish you to assist them with. Below are suggestions for charging for your writing services. (more…)

4 Memoir Business Strategy Steps to Avoid Frustration

Do you have a memoir business strategy plan? As a group, we memoir professionals are idea people. Does this sound familiar? We start projects with great enthusiasm, work assiduously for a while, and then get begin to get bored.  We lack a business strategy or plan for our success.

How do we break the predictable cycle of enthusiasm to boredom? How can we find the energy to finish what we have started? How do we cope with the day-to-day work of running the business when it becomes tedious? To escape, we find ourselves planning new projects. Wow, we’re excited once again–for a while. (more…)

Teach A Writing Workshop with Two Minds

You need two minds to teach a writing workshop.

As you teach a writing workshop, you must always experience the session’s writing with two minds because you are always filling two functions. You are a recipient of the story who is enjoying and being influenced by the story being shared and you are always the teacher whose responsibility is to shape the workshop experience for the group according to a bigger-picture plan. (more…)

Grow Your Memoir Or Writing-Based Company

What action can you take to grow your memoir or writing-based company? Are there steps you can effect today that will change how well you will be compensated for your memoir work? Start with the five steps below for a strong foundation.

I think there definitely are—whether you are trying to earn an income from memoir work or whether you would simply like to earn a bit of extra cash. (more…)

Teaching a Memoir Workshop – Tackle the Hard Parts and Win Accolades

This post ran in a slightly different version at freelancewriting.com.

When you are teaching a memoir workshop, easy is not always best.

In teaching a memoir writing workshop, the teacher’s task is to help individuals to go through and beyond two kinds of barriers to their writing: the technical and the psychological blocks that keep them from success. Our job is to facilitate our participants’ arrival at a point where they are able to “own” their stories, to acknowledge their lifestories as they are and to accept themselves as they are.

A technical barrier to grasping the meaning of the work might be a writer’s lack of familiarity with using varied or complex sentence structure. A psychological barrier would be a writer’s reluctance to search out and tell the truth of the story, or to identify and sustain the persona in which s/he writes. (more…)