Writing your Memoir Blog: Your Telegram Has Arrived

When you start any writing project, writers need to consider their audience and purpose. If you do not know who you are writing to and why, the project is probably already doomed. To create writing that is effective, it is important to consider what constitutes good writing.

To this end, I find it helpful to think about the four simple steps of effective writing.

As parents, we are all concerned for our children. It starts out when they are babies where we focus on them simply being fed, clean, warm and safe. To these needs we add the emotional and psychological concerns, food intolerances, educational resources, appropriate social activities and the list goes on. 

And underneath all of the activity, every parent is grappling with the same question: How do we prepare our children for the world in which they live?

According to research, the answer might be simpler than you thought.

Many a parent or grandparent has sat down with their family and started to share a story. While some people seem to be able to engage the kids for hours, others find their audience loosing interest in minutes. 

So what's the difference? It's all about the storytelling skills. 

If they don't come naturally, that's OK. The skills can easily be learned and make significant immediate impacts to successfully engage with your audience.

When it comes to writing memoirs and autobiographies, potential writers are often worried about being sued.

They aren't worried for nothing!

Because while you are writing about the events of your life, whether it is your entire life or just one specific aspect of it, it inevitably requires writing about the lives of others. This is where it becomes difficult. Your view on another person, what they actually did, their choices and their behavior raise potentially significant legal risks that the writer must navigate if they want to avoid litigation.

After all of your hard work, you have finally finished your manuscript. Congratulations!

Now all you want to do is share it with others. Perhaps get it published? Or have your story made into a movie? You might just make a fortune!

But is it really ready?

To give your story the best chance of being picked up by publishers or studios, it is vital to engage a good editor. A great editor. But there are different types of editors offering different types of skills.

So you need them all…….perhaps?

Do you need some of them – ABSOLUTELY.

So here is a quick guide to ensure you engage the right team to help make your dreams a reality.

So what is a good writing prompt?

A good prompt makes you think and write about things you wouldn't already include. In terms of writing about your first job, a good prompt might look like this:

What sort of prompt would that look like: 

Describe how did you felt when you started your first day of work? 

The reason this is a better prompt is that it puts the writer in the story. Yes, even memoir writers can forget to actually write about themselves, and their story looks more like a list of what they did, but reveals nothing about how they are or how they felt. 

For a memoir writer, this is critical to the success and therefore the impact of your story. Your writing must draw readers into your world. To see things, and feel things from your point of view. To be powerful, you must be able to bring them with you, and not have them observe from a distance. 

An old friend called. We had a laugh. Chatted about old times. We made a date to catch up via Zoom in a couple of weeks. And said goodbye. 

Then I got a text. Admitted to hospital, it said. 

And another. On a ventilator, it said.

Gone. 

This is the story I never wanted to write. 

There are things that are said - and said for good reason. But they have been repeated endlessly and so have lost some of their potency and impact. This is one of them.