Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

Religion in Memoirs

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.

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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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