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Last week I started a series of brief interviews with memoir authors that I’m calling Memoir Moments. Over the coming year, I’ll pose questions to these amazing women. For now, I’m asking them to share their insights on effective ways to start a memoir. 

Here’s Your Memoir Moment #1 with Linda Joy Myers, author of Don’t Call Me Mother: Breaking the Cycle of Mother-Daughter Abandonment. Hope you enjoy her words of wisdom on getting started. I was struck by the beauty of her first paragraphs when she read them during the interview. I think hearing her will inspire you.

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Download MP3 Right-click on the link to save this file into your computer.

If you are interested in purchasing Linda Joy Myers’ memoir, click on the book and it will take you to the Amazon listing.

Enjoy this interview? Please write your comments below. Have questions you’d like me to ask memoir authors? Let me know and I’ll add them to my list.
Until next time…

Want to hear advice about writing your memoir from successful memoir authors?

This fall’s East of Eden Writers Conference, held in Salinas, CA, John Steinbeck’s home, was a big success. I was fortunate to serve as the moderator for the Night Owl Memoir Panel. You got that right. We started at 9PM after two long days of sessions and workshops. However, there was great enthusiasm for our topic and we had a wonderful audience. I hope that the questions I asked and those asked by the audience will help you on your writing writing path.

Because the panel lasted about 1 1/2 hours, I’ve edited the audio file into several parts — each around 15 minutes. I post them all in the coming weeks. In this first segment, you will hear the introduction of the panelists — Linda Joy Myers, Phyllis Matson, Maralys Wills, Kendra Bonnett, and Betty Auchard — as well as responses to the first two questions posed.

I’ll share photos of the panels at the same time that I ask them a question.

Maralys Wills answered the first question: What was the most difficult part of writing your memoir and how did you overcome it?

Linda Joy Myers responds to the question: It is said that the process of writing a memoir changes the author. In what ways was this true for you?

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Download MP3: Memoir Panel [18:16m] Right-click on the link to save this file into your computer.

As you know, Kendra Bonnett and I wrote the award-winning collective memoir, Rosie’s Daughters: The “First Woman To” Generation Tells Its Story. Many people don’t know about collective memoirs or how the techniques and tools of this genre can also enrich the individual memoir.

To explore the collective memoir topic, Linda Joy Myers, Founder of National Association of Memoir Writers, asked me to participate in this month’s teleseminar that she offers as a membership benefit. We had a great time talking about such topics as: What is a collective memoir? How common is the collective memoir? What are the reasons to consider writing a collective memoir? What are the techniques of a collective memoir and how can they be used in an individual memoir? What do you do with all the material assembled for a collective memoir? Does a collective memoir have any special issues relating to formatting?

Linda Joy has graciously allowed me to make this teleseminar available to you. For more information about her association, you can visit namw.org. 

Hope you enjoy our discussion. I’ll be glad to hear from you about your thoughts on this topic.

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Matilda Butler’s Teleseminar with Linda Joy Myers for National Association of Memoir Writers
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Download MP3:Teleseminar on Collective Memoirs. Right-click on the link to save this file into your computer.

Kendra and I just returned from the 2008 East of Eden Writers Conference. As you might guess, the conference is held in John Steinbeck’s hometown of Salinas, California, known as the “salad bowl of America.” Driving there, we passed the spring-like pale green, red-tipped, and dark kelly green tops of the numerous lettuce varieties growing in the nearby fields. A treat for the eyes.

Kendra’s presentation focused on Using the Internet to Write Your Way to More Book Sales. As the audience gathered, she talked individually with those on the front row about their current use of the Internet.

The workshop participants were eager to learn the differences between “old school” and “new school” approaches to marketing your book. As Kendra says, “Classic approaches to marketing are always effective. But now the Internet means authors can directly build readership for their books.”

Kendra urges all writers to begin to build their brand and their future readers as soon as they start writing their book.

She highlighted the importance of branding yourself and building your audience with the following statistics for the most recent year available from Nielson’s Bookscan: 1.2 million books published. 950,000 sold 99 copies or fewer (that’s 79%). 25,000 sold more than 5,000 (that’s 2%). 500 sold more than 100,000 copies (that’s an infintesimally small %). “Think getting a publisher who places your book in all the bookstores is your ticket to sales and fame? ” continues Kendra. “Well, think again. Seventy percent of all books in bookstores are returned to the publisher. That means no royalties for the author.”

Still want to go with a big publisher? “Hey, that great,” says Kendra.”But the best way to get an agent and a publisher is to prove that you already have readers who like your voice, your style, and your content. Creating a popular blog, driving traffic from social networking sites, and developing relationships will help you land the deal you want. Get started now.”

Think it was all work and no play at the conference? Heck no. Kendra and I took off between our workshops to go over to the coast. Here’s a photo of us when we stopped along the 17-mile drive to watch the fiery red sunset.

I need your help. On September 6, I’m moderating a panel of women memoir authors at the East of Eden Writers Conference in Salinas, CA. Each woman has published at least one memoir and two have two published memoirs.  

We already have a few questions to pose to the panelists. I’ve listed them below. If any of the questions we’ve listed resonate with you, let us know. If they don’t, let us know that as well.

But most importantly, I’d like you to imagine yourself in the audience of that session. What questions would you ask if you were sitting in that room?

You can post your questions as a comment to this blog. Or, you can email me using the information in the Contact tab of this site.  I look forward to hearing from you. Your reward? More about that in a minute.

Our current list:

Q1. Why did you write your memoir, in other words, what was your motivation?

Q2. What was the most difficult part of the writing process and how did you overcome the problem or difficulty?

Q3. If your memoir required research, how did you go about finding the information you needed?

Q4. What audience were you writing for? Did you find that the people who read your memoir are primarily the same audience?

Q5. What advice would you give to someone just starting to write a memoir?

Q6. What did you learn about yourself in the process of writing your memoir?

Q7. Do you feel that you were changed by the process of writing your memoir?

Q8. What was the biggest surprise that happened in this process?

Your reward for sending us your questions? We’re going to tape the session and post it on this website. You get to hear your questions answered.

Thanks.  I look forward to hearing from you.

Post #10 Capture your book’s message in audio and video.

As Matilda explains in her ebook Top 10 Reasons to Write Your Memoir, (see column to the right) writers are motivated by many things in their lives. Capturing the distant details of our lives is important to many of us. Some others want to set the record straight by telling our side of a story or event. For many of us, however, it’s about healing or finding direction in our lives. I think these last two describe Elizabeth Gilbert’s popular memoir, Eat, Pray, Love: One Woman’s Search for Everything Across Italy, India and Indonesia.

We found this wonderful video on YouTube; it’s produced by Borders. Writers this is something you should all be thinking about creating for your books. Audio and video play very well on blogs and websites. And it’s easier than you might think. Please watch and tell us what you think.

We hope you’ll join us in a new online class.

Story Circle Network, a wonderful resource for women writers, is based in Texas. But don’t let the location concern you. Story Circle Network offers many services and support online. And now they are branching out into online classes. And Matilda Butler and I are part of the faculty. Please check us out: Start Small Finish Big.

We have a new class called “Start Small Finish Big: From Memoir Vignette to Publication, Part One.” We’re looking forward to working with women who want to break through “I want to” and actually start writing that memoir. More importantly, we have a strategy to get women published and even offer an opportunity for you to sell your work.

Our full class is offered through both the fall and winter semesters. We’ll hold conference calls for the whole class, post our articles on a blog for the entire class to read, learn from the online classwork we offer. It will be inspirational, motivational and help you move forward with your writing plans.

We look forward to seeing you online.

When our children were small, we took them on short walks in nearby wooded areas. As they got older, we showed them the pleasures of hiking the trails of Yosemite National Park and other places of beauty. No matter where we went or how easy or how hard the path, they loved to dash ahead to seek new adventures. Parental pace was much too slow for them. They ran ahead and then came back quickly. They wore themselves out by covering each distance twice. But that was part of their enthusiasm.

Reflecting on the different paces we manage at different times in our lives, consider this sixth and last Tao of memoir writing:

The child in us runs ahead on the path with boundless energy. The seasoned scout cautiously leads the way.

In writing, we tell others of delights or dangers, yet we are the same person.

There is more than one storyteller in each of us. We should let each of these voices come to the fore at different times to help others understand the many textures of our lives.

Writing Tip. Writing about a time of passionate youthfulness? Try using short words, short sentences, and short paragraphs. You will convey some of the boundless energy of that period. Writing about a period of aging or time spent caring for your elderly parents? See if longer sentences and paragraphs better reflect the slowness of those experiences.

If you think about music, recall that there are fast passages and slow passages. Similarly, words create a tempo for the reader and the memoirist controls this by varying the length of the sentences and paragraphs.

Exercise: Find a paragraph in a memoir that is particularly vivid for you. Analyze it: Count the number of sentences. Count the number of words in each sentence. Do several long sentences follow each other? Are short sentences used to create impact?

Then rewrite the paragraph. Try making a long sentence short. Make a short sentence long. You can do this by combining sentences or by cutting some in half. How do the changes alter the rhythm of the story? Which do you like better?

A “Safe Haven for Writers”

Whenever I come across a great site for writers, I like to pass it along to friends and colleagues. We all should do whatever we can to encourage writers who inspire us through their websites and blogs.

I want to share a real find. Martha Engber’s thoughtful and informative blog Growing Great Writers From the Ground Up. Martha knows her craft; she’s worn just about every cap a writer can. She’s a published author, journalist, playwright and now blogger. Her blog has useful material for both fiction and nonfiction writers.

In the interest of transparency, you need to know that Martha recently wrote about Rosie’s Daughters: The “First Woman To” Generation Tells Its Story and our winning a 2008 IPPY Book Award. But this post is not payback. It is, however, how I happened to discover her site. [click to continue...]

Not all stories are created equal.  Some memoir vignettes we write evoke pleasant memories.  It is tempting to tell these stories as if we are still experiencing them.  Other vignettes evoke quite the opposite memories.  When we tell these contrasting stories, we want to “keep our distance.”  When we consider the Tao of memoir writing, we say:

Too close or too far away, we cannot see clearly.

There is a best distance for recalling each event of our lives.

Some stories may be pure delight; they invite us to recount them from an intimate distance. Yet if we stand too close, we may miss their meaning.

Other stories may be too painful to tell without distance, without a narrator’s voice that lets us step outside the situation. Yet if we are too far away, we may lose sight of the emotional and factual truths.

Writing Tip: We write memoirs for many reasons.  But a common outcome across all the reasons for starting is a better understanding of ourselves at the ending.  Writing a memoir provides clarity on what has been and usually helps us to look forward with insights about the kind of life we want to live.

Try this:  Take a newspaper or magazine article.  Hold it up so that it almost touches your eye.  What do you see?  Take that same newspaper or magazine article and put it on the other side of the room.  Now walk back to where you usually sit.  What do you see?

If you do this little exercise, you’ll understand what we mean in this fifth consideration of the Tao of memoir writing.  Too close or too far away, we cannot see clearly. When the newspaper or magazine article was next to your eye, you couldn’t make out a single word, possibly not even a single letter.  The parallel in memoir writing is the story, chapter, or vignette when you include many details but forget to say why it mattered.

When the newspaper or magazine article was across the room, you couldn’t read words although you could tell something was written on the paper.  In memoir writing, this is the equivalent of crafting a vignette in such a remote way that the reader wonders why you bothered to include it.  Again, to “see clearly” our lives, we need to write at the mid-range, neither too close nor too far away.

This is not to say we write about all events in the same way or from the same distance. Be prepared to move in as close as you are comfortable. But before you conclude your story, move back.  Put the story in context.  Consider its impact on your life.

Write a paragraph about an event or person in your life.  The first time, lavish details on this vignette. Get as close to it as you can. The second time, write with coldness and detachment.  Reflect on how you feel after each effort.  Write a second paragraph for each version. In the second paragraph take the story and put it in context, personal, cultural, or historical. Give the vignette perspective, personal perspective. How did you feel? How did it change you?

As you write your memoir consider the implication for you and your reader of writing at various distances from the story.