Life writing is an opportunity to enjoy all the events and people of your life in a new and likely even more interesting way. Why? Now you have something delicious called perspective, and a wealth of experience that enables you to fully grasp the significance of what you’ve been through, you’ll see what you learned [...]
As you spend time reflecting on your life for your life writing or memoir project, you will encounter regrets. Roads not taken, friendships not maintained, doubts about your responses to difficulties or opportunities. It goes with the territory. No life lived fully can be entirely without regrets. What do we do with or about such [...]
A family reunion is a memoir writer’s dream resource. This is primary research on a grand scale. Imagine a collection of all the significant people in your extended family and their partners, wanting to get together simply to share stories. Okay, yes, they’ll want to party as well. You should probably consider going into marathon [...]
A memoir can be anything that records your life. A written memoir is just one of many options. Photographs, if you have a lot of them, supplemented by written stories is another method to capture your life memories. You can use your photos in an album with pages of text to accompany them or build [...]
Sooner or later when writing a memoir, or even notes for a memoir, you’ll get to some tough bits. There are sorrows, hurtful experiences, damaging relationships and many other things that give pain in most lives. How are you going to deal with that? You could of course choose to ignore these hurts and sorrows [...]
A memoir can be about your whole life or any part of it you want to write about. Let’s look at a few starting points. 1. Start with a date. In 1975 a friend and I bought an abandoned white clapboard prairie church in a tiny village in Saskatchewan for $300. I’ve got a lot [...]
When I tell people that my mission is to help folks write their personal stories, or memoirs, I almost always get a comment that goes something like, ‘my life is so ordinary that I’d have nothing to write’. I beg to differ. I don’t believe there is such a thing as an ordinary life. There [...]