Denis Ledoux's Blog, page 42

November 6 Activity: Organize a Lifestory Party

You can organize a lifestory party to gather information for writing your memoir. You don’t have to remember your lifestory alone. A gathering of family members to share stories about family events can help you double check the information you already have, and seek new material to flesh out your stories.

Reunions, weddings, funerals, birthday and holiday celebrations rate well on both of these tasks: scattered relatives, each of whom has a piece of the family history to share, are in one p...

November 5 Activity: Writing for an Audience

Writing for an audience may be more important than you think. Sometimes the audience is of specific people but many other writers, while they do have a specific audience in mind, are really writing to a group according to their interest.

“I want to write for my kids and grandchildren. I want them to know who I was,” one sort of memoirist will realize. While another will think, “I want to my children and grandchildren to know me, too, and I want to place my life in a greater context. I’m hop...

November 4 Activity: Don’t Trust Your Memory

Don’t trust your memory when it comes to facts, events, and dates when you are writing your stories for your memoir. There’s no way around it: your memory—and mine—is fallible, unfortunately sometimes false, and too often flattering as it “remembers” events.

November 4 Activity: Don’t trust your memory; go to the sources.

To counter this, for November is Memoir Writing Month, gather materials that will support your grasp of the past. There’s nothing like a document created at the time of an...

November 3 Activity: Let Go of Having to Write Deathless Prose on Your First draft.

In this post, you’ll learn how to let go of deathless prose in your first draft.  November is Memoir Writing Month is a good time to let go of the perfectionism that keeps you from writing.

November 3 Activity: Let go of having to write deathless prose on your first draft.

What you are accomplishing during November is Memoir Writing Month is getting the flow of your story down in a first draft.

More memoir writing resources are available with the free My Memoir Education membership. Members...

November 2 Activity: Showing Up for Your Memoir

Showing up for your memoir is the key to writing your book. Wanting to write an interesting memoir is a start, but wanting will not get your memoir written. What gets a memoir written is showing up to write when you had promised yourself you would show up. 

November 2 Activity: Showing Up for Your Memoir Showing up is being accountable.

Being accountable requires a certain amount of measurement, quantification.

When will you show up? How many times a week will you show up? For how many min...

November 1st: November Is Memoir Writing Month Kick-off

Get a quick start on your memoir during November Is Memoir Writing Month. It’s possible to get a large part—even all—of the first draft of the memoir you have been dreaming of written in a month’s time.

November 1 Activity:  November is Memoir Writing Month Kick-Off

Here are some activities that will facilitate the process. You can work on them one per day or do several at a time.

Good luck!

More of this NIMWM Activity is available with free My Memoir Education membership, please join now.

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Writing a First Draft: Why They’re Called “First”

When you are writing a first draft: nothing can rightly be called a first unless there is a second. First grade implies second grade; first class implies second class; first book implies (we hope) second book, a first draft implies a second draft.

That is why first drafts are called first drafts. A writer must expect to write a second draft, and a third even. No one can sit down and churn out countless pages of prose that don’t need rewriting. Jack Kerouac claimed he did it with On the Road...

Three Tips for Effective Memoir Pre-Writing

Before you begin to write your memoir, there are a number of non-writing tasks which you must undertake—this phase of compiling your lifestory is called memoir pre-writing, and it is essential to writing better stories.

Effective Memoir Pre-Writing Pre-writing can include: list making. rereading letters, journal entries, newspaper clippings. talking to people and reminiscing. doing any of the numerous writing exercises in this book or others to stimulate your memory and keep your interest...

Do You Have a Foodoir in You?

The continuing popularity of books about food and cookery is well demonstrated by the vast range available—just look along the cookery and food shelves in any bookshop or at the long lists available online. Many are collections of recipes by well-known chefs and bakers, but there is also another genre which combines memoir writing with recipes or food-related experiences.

In the publishing industry, these are often referred to as foodoirs and publishers are busy cashing in on the huge marke...

3 Tips for Picking Up Your Memoir Again—and Finishing It!

Re–read Your Lifestories

Have you struggled with picking up your memoir again and not quite knowing how to get back into it? Rather than castigate yourself, why not simply set some time aside to re-read your memoir?

The following suggestions are from the Write to the End–Eight Strategies to Deal With Writer’s Block! an ebook on successfully dealing with writer’s block.

All the suggestions point towards re-reading all your memoir stories, vignettes, anecdotes and snippets on hand, to do so s...