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memoir writing

Respect for Others’ Privacy in Your Memoir

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Respect for Others’ Privacy in Your Memoir
As you write your memoir, you’re likely to periodically make choices about how much to reveal about yourself. That part’s easy: do whatever’s comfortable for you, because you’re the owner of your story. The harder question is how much to reveal about the other people in your life. You do not own their story in the same way that you own yours. Your friends and relatives may never forgive you for sharing what you know about them.
“Don’t worry about that problem in advance,” advises William Zinsser in his essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” which we’ve been discussing here. “Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it…Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue. If you wrote your family history only for your family, there’s no legal or ethical need to show it to anyone else. But if you have in mind a broader audience—a mailing to friends or a possible book—you may want to show your relatives the pages in which they are mentioned. That’s a basic courtesy; nobody wants to be surprised in print. It also gives them their moment to ask you to take certain passages out—which you may or may not agree to do.”
Remember that, ultimately, this is your story. Zinsser continues, “You’re the one who has done all the work. If your sister has a problem with your memoir, she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past. Some of your relatives will wish you hadn’t said some of the things you said, especially if you reveal various family traits that are less than lovable. But I believe that at some level most families want to have a record left of their effort to be a family, however flawed that effort was, and they will give you their blessing and will thank you for taking on the job—if you do it honestly and not for the wrong reasons.”
The major “wrong reasons” Zinsser mentions are 1) whining in self-pity in order to feed your own need for attention; 2) including sordid details in an attempt to make your book more marketable because of the titillation factor; and 3) using your memoir to settle a score. Zinsser cautions memoir writers not to simply air old grievances. However, he concludes, “if you make an honest transaction with your own humanity and with the humanity of the people who crossed your life, no matter how much pain they caused you or you caused them, readers will connect with your journey.”

As you write your memoir, you’re likely to periodically make choices about how much to reveal about yourself. That part’s easy: do whatever’s comfortable for you, because you’re the owner of your story. The harder question is how much to reveal about the other people in your life. You do not own their story in the same way that you own yours. Your friends and relatives may never forgive you for sharing what you know about them.

“Don’t worry about that problem in advance,” advises William Zinsser in his essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” which we’ve been discussing here. “Your first job is to get your story down as you remember it…Say what you want to say, freely and honestly, and finish the job. Then take up the privacy issue. If you wrote your family history only for your family, there’s no legal or ethical need to show it to anyone else. But if you have in mind a broader audience—a mailing to friends or a possible book—you may want to show your relatives the pages in which they are mentioned. That’s a basic courtesy; nobody wants to be surprised in print. It also gives them their moment to ask you to take certain passages out—which you may or may not agree to do.”

Remember that, ultimately, this is your story. Zinsser continues, “You’re the one who has done all the work. If your sister has a problem with your memoir, she can write her own memoir, and it will be just as valid as yours; nobody has a monopoly on the shared past. Some of your relatives will wish you hadn’t said some of the things you said, especially if you reveal various family traits that are less than lovable. But I believe that at some level most families want to have a record left of their effort to be a family, however flawed that effort was, and they will give you their blessing and will thank you for taking on the job—if you do it honestly and not for the wrong reasons.”

The major “wrong reasons” Zinsser mentions are 1) whining in self-pity in order to feed your own need for attention; 2) including sordid details in an attempt to make your book more marketable because of the titillation factor; and 3) using your memoir to settle a score. Zinsser cautions memoir writers not to simply air old grievances. However, he concludes, “if you make an honest transaction with your own humanity and with the humanity of the people who crossed your life, no matter how much pain they caused you or you caused them, readers will connect with your journey.”

Make “Reducing Decisions” When You Plan Your Memoir

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Make “Reducing Decisions” When You Plan Your Memoir
This essay we’re examining all summer, “How to Write a Memoir” by William Zinsser, is so rich with good advice that it may take us well into the fall. So here’s another Zinsser pearl of wisdom: think small, not grand. You may start out to write a comprehensive, final-word story of your entire life, complete with a history of your heritage, a review of every school you attended and job you held, a roundup of your friends and details about all of the significant episodes that happened over your lifetime. But, really, that would take volumes, and it would be daunting to start. Zinsser suggests you begin with a wide lens and then narrow your focus.
“ Most people embarking on a memoir are paralyzed by the size of the task,” Zinsser observers. “The past looms over them in a thousand fragments, defying them to impose on it some kind of order. Because of that anxiety, many memoirs linger for years half written, or never get written at all.”
To point you in a direction, he continues, “you must make a series of reducing decisions….Remember that you are the protagonist in your own memoir, the tour guide. You must find a narrative trajectory for the story you want to tell and never relinquish control. This means leaving out of your memoir many people who don’t need to be there. Like siblings.” Leave out siblings! That just sounds wrong! But it’s not their story; it’s yours. You can mention them without going into a parallel story of their lives.
“Families are complex organisms, especially if you trace them back several generations,” Zinsser notes. “Decide to write about your mother’s side of the family or your father’s side, but not both. Return to the other one later and make it a separate project.” That’s something we often forget—nothing says that this has to be your first, last and only memoir. After you write about one aspect of your life, you may find it easier to start on a new, still autobiographical, book on a whole new topic—proving it does take volumes to cover your fascinating life.
http://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/#.UaTLItKsjTo

The essay we’re examining all summer, “How to Write a Memoir” by William Zinsser, is so rich with good advice that it may take us well into the fall. So here’s another Zinsser pearl of wisdom: think small, not grand. You may start out to write a comprehensive, final-word story of your entire life, complete with a history of your heritage, a review of every school you attended and job you held, a roundup of your friends and details about all of the significant episodes that happened over your lifetime. But, really, that would take volumes, and it would be daunting to start. Zinsser suggests you begin with a wide lens and then narrow your focus.

“Most people embarking on a memoir are paralyzed by the size of the task,” Zinsser observers. “The past looms over them in a thousand fragments, defying them to impose on it some kind of order. Because of that anxiety, many memoirs linger for years half written, or never get written at all.”

To point you in a direction, he continues, “you must make a series of reducing decisions….Remember that you are the protagonist in your own memoir, the tour guide. You must find a narrative trajectory for the story you want to tell and never relinquish control. This means leaving out of your memoir many people who don’t need to be there. Like siblings.” Leave out siblings! That just sounds wrong! But it’s not their story; it’s yours. You can mention them without going into a parallel story of their lives.

“Families are complex organisms, especially if you trace them back several generations,” Zinsser notes. “Decide to write about your mother’s side of the family or your father’s side, but not both. Return to the other one later and make it a separate project.” That’s something we often forget—nothing says that this has to be your first, last and only memoir. After you write about one aspect of your life, you may find it easier to start on another, still autobiographical, book on a whole new topic—proving it does take volumes to cover your fascinating life.

Choose a Perspective for Your Memoir

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Choose a Perspective for Your Memoir
Do you write your about your childhood from the distance you have as an adult looking back, or do you call upon the voice inside you that witnessed the action as a child? This is another key issue discussed in William Zinsser’s essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” which we’re referencing here at Write My Memoirs because it contains so much insight into the memoir writing process.
Zinsser leans toward using your childhood voice to “preserve the unity of a remembered time and place.” He cites Russell Baker’s Growing Up, V. S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door and Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain as examples of autobiographies that effectively convey “what it was like to be a child or an adolescent in a world of adults contending with life’s adversities.”
But Zinsser recognizes that many of you memoir writers will choose to write from the point of view of the adult you are now, and he agrees that the resulting book can “have its own integrity.” For examples of that structure, he mentions Poets in Their Youth, “in which Eileen Simpson recalls her life with her first husband, John Berryman, and his famously self-destructive fellow poets, including Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz, whose demons she was too young as a bride to understand. When she revisited that period as an older woman in her memoir she had become a writer and a practicing psychotherapist, and she used that clinical knowledge to create an invaluable portrait of a major school of American poetry at the high tide of its creativity.” Zinsser recognizes that these are two different types of writing and urges memoir writers to choose one rather than combining the two.
http://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/#.UaTLItKsjTo

Do you write about your childhood from the distance you have as an adult looking back, or do you call upon the voice inside you that witnessed the action as a child? This is another key issue discussed in William Zinsser’s essay, “How to Write a Memoir,” which we’re referencing here at Write My Memoirs because it contains so much insight into the memoir writing process.

Zinsser leans toward using your childhood voice to “preserve the unity of a remembered time and place.” He cites Russell Baker’s Growing Up, V. S. Pritchett’s A Cab at the Door and Jill Ker Conway’s The Road from Coorain as examples of autobiographies that effectively convey “what it was like to be a child or an adolescent in a world of adults contending with life’s adversities.”

But Zinsser recognizes that many of you memoir writers will choose to write from the point of view of the adult you are now, and he agrees that the resulting book can “have its own integrity.” For examples of that structure, he mentions Poets in Their Youth, “in which Eileen Simpson recalls her life with her first husband, John Berryman, and his famously self-destructive fellow poets, including Robert Lowell and Delmore Schwartz, whose demons she was too young as a bride to understand. When she revisited that period as an older woman in her memoir she had become a writer and a practicing psychotherapist, and she used that clinical knowledge to create an invaluable portrait of a major school of American poetry at the high tide of its creativity.” Zinsser recognizes that these are two different types of writing and urges memoir writers to choose one rather than combining the two.

Never Written a Book? Your Memoir Can Be a Great First Try

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Never Written a Book? Your Memoir Can Be a Great First Try
Continuing to share with you an essay I found helpful called, appropriately, “How to Write a Memoir,” here’s what author William Zinsser says about his dad’s only attempt at writing:
“Not being a writer, my father never worried about finding his ‘style.’ He just wrote the way he talked, and now, when I read his sentences, I hear his personality and his humor, his idioms and his usages, many of them an echo of his college years in the early 1900s. I also hear his honesty. He wasn’t sentimental about blood ties, and I smile at his terse appraisals of Uncle X, ‘a second-rater,’ or Cousin Y, who ‘never amounted to much.’”
An accomplished writer and the author of On Writing Well, Zinsser realizes that it’s that very amateurish “voice” that brings all of the charm to his father’s work: “It now occurs to me that my father, who didn’t try to be a writer, was a more natural writer than I am, with my constant fiddling and fussing. Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and your readers will jump overboard to get away. Your product is you. The crucial transaction in memoir and personal history is the transaction between you and your remembered experiences and emotions.”
That, WriteMyMemoir members, is great advice!

Continuing to share with you an essay I found helpful called, appropriately, “How to Write a Memoir,” here’s what author William Zinsser says about his dad’s only attempt at writing:

“Not being a writer, my father never worried about finding his ‘style.’ He just wrote the way he talked, and now, when I read his sentences, I hear his personality and his humor, his idioms and his usages, many of them an echo of his college years in the early 1900s. I also hear his honesty. He wasn’t sentimental about blood ties, and I smile at his terse appraisals of Uncle X, ‘a second-rater,’ or Cousin Y, who ‘never amounted to much.’”

An accomplished writer and the author of On Writing Well, Zinsser realizes that it’s that very amateurish “voice” that brings all of the charm to his father’s work: “It now occurs to me that my father, who didn’t try to be a writer, was a more natural writer than I am, with my constant fiddling and fussing. Be yourself and your readers will follow you anywhere. Try to commit an act of writing and your readers will jump overboard to get away. Your product is you. The crucial transaction in memoir and personal history is the transaction between you and your remembered experiences and emotions.”

That, WriteMyMemoir members, is great advice!

Memoir Writing for the Non-Writer

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Memoir Writing for the Non-Writer
A lot of people would like to write a memoir but feel intimidated or overwhelmed by the task, because neither are they writers by profession nor do they write as a hobby. In fact, may people who would like to have a memoir don’t enjoy writing at all. Can someone like that still be the author of an autobiography? Absolutely. If you can talk, you can write!
Picking up from the past two blog posts, we’re spending a few weeks here discussing an essay by William Zinsser on memoir writing. In this passage from his essay, Zinsser tells how his father wrote a memoir:
“My father, a businessman with no literary pretensions, wrote two family histories in his old age. It was the perfect task for a man with few gifts for self-amusement. Sitting in his favorite green leather armchair in an apartment high above Park Avenue in New York, he wrote a history of his side of the family—the Zinssers and the Scharmanns—going back to 19th century Germany. Then he wrote a history of the family shellac business on West 59th Street, William Zinsser & Co., that his grandfather founded in 1849. He wrote with a pencil on a yellow legal pad, never pausing—then or ever again—to rewrite. He had no patience with any enterprise that obliged him to reexamine or slow down. On the golf course, walking toward his ball, he would assess the situation, pick a club out of the bag, and swing at the ball as he approached it, hardly breaking stride.”
It’s all about telling little stories that, together, provide a window into a life. The writing doesn’t have to be perfect. Next time, we’ll go more into why your memoir might actually benefit from your “amateur” writing.
http://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/#.UaTLItKsjTo

A lot of people would like to write a memoir but feel intimidated or overwhelmed by the task, because neither are they writers by profession nor do they write as a hobby. In fact, may people who would like to have a memoir don’t enjoy writing at all. Can someone like that still be the author of an autobiography? Absolutely. If you can talk, you can write!

Picking up from the past two blog posts, we’re spending a few weeks here discussing an essay by William Zinsser on memoir writing. In this passage from his essay, Zinsser tells how his father wrote a memoir:

“My father, a businessman with no literary pretensions, wrote two family histories in his old age. It was the perfect task for a man with few gifts for self-amusement. Sitting in his favorite green leather armchair in an apartment high above Park Avenue in New York, he wrote a history of his side of the family—the Zinssers and the Scharmanns—going back to 19th century Germany. Then he wrote a history of the family shellac business on West 59th Street, William Zinsser & Co., that his grandfather founded in 1849. He wrote with a pencil on a yellow legal pad, never pausing—then or ever again—to rewrite. He had no patience with any enterprise that obliged him to reexamine or slow down. On the golf course, walking toward his ball, he would assess the situation, pick a club out of the bag, and swing at the ball as he approached it, hardly breaking stride.”

It’s all about telling little stories that, together, provide a window into a life. The writing doesn’t have to be perfect. Next time, we’ll go more into why your memoir might actually benefit from your “amateur” writing.

Writers: “The Custodians of Memory”

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Writers: “The Custodians of Memory”
We’re spending the early summer here discussing an essay on memoir writing by On Writing Well author William Zinsser. Last time, I shared the end of his essay, where he gave advice on how to and start writing your life story. Today, let’s look at the very beginning of his essay:
“One of the saddest sentences I know is ‘I wish I had asked my mother about that.’ Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are. Only when they have children of their own—and feel the first twinges of their own advancing age—do they suddenly want to know more about their family heritage and all its accretions of anecdote and lore. ‘What exactly were those stories my dad used to tell about coming to America?’ ‘Where exactly was that farm in the Midwest where my mother grew up?’ Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.”
That’s a very powerful argument in support of writing a memoir. While you may not feel a burning desire to write an autobiography, it’s a service to your entire family to document your life’s various stories. Your memories stretch beyond your own experiences, back to the tales you heard your parents and grandparents tell. Your children and grandchildren may someday be very interested in all of that, even if right now they do not ask you about yourself.
http://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/#.UaTLItKsjTo
https://writemymemoirs.com/blog/meet-william-zinsser/

We’re spending the early summer here discussing an essay on memoir writing by On Writing Well author William Zinsser. Last time, I shared the end of his essay, where he gave advice on how to start writing your life story. Today, let’s look at the very beginning of his essay:

“One of the saddest sentences I know is ‘I wish I had asked my mother about that.’ Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are. Only when they have children of their own—and feel the first twinges of their own advancing age—do they suddenly want to know more about their family heritage and all its accretions of anecdote and lore. ‘What exactly were those stories my dad used to tell about coming to America?’ ‘Where exactly was that farm in the Midwest where my mother grew up?’ Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into.”

That’s a very powerful argument in support of writing a memoir. While you may not feel a burning desire to write an autobiography, it’s a service and a kindness to your entire family to document your life’s various stories. Your memories stretch beyond your own experiences, back to the tales you heard your parents and grandparents tell. Your children and grandchildren may someday be very interested in all of that, even if right now they do not ask you about yourself.

Meet William Zinsser

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Meet William Zinsser
As a memoir writer, you should know about an American author and teacher named William Zinsser. Now 90 years old and still writing, Zinsser is the author of On Writing Well. In 2006, he wrote an essay for The American Scholar that provided valuable insight into the process of writing a memoir. With its inspirationally warm temperatures and lazy-day vacationing, summertime is a great season to begin your memoir or make significant progress on it. To help you do that, let’s spend a portion of this summer discussing Zinsser’s essay, succinctly titled, “How to Write a Memoir.”
I’m going to start at the end, with the very last piece of advice in that essay: how to get started. Zinsser suggests:
“Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory. What you write doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. Tuesday’s episode doesn’t have to be related to Monday’s episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past. Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months. Don’t be impatient to start writing your ‘memoir,’ the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day,…[read through your entries] and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about and what it’s not about. They will tell you what’s primary and what’s secondary, what’s interesting and what’s not, what’s emotional, what’s important, what’s funny, what’s unusual, what’s worth pursing and expanding. You’ll begin to glimpse your story’s narrative shape and the road you want to take. Then all you have to do is put the pieces together.”
More about this essay in the coming weeks.
http://theamericanscholar.org/how-to-write-a-memoir/#.UaTLItKsjTo
http://www.amazon.com/Writing-Well-30th-Anniversary-Nonfiction/dp/0060891548/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1370966977&sr=1-1&keywords=on+writing+well

As a memoir writer, you should know about an American author and teacher named William Zinsser. Now 90 years old and still writing, Zinsser is the author of On Writing Well. In 2006, he wrote an essay for The American Scholar that provided valuable insight into the process of writing a memoir. With its inspirationally warm temperatures and lazy-day vacationing, summertime is a great season to begin your memoir or make significant progress on it. To help you do that, let’s spend a portion of this summer discussing Zinsser’s essay, succinctly titled, “How to Write a Memoir.”

I’m going to start at the end, with the very last piece of advice in that essay: how to get started. Zinsser suggests:

“Go to your desk on Monday morning and write about some event that’s still vivid in your memory. What you write doesn’t have to be long—three pages, five pages—but it should have a beginning and an end. Put that episode in a folder and get on with your life. On Tuesday morning, do the same thing. Tuesday’s episode doesn’t have to be related to Monday’s episode. Take whatever memory comes calling; your subconscious mind, having been put to work, will start delivering your past. Keep this up for two months, or three months, or six months. Don’t be impatient to start writing your ‘memoir,’ the one you had in mind before you began. Then, one day,…[read through your entries] and see what they tell you and what patterns emerge. They will tell you what your memoir is about and what it’s not about. They will tell you what’s primary and what’s secondary, what’s interesting and what’s not, what’s emotional, what’s important, what’s funny, what’s unusual, what’s worth pursing and expanding. You’ll begin to glimpse your story’s narrative shape and the road you want to take. Then all you have to do is put the pieces together.”

More about this essay in the coming weeks.

Write a Memoir to Ease Your Emotional Pain

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Write a Memoir to Ease Your Emotional Pain
It’s quite common in therapy for patients to be directed to write out their feelings. Putting your thoughts into words allows you to organize them, analyze them and review them later. However, writing out your thoughts is not the same as crafting your life story. The primary amazon.com review of the book Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, by Louise DeSalvo, says: “Contrary to what most self-help books claim, just writing won’t help you; in fact, there’s abundant evidence that the wrong kind of writing can be damaging.” There’s something about story writing that is more cathartic. It has that classic form of a beginning, middle and end, even if you choose not to present your story chronologically.
Your relatives may find your memoir interesting no matter how you write it. But if you want to publish your memoir for a broader audience, keep in mind that readers are not generally intrigued by details of your therapeutic journey. In fact, one blogger maintains that readers will reject your memoir unless it contains the elements of a compelling story all on its own. Memoirists who have been widely read, blogger Agent Kristin says, have understood that “readers are interested in an inside look to a world they’ve never seen or have never imagined. A world that is unbelievable but true. A world that is unique but resonates with us. A story that captures a universal feeling and the reader senses the connection.”
I recommend a two-tier process here on Write My Memoirs. To calm your emotional turmoil, write out your feelings, your life story and your quest to find psychological peace. Keep that copy for yourself. Then if you’d like to publish your work, use that as a foundation, but craft a fascinating, nonfiction story that just happens to have you as the protagonist.
http://www.amazon.com/dp/0807072435/ref=nosim/?tag=jerwaxmenheas-20
http://pubrants.blogspot.com/2007/06/writing-memoir-is-not-therapy.html

It’s quite common in therapy for patients to be directed to write out their feelings. Putting your thoughts into words allows you to organize them, analyze them and review them later. However, writing out your thoughts is not the same as crafting your life story. The primary amazon.com review of the book Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives, by Louise DeSalvo, says: “Contrary to what most self-help books claim, just writing won’t help you; in fact, there’s abundant evidence that the wrong kind of writing can be damaging.” There’s something about story writing that is more cathartic. It has that classic form of a beginning, middle and end, even if you choose not to present your story chronologically.

Your relatives may find your memoir interesting no matter how you write it. But if you want to publish your memoir for a broader audience, keep in mind that readers are not generally intrigued by details of your therapeutic journey. In fact, one blogger maintains that readers will reject your memoir unless it contains the elements of a compelling story all on its own. Memoirists who have been widely read, blogger Agent Kristin says, have understood that “readers are interested in an inside look to a world they’ve never seen or have never imagined. A world that is unbelievable but true. A world that is unique but resonates with us. A story that captures a universal feeling and the reader senses the connection.”

I recommend a two-tier process here on Write My Memoirs. To calm your emotional turmoil, write out your feelings, your life story and your quest to find psychological peace. Keep that copy for yourself. Then if you’d like to publish your work, use that as a foundation, but craft a fascinating, nonfiction life story that just happens to be about you.

Aiming Your Memoir at a Young Audience?

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Aiming Your Memoir at a Young Audience?
“Brutally attacked by rebel soldiers who cut off both her hands….” That’s the beginning of a synopsis of The Bite of the Mango by Miratu Kamara, a book included on About.com’s list of biographies, autobiographies and memoirs for teens. Apparently teens are a tough bunch these days. Other books on the list relate the lives of a drug smuggling gone horribly wrong, teenagers on death row, a “boy soldier” in Sierre Leone and, perhaps most famous, a young surfer whose arm was chewed off by a shark.
If you believe that your memoir has something to offer young people, there’s no need to sugar-coat your life’s experiences. Write your story in words a 14-year-old can understand. Try to keep it under 300 pages. Don’t overplay the graphic detail involving violence or sex. Present it in a way that there’s a lesson they can take away—that’s probably the hardest requirement. School libraries and the young people’s sections of public libraries will carry your book if it strikes the librarians as “powerful” in painting the picture of a series of events and in delivering a message.
Without a message, the story of your life is a narrative that will resonate only with the people who know you. If you think you have something of value to teach to young people who will be inspired to follow in your footsteps, or the opposite—will be able to avoid making the same mistakes you made—write with those teens in mind.
http://childrensbooks.about.com/od/5youngadultbooks/tp/contemporary-biographies-autobiographies-memoirs-for-teens.htm

“Brutally attacked by rebel soldiers who cut off both her hands….” That’s the beginning of a synopsis of The Bite of the Mango by Miratu Kamara, a book included on About.com’s list of biographies, autobiographies and memoirs for teens. Apparently teens are a tough bunch these days. Other books on the list relate the lives of a drug smuggling gone horribly wrong, teenagers on death row, a “boy soldier” in Sierre Leone and, perhaps most famous, a young surfer whose arm was chewed off by a shark.

If you believe that your memoir has something to offer young people, there’s no need to sugar-coat your life’s experiences. Write your story in words a 14-year-old can understand. Try to keep it under 300 pages. Don’t overplay the graphic detail involving violence or sex. Present it in a way that there’s a lesson they can take away—that’s probably the hardest requirement. School libraries and the young people’s sections of public libraries will carry your book if it strikes the librarians as “powerful” in painting the picture of a series of events and in delivering a message.

Without a message, the story of your life is a narrative that will resonate only with the people who know you. If you think you have something of value to teach to young people who will be inspired to follow in your footsteps, or the opposite—will be able to avoid making the same mistakes you made—write with those teens in mind.

Boil It Down: The Food Memoir

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Boil It Down: The Food Memoir
If you’re writing a memoir but finding yourself rambling without a narrative focus, you may want to jump on the food memoir bandwagon. Food memoirs are becoming so commonplace that the Literary Foodie blogger lists several hundred you might be interested in reading. Among the most popular are Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential; Blood, Bones & Butter, by Gabrielle Hamilton, Julie Powell’s book-to-movie Julie and Julia and Julia Child’s own My Life in France; Beaten, Seared and Sauced, by Jonathan Dixon; A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle and Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, by Ruth Reichl.
But let’s talk about you. If you’re not a celebrity chef or even a good cook, why might you want to write a food memoir?
We all eat, so food is something that draws in the reader. It’s multisensory; you can describe the look, texture, smell and taste. And it’s a memory trigger. We may be more likely to remember what we ate on a certain night at our favorite restaurant than who was in our company that evening. Everyone has dishes they associate with growing up, romances, routines, special dates and general indulging. By calling upon that aspect of your memory cache, you provide a focus and establish a consistent thread for your memoir. As an underlying theme, food can be symbolic, the topic lends itself to humor and a food memoir is the perfect vehicle if you want to write only about a limited period of your life.
http://literaryfoodie.blogspot.com/p/food-memoir-list.html

If you’re writing a memoir but finding yourself rambling without a narrative focus, you may want to jump on the food memoir bandwagon. Food memoirs are becoming so commonplace that the Literary Foodie blogger lists several hundred you might be interested in reading. Among the most popular are Anthony Bourdain’s Kitchen Confidential; Blood, Bones & Butter, by Gabrielle Hamilton, Julie Powell’s book-to-movie Julie and Julia and Julia Child’s own My Life in France; Beaten, Seared and Sauced, by Jonathan Dixon; A Year in Provence, by Peter Mayle and Tender at the Bone: Growing Up at the Table, by Ruth Reichl.

But let’s talk about you. If you’re not a celebrity chef or even a good cook, why might you want to write a food memoir?

We all eat, so food is something that draws in the reader. It’s multisensory; you can describe the look, texture, smell and taste. And it’s a memory trigger. We may be more likely to remember what we ate on a certain night at our favorite restaurant than who was in our company that evening. We all have dishes we associate with growing up, romances, routines, special life events and general indulging. By calling upon that aspect of your memory cache, you provide a focus and establish a consistent thread for your memoir. As an underlying theme, food can be symbolic, the topic lends itself to humor and a food memoir is the perfect vehicle if you want to write only about a limited period of 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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