Denis Ledoux's Blog, page 2

“Push Goals”… hit your writing out of the park!

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Ouch! Your memoir characters are not as interesting as they should be! And, fortunately, you can easily change that.

Why Your Memoir Characters Might Not Be Interesting! In fiction, the people who appear on your pages and play a role in the story you are narrating are called characters. As a memoirist, you must take memoir characters as seriously as a fiction writer does. As with fiction characters so too with memoir characters Vivid […]

3 Tips for a Better Author Blog

“What do you think of my website and my author blog?” It’s one of the questions I hear the most from authors, whether they write memoirs or mysteries. I wish that my answer each and every time was, “It’s fantastic!” . . . but it isn’t. And more often than not, the problem is with […]

Does calling yourself a writer make you a writer?

“How do you become a writer?” people ask me.

While many of my memoir-writing clients are one-time authors, not everyone is in that category. Many people join The Memoir Network secretly wanting to become “a writer” and hoping that memoir writing will be their ticket into the writer’s life.

I might, in all seriousness, respond, “Start calling yourself a writer and see what happens.”

“Does saying you are a writer make you a writer?” might be their comeback and likely will be.

Well, of cour...

Bringing Discipline in Memoir Writing

A mini-course on bringing discipline to your memoir writing

A big part of success is showing up and doing the work. The same is true in writing a memoir. To succeed you have to do some writing; you have to demonstrate some discipline in your memoir writing, some nose to the grindstone.

Now the writing process is not straightforward or linear and there are many unexpected twists and turns to the process. In fact, in the link below to blog posts on discipline in writing, you will even find...

My Mother Passes

On this blog, I have frequently offered excerpts of my mother’s memoir, We Were Not Spoiled. It has  been such a satisfaction for me to have written her story and to have been able to hand her a copy. One day, after I had presented her with the hard copy of We Were Not Spoiled, she said to me as she held the book, “You spoil me!”

My mother passed ten years ago on May 5, 2015, of congestive heart failure. She had said she was not afraid of dying, but she didn’t want to die alone. She did ...

How to Write the Last Chapter of a Memoir

“How do I write the last chapter of a memoir?” coaching and editing clients will sometimes ask me, wondering how to end a memoir.

It is a good question because the last chapter of a memoir is your final shot at affirming your theme and at creating a satisfying and meaningful ending to the story the reader has been engaged in for perhaps 200 or 300 pages—or even more.

Revising the last chapter is something I worked on carefully with on my childhood memoir—French Boy/A 1950s Franco-American ...

Goal, Strategy and Tactics Are Best

On last week’s Zoom Gathering of Writers—which I hold every third Thursday of the month for members of my Substack (for now, but soon to include Memoir Network members), we concluded the session by declaring what we aspired to accomplish on our memoir for the coming month (until our next session on May 15).

Paid subscribers of my Substack join the Zoom Gathering of Writers call every third Thursday of the month at 1 PM/ET, 12 PM [noon]/CT, 11 AM/MT and 10 AM/PT. (Thursday, May 15 2025.)

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3 Stages of Writing a Memoir

A guest post

Three Stages of Writing a Memoir: Own Your Truth, Find Your Voice and Tell Your Story

In December 2011, I decided to take a trip to my home country, Azerbaijan. I had a property to sell and family to visit there. More importantly, I was on a mission to find my father’s grave. My parents were divorced when I was a mere two-week-old baby. I had never met him. Despite trying to heal this open wound for years, nothing helped. Perhaps finding his grave could bring some closure. (...

Clichés in your memoir—you need them like you need a hole in the head.

As I work with writers in my coaching and editing practice, I notice that many do not seem aware to avoid clichés lurking everywhere in their pages. They just don’t seem to be on the alert.

“Avoid clichés. Don’t let a cliché get you down in the dumps,” I tell them. “Better late than never to learn!”

Oops, I’m doing clichés again! I’ll be a good boy and not do them anymore.

I give my writers a shorthand: if it sounds like you’ve heard it before it is probably a cliché.

By the way, if you...