One aspect of writing that I love is when we stop to look inward at ourselves. We take note of the choices we’ve made in our lives and they present a multitude of stories to tell. Most writers don’t think it is that easy. I have received a lot of messages over the years from writers who say, “No one knows me, why would they care about my story?” And, “I’m not a professional writer, so I don’t know how to get my story on paper.” I’ve said the same thing to each one of those writers, and I’m saying…
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This is the third and final post in a series all about writing your memoir. You can find helpful tips in the first post about getting started and the second post about brainstorming. Tangling with structure is about as common a writing problem as you can get. However, when you are writing about your own life it can be even trickier. You are looking at sets of events from the inside, all too close to see them with any different perspective. A single event can be told from lots of angles, but your job is to pluck events that defined…
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In the previous post in this series we looked at what a memoir is and how it differs from an autobiography. So now you know you are writing your memoir, but what exactly will it be about? You need a unifying theme or event that every scene builds up to (a random smattering of “stuff that happened to you” isn’t going to work). Perhaps you can think of a hundred possible turning points in your life to write about, or maybe one defining event jumps out at you. Figuring this out is perhaps the most important step of all. This is…
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If I have learned anything from being an editor it is that everyone has a story to share. This great world of ours has given us experiences as varied as our fingerprints, and there is bound to be someone who will benefit from reading yours. Even if you think your life is nothing spectacular—perhaps even mundane—you probably have some nugget of insight somewhere along the way just waiting for you to dust it off and see it for the gem it is. I’m not going to sugarcoat it: writing about yourself is hard. However, it is also rewarding and incredibly…