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Memoir writing process

Easy Writing: From Blog to Book

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Do you write a personal or professional blog? If so, you probably have a lot of really good material, already written and illustrated, that’s just sitting there. Adapt some of your best blog work to a book format, and now you have something to hand out and even sell. And it’s so easy.

Every Christmas, I exchange gifts with a longtime friend. This past Christmas I was trying to figure out a nice gift for her when I had a thought: what if I took one aspect of her personal blog and “stole” the text and photos to make her a little paperback book with her own name as the author? Would that work? Would it be cool?

I knew that her blog addressed many sides of her life—travels, family, home decor, food and quite a bit about her pets. When I went to her blog, I saw that both of her dogs had died earlier in the year. At each passing, she wrote a beautiful tribute and posted lots of images covering the dog’s entire life and all of the people who spent time with that dog. She also had posts about the dogs while they were alive. I did a copy-and-paste on each of those entries and downloaded all of the images. I organized the material, devoting a chapter to each dog sandwiched between end pages of quotes that my friend posted about her pets. It turned out to be mostly a picture book, with just enough text to provide some color and clarity. I didn’t write a word; every bit of text was lifted from the blog.

To publish the book, I used the normal format we offer our Write My Memoirs authors: a perfect-bound paperback. Since it was largely a picture book, I made the width greater than the height/length. I created a PDF for our regular Write My Memoirs printer, and everything went smoothly. I was very happy with the result and had the book in my hands in plenty of time to ship some copies off to my friend.

As you might guess, this little 40-page book was a huge hit. She tells me it was the best gift her family received and was passed around multiple times as everyone was opening gifts on Christmas night. We would love to do the same thing for you—turn your blog into a book or help you present this type of gift to a friend who writes a blog. You can gather the essentials, or just provide a link to the blog and we’ll be the “curator” for you. Email us at su*****@************rs.com, or go to our Publishing page and get started! Books bring joy!

Staying Healthy While Writing a Memoir

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You know that roll around your middle that won’t go away? It’s from sitting. You say you get out of breath if you try to bound up the stairs? It’s from sitting. The back pain? That’s from sitting, too, but probably in a bad chair or with poor posture. We all sit too much. That little instrument you use for writing is called a “laptop” for a reason: we seem to always have a lap to put it in. As we’re hearing lately, “sitting is the new smoking.”

Now that you’ve committed to writing your memoir, you have many long hours of sitting ahead of you. You can invest in a standing or walking desk, but you’re probably not going to do that. Or you can just stand all day at your kitchen counter and type away, but even standing doesn’t solve the problem. In addition to taking mental breaks from the task of writing, you should take regular physical breaks.

Four goals as verbs: move, lift, stretch, repeat.
Four corresponding goals as nouns: speed, strength, flexibility, stamina.
These are the keys to staying fit; the challenge is to find a method that you can sustain. A lot of people love yoga, which covers three of the four—strength, flexibility and, somewhat, stamina. Some yoga programs also raise your heart rate, so a cardio component is possible. I still think you need to add a walk or run. If, on the other hand, cardio is the part you like best and you also stretch before and after you jog, then don’t forget to lift. It’s great to be lean and flexible, but especially as you get older you need to maintain muscle mass as well. And then there are you dedicated lifters who can bench your body weight but can’t come close to touching your toes without bending your knees. Don’t neglect the stretch, or you’ll tighten up.

If you’re disciplined enough to be making progress on your memoir, you should be able to talk yourself into a modest fitness routine. You can join a gym or prance around your house. Climb stairs every chance you get! Buy a couple of inexpensive free weights. When you’ve finished writing for the day, take a full-body stretch lying on your back, sitting in a straddle and standing up. And that tummy roll you have? If sitting is the new smoking, then planking is the new sit-up. Keep writing, but stay fit!

Writing From a Place of Pain

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Thank you to today’s guest blogger Julie Ann Toomey, author of the memoir Failure to Thrive: My Journey to Mental Health. Julie Ann tells Write My Memoirs:

This book has been a long time coming. Even in high school I wanted to write a book about my life. I found myself writing down experiences in story form to use

later. I have always wanted to share what I went through so others might understand the struggles a person with mental illness deals with. The push finally came when a business mentor challenged me to do so. I’d been collecting stories for years—I figured it would be easy.

It wasn’t! Through tears, heartache and pain, there was realization, amazement and therapy. It was the hardest, most therapeutic thing I’ve ever done. I discovered so much about myself, but also about others in my life.

Failure to Thrive: My Journey to Mental Health is an emotional roller coaster you won’t want to put down. It’s raw. It’s honest. It’s hopeful. It’s also 100% true and accurate, as far as I could see the truth at the time. Mental illnesses cause the truth to become skewed in ways those not suffering have a hard time understanding. This book shows it. Truth is universal, but perception is everything. This shows the perception of the truth a mental illness forces you to have. Anxiety, depression and bipolar disorder are a real part of life. They need to be understood.

Read this book. Come to understand it. Use it to help others when they need it. Be the change this world needs.

It’s Okay to Write for Yourself

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I sing a lot. I sing in the typical places—my car, the shower, my kitchen. Most of the time no one hears me sing; those who do tend to be members of my family, and one of them is likely to ask me to stop singing. They are not even polite about it but, to be fair, I should add that my singing voice can be grating. Yet the reviews have not always been a disaster. Although my choir auditions bombed in both grade school and junior high, by high school somehow my voice had become minimally acceptable, and for three years I was a bonafide alto. Ever since then, it’s been back to my car, the shower, my kitchen and a trio of daughters wailing, “Mom, stop!” Fortunately, they now live in their own homes and I get to sing for the simple reason that I enjoy singing. People who enjoy singing get to sing, just as people who enjoy painting get to paint.

Do you enjoy writing? Then you get to write. Writing is something I know from the other end of the talent spectrum. I’ve always had a gift for writing, and then I added degrees and professional experience, so I’m pretty good at writing. When I read other people’s writing, it can be a little like a bad singing voice shattering my ears or a poorly painted picture assaulting my field of vision—but it rarely strikes me that way. Usually I hear passion in the words and authors’ urgency in sharing their thoughts. I can ignore the missing apostrophes, run-on sentences and weirdly used semicolons. I can overlook the favorite word that gets repeated and repeated and the paragraph that really belongs on the previous page. But it doesn’t matter what I think unless the writer asks for my input.

Have you kept a diary or journal that you’ve revealed to not a single other person? You may have written a full memoir that you have no intention of publishing, preferring to keep it in its original notebook or computer file. Or maybe you do take it out of hiding occasionally to show to a spouse or trusted friend. Perhaps you’ve broken off a chapter that stands alone and submitted it somewhere as a short story. But if all you do is reread your own work, your writing is worthwhile. If all you do is write out your thoughts and never bother reviewing them once you’ve had your say—just to yourself—that’s also fine. The writing process is cathartic and creative and endlessly revealing of who you are, and who you are is someone who enjoys writing, so you get to write.

Religion in Memoirs

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You believe in God or you don’t. You belong to an organized religious sect or your don’t. You are very observant, somewhat observant or not observant. How much of that do you put in your memoir? So many elements make up the person you are, and religion is one of them. So it’s understandable that religion has a role in many a memoir, but the reasons are all over the place:

  • A chapter on your childhood may include your experience with religious education.
  • Authors who write about difficulty, illness or trauma often explain how faith helped them through it.
  • Your parents may be of two different religions, or you may have married someone of a different faith.
  • If you rejected your family’s religion, then that, too, impacted your life and the choices you made.
  • Anyone with a career in a religious field will have a lot of religious topics to write about.

Yet probably the most common reason to mention religion in a memoir is that so many memories revolve around religious traditions. Christmastime, for example, can remind you of anything from the magic of opening presents under the tree while still in your pajamas to the stress of all the expectations to the loneliness of being far from home during the holidays. A simple activity like stringing lights around a front door can launch a whole chapter that reveals much about your family life.

At this time of year, here at Write My Memoirs we’re thinking of you, our authors and perhaps future authors, making new memories and living new stories to fill in the text of your lives. We hope all of yours are happy and funny and touching.

The 12 Days of Memoir

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On the first day of Memoir, my memoir coach gave to me….

Here’s a checklist for writing your memoir that just happens to count to 12. It’s from Mary Karr, author of The Art of Memoir.

  1. Paint a physical reality that uses all the senses and exists in the time you’re writing about—a singular, fascinating place peopled with objects and characters we believe in. Should include the speaker’s body or some kinesthetic elements.
  2. Tell a story that gives the reader some idea of your milieu and exploits your talent. We remember in stories, and for a writer, story is where you start.
  3. Package information about your present self or backstory so it has emotional conflict or scene. All the rest of these are interior:
  4. Set emotional stakes—why is the writer passionate about or desperate to deal with the past—the hint of an inner enemy?
  5. Think, figure, wonder, guess. Show yourself weighing what’s true, your fantasies, values, schemes, and failures.
  6. Change times back and forth—early on, establish the “looking back” voice, and the “being in it” voice.
  7. Collude with the reader about your relationship with the truth and memory.
  8. Show not so much how you suffer in long passages, but how you survive. Use humor or an interjecting adult voice to help a reader over the dark places.
  9. Don’t exaggerate. Trust that what you felt deeply is valid.
  10. Watch your blind spots—in revision, if not before, search for reversals. Beware of what you avoid and what you cling to.
  11. (Related to all of the above) Love your characters. Ask yourself what underlay their acts and versions of the past. Sometimes I pray to see people I’m angry at or resentful of as God sees them, which heals both page and heart.
  12. And one big fat caveat: lead with your own talent, which may cause you to ignore all I’ve recommended.

Voice to Text: 5 Reasons to “Speak” Your Life Story

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A year or so ago I was editing a memoir for one of our Write My Memoirs authors who had requested our editing services, and I realized that something was different. The language and sentence structure sounded natural, as if a native English speaker were telling you his life story. But the many misspellings were odd, not the typical spelling errors that people make. I came to the conclusion that this was a “voice-to-text” manuscript. The software didn’t get everything correct, but it was close enough for me to figure out the words.

I never asked whether my hunch was right and, if so, why the author chose to speak his life rather than to write it. But this got me thinking about all the reasons someone might use the increasingly sophisticated voice-to-text software on the market today. Here’s what I came up with:

  1. It’s quick. You almost certainly can speak faster than you can type, even if you’re taking the time to enunciate clearly or specify punctuation.
  2. Look, no hands! The advantage to this is obvious if you have a condition such as carpal tunnel syndrome or anything that makes typing difficult or awkward.
  3. Sitting not required. Even if you don’t have physical limitations with your hands, other body parts—your back, for instance—may ache after you’ve been sitting for long periods. When you use voice recognition software, you can walk around speaking into a laptop or phone, killing two birds with one stone—getting in your walking steps while writing your memoir.
  4. No keyboard. With voice-to-text software, you don’t need a desktop or laptop. You can use a tablet.
  5. Accuracy. A skilled speller and typist will, at best, break even on this, but someone who isn’t that great at spelling and typing will find a big relief from letting the words write themselves.

So think about it! Blogger Clifford Chi @bigreddog16 identifies eight worthy voice recognition software programs.

Why Young People Write Memoirs

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The founder of Write My Memoirs was in his 60s when he figured out that people about his age needed a good website to anchor their memoir writing. In more recent years, we’ve noticed a trend—people much younger than their 60s also are joining and engaging with Write My Memoirs. It seemed odd at first. How much life is there to write about after only 20, 30 or even 40 years? The answer to that lies in the very heart of what a memoir is.

“Every event, and certainly every event worth writing about, will always remain tattooed on our neurons,” writes biographer Benjamin Moser in a New York Times article, “Should There Be a Minimum Age for Writing a Memoir?” Moser says it’s never too early to start writing about those events for the simple purpose of keeping a record. He calls it an “homage we pay ourselves.”

In the same article, young novelist and essayist Leslie Jamison makes a similar case for capturing the memory while it’s still fresh. “The narratives we tell about our own lives are constantly in flux,” she notes. “Our perspectives at each age are differently valuable. What age gains in remove it loses in immediacy: The younger version of a story gets told at closer proximity, with more fine-grain texture and less aerial perspective.”

In the article “Why Should You Write Your Memoir?” in Psychology Today, researcher Diana Raab reports her findings from interviews she conducted for her book, Writing for Bliss: A Seven-Step Plan for Telling Your Story and Transforming Your Life. Younger people told her pretty much the same thing we hear from older memoir authors: they felt they had a story to share and wanted to tell it in their own voice, from their own perspective. “Additional reasons to write a memoir include preserving a family’s legacy, learning more about one’s ancestors, a search for personal identity, gaining insight into the past or healing from a traumatic experience,” Raab adds.

Our experience at Write My Memoirs is that our older authors look back on their entire lives and choose stories they consider worthy of inclusion in their memoir. The driving factor is the writing—a desire to write about their life. With younger people, the story itself is what drives the idea. Something distinctive, good or bad, happens to them and they want to make sure the story gets told. It’s a subtle difference, but we notice that age does influence how you present your memoir.

“I Was Here and I Mattered”

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It’s all about money at the website moneycrashers.com, so blogger Michael Lewis included “make money” among his four reasons for writing a memoir. But his blog post was really a thank-you note to his late father for leaving a memoir for his family to read after his death. Lewis writes:

“During the last five years of my father’s life, he began a series of letters and memos to my younger brother and me about his life. Dad was not a famous man, nor a particularly accomplished man—at least, not by standard measures of success. Nevertheless, his letters chronicling a childhood during the Depression in the midst of the Dust Bowl, his experiences as an infantryman on the battlefields of Europe, and life in the 1950s were an incredible record of an extraordinary life and time in the history of America.’

This is exactly what we discover every time we publish a life story at Write My Memoirs. The personal memories documented in an ordinary person’s autobiography become fascinating from the modern-day point of view. When that ordinary person is your family member, the fascination grows even more intense. I’m not surprised that Michael Lewis organized his dad’s writings and bound them to make little books they could pass out to the rest of the family.

“Writing your autobiography is an opportunity to reach across the boundaries of time and space, set the record straight, honor the ones you love and celebrate the journey you have taken,” Lewis writes. “It is the chance to create your own time capsule; an opportunity to leave your handprints on the walls of human existence and to shout to the world, ‘I was here and I mattered!’”

Exactly. That’s what Write My Memoirs is all about: documenting that you were here and you mattered.

Chronology vs. Topic Grouping

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You make lots of decisions as you’re writing your memoir about when and how to introduce the topics you want to cover. You may choose to present a chronological account of your life, from birth to present day, because it seems logical and probably the easiest option. But you’re likely to find that it’s not as straightforward as you anticipated.

Let’s say that you’re writing about a favorite aunt and uncle. Perhaps as a child you spent a week with them every summer or have special memories of welcoming them to your home at Christmastime. They were a significant presence during your childhood, but then maybe they moved far away or you just grew up and didn’t see them very much. Or maybe you continued seeing them at holidays, but you’re not chronicling every holiday in your memoir. Really, the next mention you want to make is to note their death and honor their memory by saying you miss them. Where should you say that?

You can wait until you write a chapter that occurs around the time your aunt and uncle died, assuming they died within a few years of each other. You can mention various things affecting you at that time and include your trip to attend a funeral or just your sadness at their passing. Or you can just finish out their story in the earlier passages that focus on them. After explaining their importance in your life, you can write something such as: “I saw my aunt and uncle less frequently as I got older, but I’ll always have fond memories of both of them. They died in the 1990s after living long, happy lives.” Even if you write your life story in chronological order, be flexible enough in respecting the chronology to allow yourself the creative license to keep a topic together if that seems to be easier for the reader to follow.

Here are some questions to ask yourself that will help you recall people and events in your life.

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Then just set up a chapter and start writing your memoir. Don’t worry about rules. There are no rules to writing your memoir; there are only trends. These trends are based on techniques and features identified in current top-selling memoirs. At best, they’re the flavor of the month. If you’re capturing your life in print for your family, for your own gratification or to inspire readers, rather than aiming to set off Hollywood screenplay bidding wars, these trends don’t even apply to you. You’ll write the memoir that suits you best, and it will be timeless, not trend-driven.There are no rules, but there are four steps:

1. Theme/framework
2. Writing
3. Editing/polishing
4. Self-publishing

You’ve researched this, too, and you’ve been shocked at the price for getting help with any one of those steps, much less all four. That’s because most memoir sites promise to commercialize your work. They’ll follow a formula based on current memoir trends, because they want to convince you that they can turn your memoir into a best-seller. These sites overwhelm you with unnecessary information not to help you, the memoir author, but to address Search Engine Optimization (SEO) algorithms so they can sell more.

That’s not what we do at Write My Memoirs. Our small community of coaches, writers and editors are every bit as skilled as any you’ll find, and we charge appropriately for their expertise and the time they’ll spend helping you craft a compelling, enjoyable read. But you won’t pay an upcharge for other websites’ commercialization, the marketing that follows, and the pages of intimidating “advice.” You can sell your book if you like—we have ISBNs available for you—but our organic process of capturing your story takes a noncommercial path.

If you want help with any or all of the four steps above, choose from our services or save money by selecting one of our packages. If you’d like to talk about what’s right for you, schedule a call. One year from now, you can be holding your published memoir in your hand. And at that point, it will be a big deal!

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