Posted in Hating Your Book, Memoir Writing, My Mother's Money on Mar 29th, 2011
It’s riveting. It’s exciting. If I wanted to, I probably could make it read like a thriller. Yet, here’s a conversation I have at least once a week. A friend says, “How’s your memoir coming along?” “Which one?” I ask, hoping this friend is asking about the other one, the one I’m writing that I [...]
Posted in Creative Writing Tips, Memoir Writing, My Mother's Money on Mar 28th, 2011
Introduction While sorting out the question of whether my work-in-progress, My Mother’s Money, is a memoir or a family history, I became intrigued by several thoughtful posts on Virginia Lloyd’s blog addressing this and other questions about what does and what should qualify as memoir. So I invited her to discuss the distinction further here. [...]
Posted in Personal Essays on Feb 16th, 2011
Not in my writing projects. Although I have changed the opening of my memoir, My Mother’s Money—or Almost an Heiress—6 times. (I’m still shuffling the pages back and forth between two sections, weighing which one has the stronger hook.) I’m talking about the many times in the past two and a half years that I’ve [...]
Posted in Memoir Writing on Feb 10th, 2011
Today’s guest post is by Darah Zeledon, aka The Warrior Mom, wife and mother of five young children. Darah and I are online buddies, and I know her as smart and funny. If you don’t believe me, read “Top 10 Embarrassing Things My Kids Have Said & Top 11 I’d Like To Say.” I knew [...]
Posted in Personal Essays on Feb 1st, 2011
Leave a comment about what interferes with your writing to win a free download of Polish and Publish: The Indispensable Toolkit for Creative Writers. This time last week I was arguing with a salmon. The Whole Foods butcher had boned it nicely, but left some unappealing tan flesh attached to its underside. I was struggling [...]
Posted in Creative Writing Tips, Memoir Writing on Jan 28th, 2011
Some of the most useful, powerful, and perhaps lesser known resources I recommend to my students who are working on memoirs, life stories, and family histories, and use in my own memoir writing are listed below. They include electronic and hard copy resources, including some of the sharpest and most helpful memoir writers on Twitter. [...]
Posted in Personal Essays, Polish and Publish on Jan 22nd, 2011
Leave a comment about what interferes with your writing. Add your email address (which I won’t share) to win a free download of Polish and Publish: The Indispensable Toolkit for Creative Writers. No, not my home office furniture. That would keep me from writing, but my dear friend Ava just gave me her husband’s ergonomic [...]
Posted in Creative Writing Tips, Memoir Writing on Nov 27th, 2010
If you’ve begun writing a memoir, you might have noticed that the process is revealing aspects of yourself and your past that you failed to recognize before. It’s a little like assembling a jigsaw puzzle that you’re still seeking all the pieces to and slowly beginning to understand their relationship to one another. As I [...]
Posted in Creative Writing Tips, Memoir Writing on Nov 18th, 2010
Yesterday I introduced the writer, Darah Zeledon, mother of 5 small children. Today we continue our interview with this Warrior Mom, who manages to slip in time nearly every day to work on her memoir or add a post to her blog. What do you do when an idea hits you and you’re otherwise engaged? [...]
Posted in Creative Writing Tips, Memoir Writing, Polish and Publish on Nov 17th, 2010
I met Darah Zeledon, the Warrior Mom, through one of the LinkedIn groups for writers that she and I both belong to. She’d posted an essay she’d written; I loved it, so I contacted her to tell her so. Since then, we’ve become fast online friends. We seem to share a similar high-energy enthusiasm and [...]
