Denis Ledoux's Blog, page 2

People had Different Paradigms. Telling the Past as It Probably Was!

My latest book is Here to Stay/Lives in 17th Century Canada. In this post, I want to make clear that people then lived with different paradigms. As I was writing Here to Stay, it became ever so obvious that the story was set in a time that operated under different paradigms than ours. The players […]

Filles du Roi / Daughters of the King: Marthe Quittel Comes for a Husband

Among the eight filles du roi aboard the Marie-Thérèse who were coming to find husbands was a woman from Normandy, Marthe Quittel, a Protestant from Rouen.

The Power of Telling Our Stories

In the late autumn of 1988, as Mainers were beginning to hunker down for another winter, I had an experience that confirmed the power of telling our stories to an audience. One afternoon, I opened a door to a meeting of Foster Grandparents volunteers. I was walking into my future. But, I didn’t know that […]

You can become good at writing!

To create a successful workshop business of helping people to write their memoir, you must become adept with the memoir genre itself. You must learn to write better memoir yourself. Being a good fiction writer or a poet or an essayist is not enough. You must have read many memoirs and have written in the […]

Book launch reviews HTS

working copy of the cover Wanting to write a meaningful memoir is a start, but it is not enough. You must know how to write such a story. On the Third Thursday of every month (at 1 PM/ET, 12 CT, 11 MT, 10 PT), you can participate in a live memoir-writing workshop on ZOOM. As […]

A memoir is elevated by its theme not by its topic.

It is the development of a theme that makes a memoir, even of ordinary topics, come through as interesting and even memorable. The topic is the bare bones of what you say in your book, and the theme is your “take” on what you say. The theme is necessarily wispy and even open to various […]

Memoir Writers Are Masters Sculptors, Part 2

7 Techniques for Finding Your Story Structure In Part 1, we discussed how memoir writers are like sculptors. Today, I will share a few techniques I learned and used to find the story structure for my memoir, Ever Faithful to His Lead: My Journey Away From Emotional Abuse.

Memoir Writers are Master Sculptors, Part 1

As authors, we are artists and we create masterpieces through our words. Here’s how as memoir writers are master sculptors. With the recent launch her first memoir, Ever Faithful to His Lead: My Journey Away From Emotional Abuse, Kathy Pooler is reminded that the process of envisioning, carving, chiseling and shaping our book can be […]

“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 […]