Soleil Lifestory Network is scheduling an anthology, And That’s When Things Changed / Stories of Decisive Moments, of a breakthrough moment in your life or in the life of the person who is the main character of your story.
Join us in bringing your work to the attention of a larger public…for more info: http://www.turningmemories.com/anthology1.html
Eventually, after you have written awhile, you will likely have amassed a number of vignettes, story segments, and stories. You will want to group them together to make a statement, a bigger picture. How will you do it? Below are four ideas for organizing stories.
Remember: These suggestions do not refer to the sequence in which the stories are written but rather to how they can be ordered after they have been written.
1) Chronology–If you choose a chronological order, you organize your stories in a way that most nearly replicates the sequence in which events happened. For example, what happened in your childhood is placed first in the narration and what happened in your youth is placed second and in your middle-age, third; what happened in the spring is placed first, in the summer, second, etc. If you organize all your stories in this way, there will be a natural continuum among them based on time connection. This is the way most people choose to link their stories and it is an easy organization for the reader to follow.
2) Subject–You might choose to put together everything about one person in one chapter and everything about another in a second chapter. This gives a clear account of your subject but omits interactions that might change the way we perceive a character. The collection of stories may seem disconnected.
3) Theme–You might write about a specific theme that is of interest to you. In this way, your story might be a story about labor unions or about dedication to art. Everything is chosen or omitted according to how it develops your theme. This can make for a very focused book.
Alternately, you can choose topics across the generations or among family members. These topics might include religion, careers, marriage, etc.
For example, you might look at the relationship to work in your family during your childhood. You might write about your grandparents’ and your parents’ work attitudes and practices during this time. Then you can give your attention to other themes in their lives during your childhood: parenting, religion, etc.
Another possibility is to write about a theme in your grandparents’ lives and then go on to its appearance in your parents’ lives and then in yours and lastly in your children’s. You can choose to give an internal chronological development to each of your themes: start with youth and proceed to old age or the present with each generation. Then start the whole process over again with another theme.
4) Both chronology and theme–Although you may begin to write your pieces chronologically or thematically, you may find yourself combining both of these elements in your final product. These approaches can easily be integrated into your life story as a whole.
Good Luck organizing your stories!
For your FREE 36-page Memory List Question Book, go tohttp://turningmemories.com/ebookstore.html
It’s a quandary: where do you start writing your memoir? Many people may say: from the beginning. But, I don’t think that is the best place to start composing…
The answer is actually quite simple: Start writing your memoir anywhere in the story you feel like writing about on any given day and keep writing as long as you wish to do so. Then, if the topic ceases to interest you and you would like to write about something else, go ahead and do so. Write about the new story line even if you haven’t finished the previous one. You are connecting to your muse at this point!
Memoirs are really collected musings that are woven seamlessly. Think about it: if you wrote 3 pages a day-in any order-for 100 days you would have three hundred pages of manuscript. You would then organize the stories and vignettes-most people do so chronologically. Inevitably there will be many transitional stories missing. These you will then write in and insert in their proper place in the manuscript.
Only you will know that the vignette between pages 179 and 184 was written first of all the stories; the reader will not even suspect it. For the reader, the memoir will begin on page one! While this is certainly not always the case, the beginning of the memoir, the place that more than any other in the book, creates a tone to the story, may have been written last. In fact, writing or re-writing the first chapter of your memoir is frequently the last thing you do in the writing of your book.
Below are prompts for the first week of November. To help you to write your memoirs more prolifically–and even bring them to a finish in the form of a published memoir–I offer these eight suggestions to help you succeed. They are tried and true tips that bear repeating and repeating.
November 1: Ask someone in your family to tell you some of his/her lifestories.
November 2: Share a few of your lifestories with someone with whom you have not done so before.
November 3: Visualize an event from your early life. Take notes on what you recall.(See pages 52 and 136 of Turning Memories Into Memoirs, third edition)
November 4: Create a memory List of at least 200 items. (See page 41 of Turning Memories Into Memoirs, third edition)
November 5: Write a story from an item on your Memory List.
November 6: Organize a lifestory party at which you invite your siblings. Have a free exchange of memories.
November 7: Tell a story to your child or grandchild about one of your grandparents.
November 8: Tell a friend or relative the back story of an object in your house. Write the story down.
November 9: Write in a journal about today. Include salient details that will make the day vivid when you reread this entry years from now.
November 10: Write a 3-to-5-page story about something in your life you have not spoken to many people about.
November 11: Volunteer to write five pages of a relative’s lifestory.
November 12: Find your memorabilia (diplomas, newspaper articles, certificates) and write at least 50 memories that come to you.
November 13: Reread old letters and write down as many memories as they bring to mind.
November 14: Find a memoir in a bookstore or library. Begin reading.
November 15: See a movie that is a biography.
For a free e-book on writing memoirs, The Memory List Question Book: http://www.turningmemories.com/memorylist.html
To help you to write your memoirs more prolifically–and even bring them to a finish in the form of a published memoir–I offer these eight suggestions. They are tried and true tips that bear repeating and repeating.
1. Set up a regular writing time. How long you write is perhaps not as important as how frequently you do so. Once you have set up a writing time, honor it as you would a medical appointment. Don’t allow others to usurp your time!
2. Give yourself permission to write a rough first draft. Perfectionism is not a virtue at this stage. Keep writing for volume. Quality will enter in later
3. Start anywhere in the story you feel like writing about on any given day and keep writing as long as possible. If the topic changes on the next day, write about the new story line even if you haven’t finished the previous one. You are connecting to your muse at this point!
4. Once you have a number of stories or story pieces, collate them in a three-ring binder according to chronological order. Write the missing links between the texts that you have already written. Seeing your stories pile up will also encourage you to continue writing.
5. Read memoirs critically to learn as much as you can from other writers. I call this process “reading as a writer.”
6. Commit to reading how-to-write books, take a class, seek coaching. A professional can create many shortcuts for you.
7. Work with an editor. An editor can help spot problems that have become invisible to you.
8. Create an end date (publication) as a stimulus to keep writing. Tell people about this publication date.
I wish you many happy hours of writing each and every week of November Is Lifewriting Month.
To make money from memoir work, you must consistently and carefully pay attention to income goals.
Set annual, quarterly and monthly income goals and then create and schedule memoir programs in pursuit of those goals. In your programs, you must not compromise quality, otherwise your word-of-mouth referrals will decline and your program drop-out rate will increase. Concurrent with assuring program quality, you must also push for greater fiscal responsibility. Each product must generate its share–and more–of the income you need to meet your income goals–and ideally exceed them.
As unreasonable and counter-productive as it may seem, many personal historians are reluctant to charge appropriately for their work. This may come from some belief that to care for others we must abandon caring for ourselves. Or, charging to care for someone is an indication of lack of real caring on our part.
The fact is that, if you do not nurture your income and meet your income goals, you will eventually be out of business and therefore unable to help and care for others. Next year, if you want to be available to work with people to preserve their personal and family stories, you must nurture your income–this is part of running a small business. Without satisfactory income, you will eventually quit memoir work.
EXERCISE
Examine your relationship to profit by keeping a money journal. Write for at least two pages at every sitting and do this exercise at least five to seven times in the next month. Become sensitive to your relationship to money and to profit by examining it regularly. Keeping looking for what attitudes and behaviors you need to change to help your bottom line.
Good luck tracking your income–and join me on November 30 for the free tele-class that will get you prospering!
For your FREE 36-page Jumpstart Your Memoir Business Success book, go to http://www.turningmemories.com/jumpstartbusinessbook.html
While family and friends are a worthy readership for your memoir, it is possible to reach an even larger audience. Here are four suggestions to enable your story to appeal to a broader public.
1) Write a story that is truly well-written and whose reading–the prose itself–will bring joy to your reader. To do this, you will need to make effective use of a number of fiction writing techniques including images, metaphors, similes, suspense, foreshadowing, dialog, etc. You will need to achieve clarity, coherence, conciseness, completeness, and much more. If you enjoy playing with language and have an ear for it, you can succeed at creating a well-written memoir that will bring pleasure to its readers.
2) Find what is truly unique about your story and explore that thread. Perhaps you were experimented on with drugs by the CIA or perhaps you were a prisoner of war or perhaps you have given birth to quintuplets. People love to read about a personal experience that is different and unique. And… it is highly probable that you have done something in your life that is unique–even if it is only during a small portion of your life. Perhaps there was a time when you tried to reconcile a liberal political view with a conservative religious group or perhaps you were afflicted with a malady that vanished when you took a special cure. It may take you time to identify what you have experienced that was unique, but be patient with yourself. Linger with your story a while and your uniqueness will come to you. Remember that the uniqueness does not have to appeal to the masses–a niche will do.
3) Set your story in a historical context. Perhaps you were the first person to do something in your group or community–the first man to graduate from a hitherto all-woman’s college. Perhaps you were in the Vietnam war and you wish to write a memoir from the point of view of an ordinary soldier or perhaps you were a pacifist who opposed the war. Perhaps you were among the first women to become a financial advisor in your state and want to write about the dissolution of gender barriers in banking. Perhaps you were housemaid to the Kennedys and have stories to tell about national figures who frequented the house where you worked. Perhaps you have a story to tell about what it was like to be a newly-arrived Muslim living in North America. To succeed at setting your story in a larger historical context, you will obviously have to learn about the historical context and be able to write about it with ease. Not only as it affected you but about the “bigger picture” that gives context to your individual experience. Begin by reading about the historical context and from that may come your story.
4) Find the psychological/spiritual/cultural drama in your story. It often happens that writers can write about the psychological or spiritual unfolding of their personality and, in doing so, write about the “universal,” the typical or normative unfolding and development of a personality or of the soul. This treatment of your memoir sets your life experience as a possible model. An example would be how you became an artist or how you have had an experience of enlightenment or how you rose from rags to riches.
The value of a memoir is measured by the inherent value to the writer and to its selected audience pursuing the same sort of life. If you want to reach a larger audience, it is important to position your story.
These four memoir possibilities demonstrate how to go about making an otherwise ordinary life into a story that can appeal to a larger audience. It is in the rewriting stage, as you struggle with the story that is trying both to remain hidden and to come out, that you will most likely achieve the insights that will appeal to a broader readership. So… keep writing. It is possible for you to produce a story that is not only worth your time to write but worth someone else’s time to read.
For your FREE 36-page Memory List Question Book, go to http://turningmemories.com/qebkstore.html.
To your dismay, you have been writing in snippets. In the mornings, when you show up at your laptop, you face, as does every writer, a demanding master: writing for the day.
Oh, how you wish it were the end of your scheduled writing period!
Like many memoir writers, your memoir writing time is perhaps not long. Then you need to move on to the numerous chores that are attendant on keeping a life and a home going. You feel some urgency to write deathless prose because of the short time allotted.
Perhaps you open a file and find there 200 words you had written, say, several days earlier. Then you think, “OK, today, I bring this vignette to completion,” but it seems that you can only write another few hundred words before you feel like moving on to something else–anything else but this dreadful text on the screen before you! What you have been writing that day seems to be only trash. Any junior high school writer could do better, for heaven’s sake! So you think, “I better move on to another story. Let this ‘meretricious melodrama’ incubate for a while longer.”
You open another document. “What do you know, this story fragment already has 500 words. I’ll pitch right in with some editing. Get those five hundred words into shape.” By the time you get to the end of the text, you are able to add a few hundred new words and, by the time that was done, it has become the end of your hour and, with great relief, you realize you can move on and still call yourself a writer.
But wait, don’t walk away discouraged. Calculate the number of pages you have written. Even snippets add up to many pages if done regularly enough. While none of it is likely to be deathless prose, and you do not know how much of it will survive into a finished memoir, it is nonetheless always easier to rewrite and edit than to produce a fresh text. So–
Be kind to yourself. Keep at your work and you’ll produce some text to serve as a basis for a memoir.
Remember: “Inch by inch, it’s a cinch. Yard by yard, it’s hard.”
“Each poem clarifies something. But then you’ve got to do it again. You can’t get ‘clarified’ to stay so: let you not think that. In a way, it’s like nothing more than blowing smoke rings. Making little poems encourages a man to see that there is shapeliness in the world. A poem is an arrest of disorder.”
– Robert Frost, poet
When I read the quote above, I did not have to make much of a leap to sense that the words apply to the task you and I undertake to write memoir. More than anything perhaps, we want to arrest the disorder that seems to be life. And so, we take our raw material–the events of our lives and of the lives of the people who surround us–and endeavor to make meaning of it all. In short, we take up our mishmash of events, our disorder of memories, and attempt to make order–or, at the least, minimize the disorder.
This rendering of order proves to be soothing. It is what we deeply wish to achieve in our lives–to have all the disparate and seemingly meaningless (or at least random) occurrences, wishes, pains somehow come together coherently, meaningfully. It all happened, we realize in an “A-ha!” moment, for some reason rather than by chance. This “arrest of disorder” is also what our reader wishes. (Readers read memoirs, I am convinced, not only to be entertained–as in “a good read”–but to find help in arriving at some sense of how life can–or even ought–to be lived. In the order you impose to life via the choices you articulate in your memoir, the reader hopes to learn how to achieve the same order in hers.
Having done the work of writing a short lifestory or even a lengthy memoir, you are perhaps, at first, satisfied.
“There, I’ve done it,” I hear you exclaim, but then I see you turn away. A moment of doubt has unsettled you.
“Have I really done what I set out to do?” you ask as you acknowledge your misgivings to yourself. Perhaps you have not really arrived at the end of this task. Perhaps you should continue writing–or more clearly, feeling your way through your material.
To quote Frost again: “But then you’ve got to do it again. You can’t get ‘clarified’ to stay so: let you not think that.” So…you rewrite your story. You pay special attention to the metaphors and the extended images. You cross out everything that seems distracting–a disorder of thought–and you make sure you have chosen the most judicious of words possible to express yourself.
And so you continue to apply yourself. There are discouraging moments when you are sure you are “blowing smoke rings.” But perhaps, too, there are exhilarating moments when you feel that you have arrested the disorder. Like Frost, you realize that “making (memoir) encourages a (person) to see that there is shapeliness in the world.”
Yes, this memoir passion of yours is a good one, a healthy one for you as it releases endorphins that keep you wanting more of the pleasure of writing. And, it’s good for humankind because it encourages us all to believe that possibly “there is shapeliness in the world.”
Keep writing because you and your family and your wider audience need the experience of “an arrest of disorder.”
And if your writing produces a stimulating release of endorphins…
Enjoy!
A concept that I have found crucial in organizing my marketing efforts for Soleil Lifestory Network is that of “the pipeline.” As a business person, I–and you–ignore the pipeline to our great peril. We must always be aware of having the marketing pipeline full of prospects. This is an ongoing process. It is never done!
The pipeline is an image that refers to all the people who have connected with you in some way and are therefore your potential clients. Think of the pipeline as having an entrance (inquiry) and an exit (purchase). In any pipeline at any given time, there are many sorts of prospects–some making their way to a purchase others clogging the line by requiring attention that you need to expend elsewhere. These need to be taken out of the system.
1. There are the “I’m just curious” people. Some are looking for free information–they will never buy from you. Identify them early before you spend much time. Be polite, outline your offerings–and let them go. They will eat your time and drain your business development. They only seem to be in the pipeline. They aren’t–they’re clogging it. And if you are spending time on them, you taking time away from a true potential customer.
2. Some people make their way through the pipeline quickly and will buy right away. The “selling” has already occurred when they heard you speak, were recommended by a friend, or when they studied your website. They are ready to buy. What you need to do with them is close the sale! If they are ready to buy, don’t keep selling! Let them buy so you can both move on.
3. Other prospects, however, need a long time in the pipeline. This is usually because they want to be convinced. The most economical way for you to do this is to have multiple, sequential response materials available on the (a) benefits and (b) features of your products and services.
Of those who need convincing, some will purchase soon (for instance, half of our new teachers purchase Affiliation Packages within three weeks of first contact, most do so at the second contact.)
Others will say “it’s not right for me now.” They require continuing contact so they don’t slip out of your pipeline. Many will eventually buy a product from you–but not now. You must have a system in place to keep them connected to you (response materials) over the coming months and years it will take to move them towards a purchase. (I have found that if an Affiliate Package inquiry does not purchase within three weeks, the sale is likely to take months or years. In fact, a surprising number of old inquiries do eventually purchase.) For many of these people, a crucial condition in their lives is missing to finish the purchase.
You can keep them in your pipeline by using multiple (sequential) response materials as follow through to their contact. This can be crucial to ensuring that the prospect doesn’t leak into someone else’s system. Obviously, it is a waste of your marketing time to sell the concept (in our case, the value of memoir preservation) to a prospect and have them, months later, purchase your service–from someone else.
Most potential buyers in this category are pleased to purchase the concept (they have come to you in search of it, after all) and won’t maintain a relationship with you. They are likely to see your product and someone else’s as interchangeable–so you must make it clear with your follow-up contact–that your product or service is special. And you must be there when they arrive at the purchase point at last. (This is all called market positioning–and it’s another article!)
4. Still others in your pipeline will never buy–for whatever reasons. At one point, they have simply slipped away–found another product more to their liking, given up their interest, or–who knows? If you have ever done political canvassing or door-to-door fundraising, you know that you need a certain number of “no’s” to get one “yes”. Don’t get discourgaed that every prospect doesn’t convert to a sale. In our business as in others, it’s a matter of percentages and it’s always true that the more prospects you have, the more sales you’ll get.
When you wear the Marketing Director hat for your company, it’s your job to know who and how many prospects are in your pipeline at any given time. It’s also your job to keep that pipeline filled at all times. Because when your pipeline dries up–you are in trouble.
