Denis Ledoux's Blog, page 45

(More) Better than Prompts: Five Tips to Help You “Jog Your Memory”

When starting on a memoir, it can be difficult to remember all the stories and memories you would like to include. You naturally want to jog your memory.

When you are intent on writing “from the inside out” as we at The Memoir Network hope you will, there are some useful techniques you can use—to add to compiling your Memory List and perhaps even to stimulate it.

Below are a few “memory jogs” to get you thinking and especially feeling about the people and places of your past.

1) Scrutinize...

How to Get the Most Out of Sharing Your Memoir In-Progress

How sharing your memoir will help

A critical step for a brand-new writer is sharing your memoir writing in progress with others. There is nothing like a reader to help you develop a healthy critical sense of your work. This article is especially for the writer who cringes at the thought of sharing his/her writing.

Those others you will share with might be writers, they might be friends, or they might be family members. Many readers of this blog are first-time writers. This post is especi...

Five Takes for Writing with Good Grammar

Memoir writers sometimes ask, “Is writing with good grammar important?”

Yes and no. To anyone beginning to write lifestories, I would caution, “Get your story down on paper and don’t worry about “good grammar”—at least, not at first.”

1) Composing a fluent first draft that tells the storyline is more important than producing a grammatically-correct one.

Forget the curmudgeonly high-school English teacher who used to peer over your shoulders; forget your inner censor. The correct placement o...

Solving Problems of Telling the Truth in Your Memoir

When telling the truth, how much of what happened do you have to tell? At what point does withholding the truth become a lie? For instance, in all her famous diaries, as Anais Nin celebrated the freedoms of her life as an artist, she never once mentioned that she was bankrolled by a husband. True, she could not mention his name or details of his life because he had refused her legal permission to do so in print. But wouldn’t the truth have been better served if she had mentioned the worki...

Show Up and Do the Writing!

To your dismay, you have been writing your memoir in snippets. In the mornings, when you show up on your laptop, you face, as does every writer, a demanding master: a writing stint for the day.

Oh, how you wish it were the end of your scheduled writing period!

Like many memoir writers, your memoir writing time is perhaps not long. Then you need to move on to the numerous chores that are attendant on keeping a life and a home going. You feel some urgency to write deathless prose because of...

Use an archetype of your experience to revive your memoir

Can an archetype of your experience refocus your memoir? “My memoir writing has grown tedious,” you bemoan. “I thought what I was writing about was exciting when I began writing. It was exciting then. I could remember so much of what happened. It was compelling. And now as the time I lived this experience recedes into the past, as the vivid memories become less vivid, I am finding it hard to continue to write. Should I give up?”

What writer has not had this experience?

One begins a memoir w...

Should You Write With An Audience in Mind?

While some people decide to write a memoir according to structure—healing memoirs, investigative memoirs, etc—as I wrote in a previous post, others write with an audience in mind. (Writing with structure in mind often calls for writing with an audience in mind, also.) 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...

3 Things Your Writing Coach Can’t Do For You

Coaching almost always proves a great pick-up experience for a person whose memoir is floundering. Your writing coach can help you access process and technique and point of view more rapidly than most people can on their own. But, a coach—even a great one—can only do so much for you.

There are things a writing coach cannot do.

Overmuch of the last two decades, I have coached many, many writers—more writers then I can remember. In those years, I have seen some people soar with the experience...

4 Tips For Making and Using a Core Memory List to Write More Efficiently

People who attend Turning Memories Into Memoirs workshops will sometimes say, “I want to write my stories but I have forgotten so many details.  Is there any way I can get them back?”

There is one tool above all others that makes the experience of lifewriting successful.  That tool is the Memory List.  In this article, I will talk about the Core Memory List.

What is a Core Memory List?

The Core Memory List is a list of the crucial relationships and events which have shaped your life. It co...

How to Have a Successful Book Reading–Author Book Reading Tips

A successful book reading requires a little planning upfront.  If you use the following tips, you will have a great book reading and engagement with your audience.

At a recent author book reading, I read from my mother’s memoir, We Were Not Spoiled, to a group of Senior College people. Since the program was offered in Lewiston, Maine, where my family is from, I looked forward to the event because I knew that the space would have many individuals who had known my mother, me or many people in...