Denis Ledoux's Blog, page 60
May 5, 2017
No Smile on my Face
DL: May 5, 2017, marks the second anniversary of my mother’s death so it is fitting today to commemorate her memory by running an excerpt from her memoir, We Were Not Spoiled. To read other excerpts, click here and here and here and here.
In the fall of 1929, Robert joined me at school, and because he was born in February, he was two years behind me. I entered the first year of third grade. St. Peter’s School had this practice of having all the children repeat the third grade so there...
May 2, 2017
Authority/Author: words with the same roots
To those who struggle with whether they should write or continue to write a memoir, let me be clear: no one can give you the authority to write your story, to tell the truth about your life. You are the only person who can do that (Of course, others can help you along the way, but in the end, the leap is always up to you.)
Here are a few steps to take along the way to accessing writing authority in the telling your story.
1. Give yourself permissi...April 25, 2017
My Eye Fell Into the Soup: How Cancer Journals Turned Memoir Was Launched
Martha began writing a journal before I knew her, and she wrote consistently for the 31 years we were together. My own habit of writing a record of my life began in my early twenties—in 1970. We might have said, as did Anaïs Nin in the first volume of her published diary, “I neede...
March 16, 2017
5 of 16 Reasons to Undertake Ebook Publishing
[This is the first of three posts featuring reasons for including ebook publishing as part of your marketing options.]
Are you making a mistake not planning to include ebook publishing in your publication schedule?
People interested in independent publication ask me if they should publish their manuscript as an ebook, a hard copy book or both.
The honest answer on my part is I don’t know. The decision is individual and unique to you. What...
March 7, 2017
Shaping your memoir: The mythic journey of your life
We read memoirs for many reasons. These reasons can perhaps be summarized into two: we want to be entertained and we need to be informed.
In this post on the mythic journey of your life, I want to write about the second of those reasons:our need to be informed.
Whether they articulate it or not, many people read memoirs because they want to understand something about the lived experience of life. Life is not easy. It is full of c...
March 2, 2017
Making of the Photo Scribe
One day in 1996, I read an article in a local newspaper about a scrapbook workshop called Creative Memories that was about to be presented. There was something about the tone of the article that led me to believe the woman offering the program and Creative Memories were not one and the same. My sense was that she was working at someone else’s program; she was a presenter and not an originator.
Not...
February 28, 2017
Turning a Journal into A Memoir
I have been slowly revising my latest book My Eye Fell Into the Soup. This book is the first of a two-book set depicting the two years that Martha and I lived with her cancer illness. I have described some of the writing process elsewhere.
There was a time when writing / organizing / revising this so-personal manuscript was difficult, very difficult, but that is no longer the case. When I was first working on My Eye Fell Into the Soup, I would take...
February 16, 2017
Helpful Thoughts As You Write a Memoir
Over the years, I have both worked with people to help them write a memoir and have heard from people who have done the work of writing theirs.
Often these people had never written anything before—not memoir, not fiction, not creative non-fiction. They did not think of themselves as writers. One day these people—as you are now doing—decided it was time to write a memoir. They set about to compose a lasting record of their personal and family stories in...
February 7, 2017
5 Better Ways to Describe The People in Your Memoir
Without other people, our lives and our memoirs risk becoming dull. Although ideas are pivotal for many individuals, relationships are even more commanding. We are intrigued with who other people are and how they function. “Who’s that? What are they doing? Where did they come from?” These are question we want answered. To write a strong story, capitalize on this interest.
The people in your story are your characters. It is your job to bring vivid characters to the attention of your readers....
February 2, 2017
My first publishing story: independent publication
My first book, What Became of Them, was a collection of short stories. I had written these stories over a number of years, and then in 1988, I decided it was time to send them out. I sent them to several publishers and waited. I totally understood how a book has to fit into a publisher’s catalog and it must promise to earn the company some income (preferably a large one) from its audience.
My goal was not to be approved by someone, to have my writing f...
