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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 coming months. (A goal is a wish with action steps and a timeline.) These goals need to be written and reviewed periodically.

Studies have shown that people who set goals in writing have a better outcome vis-à-vis accomplishing what they set out to do. Here’s a report on one such study. (The famous Harvard goal-setting study so many of us have heard of apparently never happened, but the concept of goal setting is clearly important and is explored in the linked article.)

22 Memoir-Writing Goals especially for you!

(more…)

DL: this post—Three Pillars of Starting a Memoir Right—introduced a YouTube video which turned out to be the most popular of all my videos. Today, I would like to share both this post and the video. If you haven’t done so already, please share the post and the video and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

_____

Writing a memoir requires a lot of time and energy—but you can do it. You can succeed in writing a memoir. Many people just like you have succeeded in doing so already. Today I am offering you my three pillars of memoir writing.

I want to share a system with you for getting started on writing a memoir. I call it the three pillars of memoir writing.

As with so many projects you might undertake, you can reinvent the wheel or you can plug into a system that has been shown to work. My Memoir Network has been helping people just like you to write personal and family stories since 1988 and our proven system can help you, too, to write a memoir.

The system that I have found to be best for launching new writers—and many practiced writers, too—has three parts to it—three pillars of memoir writing.

1. When writing a memoir, create a memory list. It’s a strong part of the pillars of starting a memoir right

(more…)

Don’t worry. This memoir-writing task does not call for drawing skills as you eschew creating memoir stick characters.

The term “stick character” refers to a drawing of a person by someone with no talent who draws lines for arms and legs. Stick Characters don’t entice the reader much and they don’t do justice to your people. You will do better without stick characters burdening your memoir. Develop your characters fully. Your characters are, after all, the people in your life. They are/were complex in life and ought to be complex in writing. Write them into your text clearly and forcefully. If you need help, there are many sources available for coaching and editing.

You can make your people (characters) more “real” by

  •     including both positives and negatives about them.
  •     letting your reader “hear” your people speak in dialog.
  •     using all five senses to describe your people.
  •     not being afraid to present contradictory views (from other characters).

 Review something you wrote recently and look for details you failed to include about that person. Perhaps you will choose to include something they did or how they walked or what they once said to you. In this way, page after page, you will make your characters more multi-dimensional.

In almost everything you do in life or in writing, pacing ranks right up there in importance. The tortoise knew how to pace himself and won the race.

The hare, on the other hand, needed to view this post before setting out on the race which he eventually lost despite the gift of speed nature had given him!

Pacing your memoir is generally an acquired habit.

Pacing requires some planning and getting used to. The tortoise understood this and took off at a slow but steady pace.

Long-distance runners pace themselves for an eventual victory at the finish line. They don’t opt to be head-of-the-line on mile five or ten or fifteen. They know to settle on a speed for each portion of the race so that they can finish first.

How do we apply the concept of pacing to your memoir structure?

Every memoir is, of course, different but there are some basics that everyone needs to master and apply.

In your memoir, you are trying to say something you consider to be important. In many cases, it is this important message that has led you to start to write. Most of us don’t write memoir to make a lot of money—that would be nice but it’s not likely. We write to share an experience.

But, something happens in the writing. Perhaps you become entranced with an event that now seems particularly interesting to you. Why not explore it, you think and you soon go off on a tangent. Important stuff perhaps but not central to this particular memoir.

“But this is important to understanding my story,” you say.

Perhaps you are writing about a business failure and what you learned from it. Your wife, or perhaps it was your husband, was your partner. So, who was this partner of yours who was also your spouse?

You begin to write about when you were dating. How your world changed then. And you go on for 25 pages. Very interesting stuff, very romantic—at least to you and the truth is it has little to do with your business failure.

What we need to read about is your business. Unless your spouse was a direct cause of the collapse, let’s leave the courting out of this story.

While it may be appropriate to write about why you believed you and your spouse were a great team to begin a business until you realized it wasn’t so great a team. Perhaps you both had the same strengths and the same weaknesses so entire parts of the business were not being taken care of.

Writing about your courtship is waste of memoir space, a failure of pacing your memoir. As I have expounded elsewhere, kill your little darlings, your favorite stories that don’t belong in your memoir.

Your memoir demands appropriate pacing.

We read memoirs for many reasons. One of course, is to have a “good read.” But, I also believe a crucial aspect of a memoir reading is education. You are making a point in your memoir not merely being entertaining.

We readers also want to learn how to handle life situations. Because of this, your book on a businessfailure will not appeal to the high school boy whose entire life revolves around sports. It probably won’t appeal either to a businessperson who has been running a successful, profitable venture.

So, who will your book appeal to?

Your book will probably appeal to someone starting out who wants to avoid problems or it will appeal to someone whose business is shaky and wants to know what to do or at least what to avoid. Thirdly, it might draw a person in who has failed at a business and is now looking for additional insight before launching another venture.

With this in mind, your commitment to outlining your courtship with your business partner—your spouse—is not what people want to read.

It’s a little darling that is getting in the way of your theme.

It is not what is heading in a direct line to your conclusion.

What’s the most important part of your story? 

We don’t particularly want to know about the quirky dates you had or your taste in music, but we are likely to want to see the two of you discussing the future and about how both of you had once had a desire to launch a business. That much is appropriate and necessary to understand your partnership.

Some text will be necessary to show the early stages of the company, but soon you will need to kaleidoscope into the early challenges. How did you choose to meet them and with hindsight can you share what early mistakes might have made?

Right pacing in a memoir refers to the inevitable exposition of the story as it leads directly to its crisis and turning point.

 Everything else is a distraction and deletes from proper pacing.

pacing your memoir

To view this article on video, click here.

And remember: “inch by inch, it’s a cinch; yard by yard it’s hard.”

Good luck writing your stories!

—

Below is an e-course I have prepared for you to look more deeply at pacing your memoir time and energy.

~ FAULTY PROCESS IS—WELL—USELESS

~ TIME HACKS FOR WRITERS

~ HOW TO MANAGE YOUR MEMOIR WRITING 

~ MEMOIR WRITING PROCESS

~ Today’s video:  FOCUS MEMOIR WRITING ENERGY AND TIME.

Today is Monday, and it’s a great day to write a bit on your memoir!

Keep the reader interested by using plotting whenever you can, but you don’t need to go gaga about plot—just include enough. Remember: you are not writing a thriller.

Exactly what makes an action interesting is evidently subjective. What might interest an older, retired woman dedicated to promoting social action is likely to be utterly boring to the teenage boy who spends all his free time—and some time when he should be studying and doing his homework—playing basketball. Yet, both would insist that a story needs to be interesting if they are to continue to read. It’s just that they don’t agree on what “interesting” is.

The key take-away here is: a memoir needs to be interesting to its natural audience. What action/plot do the people who would most appreciate your memoir need to keep reading? Your action can be entirely and extremely external (e.g., a flight through a city in a get-away car) or internal (doubts and hesitations). 

The Stephen King fan who is focused on action would find a Virginia Woolf novel which is focused on characterization extremely boring while a Virginia Woolf reader would find a King novel a bit gaga in its too-much action and excitement. Either group would find the books of their author interesting and those of the other writer boring.

Many people confuse dramatic action with dramatic development. The distinction is crucial and it will help you to write a much more interesting memoir. Even laden with inherent dramatic action, a story without dramatic development can prove to be quite uninteresting.

Your memoir will most likely not have one action. There will probably be many.

Understanding “theme” and its role in your memoir is another core task that will both simplify and clarify your message—i.e., your theme. Your theme is perhaps what has motivated you to start your memoir project. There is likely something you want to say about life—your life. Your theme can also be called your message. The theme can be lofty (strive for virtue) or it can be trite (life is hard). Theme drives your story and colors your narrative. 

Everyone writes with some hope of getting a message across. But here’s the risk of trying to get a message to the reader: you can slip into “preaching.” Be wary of insisting on the “shouldas, oughtas.” They will sink your memoir and cause your audience to flee you. 

Reaching for preachiness is not part of these best memoir-writing tasks I am outlining—for a good reason. Who wants to be preached to? 

Go for theme—because frankly you can’t avoid it, but eschew preachiness. Preachiness you can avoid!

It was 2016, and I was in what I thought of as the very last days of the memoir writing process and polishing A Sugary Frosting / A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage, the early lifestory of my deceased spouse, Martha Blowen. It was a time to make sure I had written what I wanted to write and to check grammar and spelling before it went out to a copy editor.

I had promised Martha that I would write her stories so that our grandchildren would know something about her. In May 2015, I began gathering the stories she had written of her life. My intent was to create a booklet of these stories. But, to be honest, it has never appealed to me to write booklets. I like to write books. That’s what I do and that’s what I do well.

Martha Blowen

As I read through Martha’s stories, in a few instances, I understood that some were fragmentary and needed filling out. I knew the story she was trying to convey but then I had lived with her for 31 years. Would someone who did not know her—our grandchildren, for instance—understand and appreciate the tale? So, I tweaked the stories to make them more complete, more meaningful. Good work, I thought.

Then there were all the other stories that she had not written that I knew to be important to her and that I felt our grandchildren would want to know. I had heard Martha’s stories many, many times and so it was not hard for me to write them. Soon I had composed more stories than Martha had left behind. Well, why not write these down, too—so I wrote them.

Now the stories were adding up to a life, to a memoir.

Going Deeper into the Writing Process

As I am always urging anyone who works with me whether in coaching, in editing, or in ghostwriting, I created a memory list. This is a list of any and all memories related to a topic. It is both a fantastic recall exercise and an organizer for a memoir.

As you can imagine, A Sugary Frosting / A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage inevitably began to grow and grow. Soon it was well beyond the booklet stage. I continued writing, realizing I was creating a full-length memoir. As I wrote, there arose the standard question of where does the memoir end, where does this memoir of Martha’s early life come to an end. There was a natural curve to her story – and that was the life she had spent with her parents in the parsonage. After that, she lived a different life energy. (I write about life phases on my blog and why they are so important in memoir writing.)

In the polishing part of the memoir writing process, I identified two facets as interesting in the story. One was that it portrayed the story of a subculture in America in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s—in this instance, life in an Anglo-Protestant parsonage. A Sugary Frosting / A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage was also a necessary prelude to a book that I wanted to publish in the next year or two. This book, which was composed of collations of Martha’s and my journals, would be about the two years after Martha had been stricken with intraductal breast cancer and during which it progressed through her body. These journals were full of her illness, her resistance, and her time of acceptance. This was, of course, my time, too, of resistance and acceptance.

Martha died on August 18, 2008. There was a long time during which I was unable to write about her. Eventually, however, after a couple of years, I was able to resume the memoir writing process but on different book. This one was the one that sprouted from her journals and her stories. I created a book from the two journals she and I had kept.

My original intent had been to make these two journal books my next publishing project. But when I thought about it, I felt these journal manuscripts had something missing. What was missing, I believe, was a large historical context – “historical” meaning her earlier life: what context did she come out of? What influences had marked her for life?

That questioning led to re-igniting A Sugary Frosting and I set to work on it again. This time I finished it. A Sugary Frosting was published in both hard copy and e-version on March 30, 2016.

writing process

Here is a free memoir-writing e-course which I have curated just for you:

~ Faulty Process is—Well—Useless

~ Don’t Waste Your Memoir-Writing Time

~ A Pillar for More and Better Writing

~ Writing When You Don’t Feel Like Writing

~ Today’s Video: Stick with the process. Success demands it.

 

Good luck with your writing and remember to write a bit on your memoir today.

And remember: “Inch by inch, it’s a cinch; yard by yard, it’s hard.”

Good luck writing your stories!

Keep writing. Manage your time well. Your memoir is important.

Best,
Denis and The Memoir Network Team

Today is Monday, and it’s a great day to write a bit on your memoir!

Your story is not formless; it is not an amoeba. A memoir needs form. You must give your memoir the backbone your readers want and need! Your memoir calls for structure to make as forceful a statement as it can make.

Eventually, after you have written awhile, you will likely have amassed a number of vignettes, story segments, and stories and wonder about how to best organize them into a coherent and interesting memoir. You must make a statement and create a bigger picture of your story.

How will you do it? Well, one answer is that you will do it by how you organize your story. Generally, people use chronology, topics, themes, and all of the above.

The Memoir Network’s “Memoir Writing Series” will lead you through the process of putting your story together, of making some narrative structure that will keep your readers reading.

For more info on structure from our blog, click here.

Good luck with your writing and remember to write a bit on your memoir today.

And remember: “Inch by inch, it’s a cinch; yard by yard, it’s hard.”

Best of luck to complete your writing project.

Best,
Denis and The Memoir Network Team

Your friends and family love your memoir. Apparently, they are sure you are an outstanding writer, but you’re not so sure. Perhaps you wonder if you need a manuscript review.

What they are telling you comes across more like support and opinion rather than as an evaluation.

It’s understandable you have your doubts about the assessments you have received from family and friends. These are people you will be seeing again. They want you to think well of them. But, you are not looking for support and encouragement.

An Objective Evaluation

You are looking for an objective evaluation of your book, an evaluation that is considered and reliable.manuscript review

“So where do I find out if my book is ready for the world?” you ask.”How do I find out if there is something—even a lot—I could do to improve it?”

You need someone who does not know and love you. You need to have an appraisal from a professional who has thought much about what makes a memoir interesting and meaningful and is willing to tell the truth about what is in your pages.

You need a manuscript review.

What’s The Difference Between a Manuscript Review and Editing?

A manuscript review is a critical, evaluative review of your memoir—or section of your memoir.

Editing—especially developmental editing—focuses on offering specific suggestions for improving text. Your editor goes deep into your story and  suggests revisions. In a sense, your editor becomes a co-author with you.

In a manuscript review, we evaluate what we read, and while we are likely to offer many comments, they will not tend to be developmental. Rather than point out how to strengthen the sketchy portrayal of your mother (for instance), we will tell you the character of your mother is sketchy and needs work. This is an especially good option for  the writer who is experienced and skillful and needs help to assess the manuscript—we are all a little blind to our own work, after all. This writer already possesses many of the tools necessary to improve the manuscript.

The neophyte writer can still benefit from a manuscript review but would probably do better with developmental editing.

Your Review Team

The editors at The Memoir Network are here to help you identify your manuscript’s strengths—and help you build on them—and its weaknesses—and help you to minimize them. There are many parts to a manuscript review. Below are some of them.

How We Respond to Your Need for  a Manuscript Review

We look at how you employ language: Inevitably a memoir is more than a collection of words. It’s that but a memoir also has to be both interesting and make sense.

  • Is your grammar correct and in the service of meaning?manuscript review
  • Is your diction at the level of the character’s education and social standing?
  • Is your language in the service of your theme?
  • Is your diction too elevated—or too pedestrian—for the audience you purport to be writing for?

Audience: You must always write for your reader. We will look into how you are addressing your audience.

  • Who is your audience and are you clearly addressing your intended readers?
  • What do they expect from a memoir such as yours?
  • Are you clearly providing solutions to the needs of your readers?
  • How are you delivering on your promise?

Narrative Development: This is also known as dramatic development.

  • Is your manuscript as compelling as it can be
  • Here we’ll look at how the narrative pulls us along. This will invariably include suspense and foreshadowing but also the consistency of your story flow. Nothing handicaps a story like time problems. This is often referred to as time sequencing.
  • Is there a conflict (often this is a psychological one rather than an external one)? Have you selected events to happen in a reasonable and compelling order? Are you providing resolutions too early in the story and then telling the rest of the story in flashbacks? Is your plot serving your theme?  

Character Development: This is where we look for how you present the people in your memoir

  • Are your characters detailed enough to come across as “real” people?
  • Are your characters static or do they change over the story time as most people do in life?
  • Your kind mother on page 56 cannot be mean on page 195—perhaps stern or assured but not mean. We see this a lot—it’s a sign you are probably making something up.
  • Something has got to happen to the characters. Have you clearly identified their struggles?

Theme: Theme is what your story is really about. It is the soul of your writing.

  • Is your theme meaningful and not merely a cliché? (“We were poor but happy.”)manuscript review
  • Does your theme really flow from how your characters interact and how your action unfolds?
  • Is the value and importance of your theme shown to grow?

In conclusion to “Need A Manuscript Review”

Please visit our Manuscript Review pages to determine if this service is appropriate for you. You will find pages devoted to the process and to outlining fees.

Your commitment to writing your memoir must be ongoing. It’s easy, as most of us know, to start to write with a burst of energy, but over the months and perhaps years it takes to write a memoir, your energy almost invariably wanes—at least to some extent.

Commit to staying the course

What to do to get yourself enthused again?

Today, I’m offering tactics you can implement to help sustain your motivation and see you to the end. Of course, there’s always willpower, but willpower is known to weaken gradually until it is ineffective. Learning how to get—and stay—motivated is easier.

Motivation is both intrinsic and extrinsic.

Intrinsic motivation comes from inside of you: you like to think of yourself as a writer; you enjoy the introspection of memoir writing; making sense of the past is fun for you. When you want to motivate yourself intrinsically, you call upon these (and many other) reasons.

Extrinsic motivation comes from the outside: you have a family reunion coming up and you want to share your memoir; you want to publish a book to show off your accomplishments to your detractors; a publisher wants your book by a certain time; you tell friends and family that the book will be ready by a given date. Lining up many extrinsic motivators is usually helpful.

The best motivation is, of course, personal, and it is often a combination of intrinsic and extrinsic. For instance: you love to write and enjoy reminiscing about your past. This sort of motivation could see you through years and years of seemingly never-ending writing! When you add to this extrinsic motivation—for example, you are having a class reunion next year and want to have your book available to show off, you are on a course to have written your book in a reasonable time.

By the way, it need not take you forever to write a memoir. In fact, it should take you only 12 to 24 months.

Here is a link to a YouTube playlist to steep yourself in more thoughts about commitment and motivation.

Why not bookmark The Memoir Network’s YouTube channel to acquire skills for consistently better memoir writing?

And remember: “Inch by inch, it’s a cinch; yard by yard, it’s hard.”

Good luck writing your stories! And commit to staying the course!

Keep writing. Your memoir is important.

Best,

Denis

set-goals-brainstorming-2398562_1920

22 Memoir-Writing Goals to Jumpstart your Memoir Writing

By on July 1, 2022

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 coming months. (A goal is a wish with action steps and a timeline.) These goals need to be written and reviewed periodically.

Studies have shown that people who set goals in writing have a better outcome vis-à-vis accomplishing what they set out to do. Here’s a report on one such study. (The famous Harvard goal-setting study so many of us have heard of apparently never happened, but the concept of goal setting is clearly important and is explored in the linked article.)

22 Memoir-Writing Goals especially for you!

[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

We'd love to have you access this content. It's in our members-only area, but you're in luck: becoming a member is easy and it's free.

Already a Member?

Sign In

Not a Member Yet?

Find out More
3 PILLARS OF STARTING A MEMOIR RIGHT

Three Pillars of Starting a Memoir Right Everytime.

By on April 18, 2024

DL: this post—Three Pillars of Starting a Memoir Right—introduced a YouTube video which turned out to be the most popular of all my videos. Today, I would like to share both this post and the video. If you haven’t done so already, please share the post and the video and subscribe to my YouTube channel.

_____

Writing a memoir requires a lot of time and energy—but you can do it. You can succeed in writing a memoir. Many people just like you have succeeded in doing so already. Today I am offering you my three pillars of memoir writing.

I want to share a system with you for getting started on writing a memoir. I call it the three pillars of memoir writing.

As with so many projects you might undertake, you can reinvent the wheel or you can plug into a system that has been shown to work. My Memoir Network has been helping people just like you to write personal and family stories since 1988 and our proven system can help you, too, to write a memoir.

The system that I have found to be best for launching new writers—and many practiced writers, too—has three parts to it—three pillars of memoir writing.

1. When writing a memoir, create a memory list. It’s a strong part of the pillars of starting a memoir right

[Free Membership required to read more. See below. ]

We'd love to have you access this content. It's in our members-only area, but you're in luck: becoming a member is easy and it's free.

Already a Member?

Sign In

Not a Member Yet?

Find out More
pacing a memoir

Pacing Your Memoir Requires Planning

By on April 11, 2024

In almost everything you do in life or in writing, pacing ranks right up there in importance. The tortoise knew how to pace himself and won the race. The hare, on the other hand, needed to view this post before setting out on the race which he eventually lost despite the gift of speed nature […]

a memoir needs form

Monday Focus: Your memoir is not an amoeba: a memoir needs form.

By on March 25, 2024

Today is Monday, and it’s a great day to write a bit on your memoir! Your story is not formless; it is not an amoeba. A memoir needs form. You must give your memoir the backbone your readers want and need! Your memoir calls for structure to make as forceful a statement as it can […]

manuscript review

Need a Manuscript Review?

By on March 19, 2024

Friends and family love your memoir. They say you are an outstanding writer, but you’re not sure. Perhaps you need a manuscript review. See inside.