Category: How-to
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Compelling Chapters Knit Small Stories into Powerful Memoirs
Another way to reach readers is to develop a blog. Even if at first you have no readers, writing the blog will let you see yourself as a performer. When the comedian Steve Martin was starting his career, he went on stage and looked out to an empty restaurant. The manager told him to perform…
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How to Pick the Best Title for Your Memoir
Authors stare at the sky of their minds, hoping some pattern will jump out at them. But before making a decision, consider all the work a title has to do. A great title helps potential readers buy the book, love it to the last page and then recommend it to friends. To learn more, look…
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Should this Memoir be Called: Courage of Motherhood?
As I continue to poke and prod, trying to learn why this memoir holds together so tightly, another theme jumps out at me, hidden in plain sight. Sonia Marsh saves her family from disaster with as much story-worthy heroism as James Bond demonstrates when saving the world.
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What is the Theme of Your Memoir?
Finding the theme, a crucial requirement for a book you buy at the store, can seem ridiculously out of reach for the story you are attempting to understand about yourself. What do you mean, “What is the theme? It was my life!” Life has so many dimensions. Must you really limit your story to just…
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From Complex Memories to the Compelling Title of Your Memoir
However, despite the contrast between the breeziness of the title and the difficulty of the life it describes, I never felt betrayed or misled. On the contrary, the deeper I went into the story, the more meaning I found in the title. I realized it provided a micro-guidebook, showing the family’s initial optimistic hopes for…
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How to Start Writing Your Memoir
If you have ever wanted to shape your memories into stories, there has never been a better time. Thanks to the popularity of bestselling memoirs by ordinary people, many of us are wondering if we could record our past into a readable form. Before we start, though, two simple questions block the way.
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Telling a Memoir’s Backstory by Seesawing in Time
How the story falls together in the reader’s mind will depend on these questions of structure. Take your time. It’s your life, and if you want to turn it into a great story, don’t be surprised if you have to work at it with the same creative obsession that you expect from the authors of…
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How a Wrapper Story Helps You Structure Your Memoir
By developing the narrator as a visible presence in the story, you can help the reader gracefully move back and forth between the time frame of the person writing the book and the time frame of the character who lived through the earlier events.
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Beware of Casual Flashforwards in Your Memoir
Foreshadowing seems like a legitimate element for fiction. In that fluid reality, the author inserts an ominous thunderstorm to hint at the future. But I have mixed feelings about fortune telling in a memoir. Even though the narrator knows what happens next, the character does not.
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More Tips about Constructing the Timeline of a Memoir
Every memoir writer has to steer through these decisions, to determine not only how much to include, but also how to do it gracefully. By working out their challenges with time, character development and suspense, they successfully set the reader’s expectation and then fulfilled those expectations. These memoirs and the hundreds of others I have…
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