We are experiencing issues with our Contact form.
Please Email Us Directly at: Su*****@************rs.com.

Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

PLEASE NOTE:

oUR CONTACT US Form HAD A MALFUNCTION.
IF YOU HAVEN’T RECEIVED A REPLY, PLEASE FILL IT OUT AGAIN OR WRITE US DIRECTLY.

Every ordinary life story is extraordinary!

writing

What Category of Writer is a Memoir Author?

by
room of people writing on laptops and notepaper

All categories. That’s the hard part.

Memoir is an identified genre, but when you examine the process you see that this genre sources writing from many others. So when you ask yourself what category of writer you should be acting as in order to write a solid memoir, you may have to answer: all of them.

Well, not all. Children’s lit, horror, fantasy—there probably are others as well that don’t play much into memoir. But many do. Still, memoir is unique, and borrowing from other genres doesn’t mean letting them take control.

Diary

First, of course, you’re writing stories from your life. So in a way, you’re letting readers peek into your diary. Let that influence you to stay raw, honest and vulnerable.

But you’re not a diarist; you’re a memoir author. You won’t be giving readers anything close to a day-by-day account of your life. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking you have to include more than necessary to stay on your theme. Choose your stories carefully.

Some authors even use the structure of a diary for their memoir, but I think in most cases a memoir does not benefit from the diary structure. It makes me think the author chose the format just because it’s easier.

Fiction

Memoir authors can be surprised when their book starts sounding a lot like a novel. That’s a good thing. It should read that way, with devices from fiction like dialogue, description and character development. It can have suspense and foreshadowing, story arcs and time jumps, cliffhangers at the end of chapters.

But this is nonfiction. That means it has to be essentially true. The “essentially” part is that you aren’t expected to write a conversation in the exact words that were said at the time. Or if you describe what your dad was wearing, you can picture him in something he wore often and not feel an obligation to know whether he wore it on the day in question. But “essentially” also means you have to get the essence of the conversation right and capture the essence of the person you’re describing.

News Report

Instead of sounding like a novel, some chapters may sound more like a news report—a straightforward description of events. So part of the time you’re a reporter, providing readers with a detailed account of something that happened in your life. Like other journalism students, I learned the five W’s: who, what, where, when and why. There’s also how. Keep these in mind when describing what occurred.

Journalism students also learn how to make a story short and dry. Newspaper articles are, or at least were, cut from the bottom, so you have to get all of your important facts in at the beginning and let them proceed in diminished order from there. There’s no room for adjectives, either. Just report the facts.

That short-and-dry aspect has little bearing on memoir writing. Make your writing concise and don’t ramble, but certainly “dry” is not a description you want for your book. You can start anywhere, and you have license to indulge in description. Remember the “show, don’t tell” mantra, which is true for both news report and memoir. If you describe the events well, the reader will know how you’re feeling about them.

Feature Article

If a magazine or website did a profile on you, what would it say? It would have a theme and then support that theme with pertinent stories from your life. A memoir is kind of a very long feature article about you.

But it’s not quite that, because it’s written in more of a fiction format. The bigger difference, though, is that it’s from your point of view. It’s inherently biased, not objective. Since you’re writing it, you don’t have to balance the piece with other people’s opinions, good or bad, about you.

History/Textbook

Memoirs teach readers about all sorts of topics that surround the person’s life. Like any book or movie, it should increase the reader’s knowledge in addition to offering an entertaining story.

But when your memoir captures a time period or geographical location so comprehensively that sections morph into a class lecture, you’ve gone too far. I often remind memoir authors specifically that they’re not writing a textbook.

Op-ed

I also remind memoir authors who are using their book to make a point that this is a memoir, not an op-ed. Persuasive writing is a talent, but in a memoir it has to be under wraps a bit. You can be fighting for justice or promoting one side of a cause, but you have to fold that into your storytelling. You’re not writing a diatribe.

Humor

Not every memoir can have humor, but authors of even the darkest tales can find a way to lighten up between tough memories. It gives readers a break. If your memoir doesn’t cover a tragedy and is more upbeat, humor adds a compelling reason for readers to recommend it to friends.

Young Adult

Memoir writing can be intellectual and complex, and some memoir topics may be too mature for young minds. For the most part, though, memoir is perfect reading for teens. They can learn about a person and what life was like during the time period covered and within the culture described. So if you’re struggling to explain your life in the most highfalutin language, you may do better to dumb it down enough to keep the reading flowing.

More Ideas

There are lots of structures to choose from when you’re writing a memoir. Food can be an important element in your story, so maybe your book is a memoir/cookbook hybrid. Perhaps a home figured prominently in your life and you describe each room the way you might for an interior design magazine. Or your life may take place in so many locations that your memoir is part travelogue.

Wear as many writers’ hats as you need in order to craft the memoir you envision. You’re a memoir author. That means you’re hoping to be a master of multiple writing categories.

 

How to Tell Whether You’re a Writer

by
How to Tell Whether You're a Writer little girl writing in a book

And why you don’t have to be a writer to write a great memoir

When you’re a writer, you write. You can tell whether you’re a writer just by looking at the sheer volume of your work. Do you have notebooks full of essays, poems, stories or even just thoughts? Is your computer filled with files of creative or expository writing?

Writers Write 24/7

When you’re a writer, your mood and the outside world may influence your subject matter, but none of that keeps you from writing. When you’re happy, you write. When you’re angry or sad, you also write. When you’re bored, you write, but when you’re so busy you don’t have a minute to spare, you still write. You don’t have to be an avid reader or a student of writing to be a writer. Some writers just have a feel for language without all that much example to follow.

Sometimes the writing is just in your head. This is when you’re not in the stage of getting it down on paper or into the computer. You’re more in the gathering stage—observing life in a way that writers do, with chapter titles or lines from a movie scene script scrolling across your mind.

Parents sometimes seek my advice. “My kid wants to be a writer,” they’ll say. “Is it easy to make a living from writing? Should my kid major in writing in college?”

I have only one response. “A writer writes,” I say. “Whether writing as a living or doing it as a hobby, if your kid is a writer, your kid will write.”

I think you might as well try to make money from what you love to do, but if you have another calling you’d rather pursue professionally, writing will still be there. Kids like that can become lawyers, and then the part of the job they love most is writing the brief. They can graduate with a major in business and still find lots of writing opportunities in marketing and other aspects of their job description. And if it does just end up as a hobby, it can be a very satisfying one.

Skill Level Is No Measure for Whether You’re a Writer

You can be a writer and yet not write very well. You may have an amateur hand at poetry or grammar errors in your essays or poorly constructed transitions in your short stories. Still, you get joy from the process of putting your thoughts into words, the words into sentences, the sentences into paragraphs, and you see where I’m going with this.

The opposite is true as well: you may write very well but not be a writer. Your boss may ask you to do a lot of writing in your job because you’re good at it. Maybe you’re able to knock off a speech for your sister’s wedding in an hour, and perhaps grammar and spelling come naturally to you. But you don’t choose to write for pleasure. You’re out doing other things. If you’re that person, you are not a writer.

Think about a natural athlete. How many of those have fallen by the wayside? The star high school basketball player, the gifted Little League pitcher, the promising tennis prodigy. Something else catches their interest, and the sport fades because, while they have more talent than everyone around them, their heart is not in the sport. If your heart is not in writing, you’re not a writer. But you still can write.

What skill level can determine is how much validation you receive about your writing. Typically, gifted writers receive a lot of encouragement in school, but I worry about writers who have more love than talent. A teacher who gets overzealous in criticizing your writing can kill the passion in you. That’s a real shame.

For one thing, you can improve in time. But mostly, if you love to write you should be encouraged even though you won’t be writing for a living or maybe even sharing your writing at all. The process of writing can be healing, so don’t give it up just because some teacher didn’t nourish your desire to write.

Both Writers and Non-writers Can Write a Memoir

If you’re trying to write a memoir, don’t worry about whether you’re a writer. Just keep at it until you finish your memoir. It may be your only completed written work or the only writing you’ve ever taken on voluntarily. Writing a memoir may be important to you for a lot of reasons; enjoying the writing process doesn’t have to be one of them.

And if you’re a writer in your heart and soul, a memoir may just be another format you feel like trying out. You may believe that you’ve lived an ordinary life, but you find it an exciting project to describe in writing the world that is uniquely yours.

My Own Example

I think I was pretty much born a writer. I wrote a song when I was about twelve, I always wrote my own cards for my parents’ birthdays, and I started writing poetry in high school. None of that came about as a conscious decision. The way a friendly person makes friends from childhood on, I just wrote as part of who I was.

My English literature major in college seemed an obvious choice, since in high school I received good grades on my term papers and enjoyed writing them. But halfway through college, when I took a couple of journalism courses, I had a name for what I really was: a journalist. I was a reporter. I could write up any set of facts. I realized that I enjoyed doing research and conducting interviews more than relying on my imagination to come up with plots and develop characters for creative writing. I never dreamed about writing the next great American novel.

Since then, I’ve been lucky to have been a working journalist, a grammar teacher, and eventually a memoir coach, editor and ghostwriter. But even though I write professionally, I still write for myself. My computer files’ labels tell the story: “old writings,” “miscellaneous writings,” “song lyrics,” “parenting reflections,” “speeches,” “TV pilot,” “poems,” “script ideas,” and dozens of titles of stories.

Even this blog—no one forces me to write it. I just like getting my thoughts down. I’m a writer. Maybe you are, too. Or maybe you’re not. That’s okay, and your memoir may still be amazing.

 

Login

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!

Schedule A Call