IT’S HARD FOR ME TO BELIEVE, but I’m rapidly approaching the eighth anniversary of launching WritingThroughLife. That’s right. I’ve been blogging here for almost eight years! And during these years I have written a large number of articles on journaling, memoir and legacy writing, technology tools for writers, and publishing.
I started out writing about intuition, creativity, productivity, journaling, and why writing is important for personal growth and healing — mostly, I wrote about journaling. But sometime during my third year, I realized that I felt too hemmed in. I was limiting myself by writing about only one aspect of a writer’s creative life. After all, my own writing life was expanding. I had just published Week by Week: A Year’s Worth of Journaling Prompts & Meditations, was working on my memoir, Not the Mother I Remember, immersed in an MFA program, and learning the ins and outs of publishing and book marketing.
So I began writing more about the craft of writing as it pertains to memoir and legacy writing. I wrote a lot about it. If you are thinking about or are in the process of writing your life stories, whether for memoir and “just” for your family, I recommend the following articles from my archives:
- 5 Reasons to Write Your Memoir — In this article, I spell out what a memoir is and why you should write yours. This is a great article to read if you are doubting yourself, if you think your life is not “interesting enough,” or if you want to know what you and the world can gain from your story.
– - Why Write? Journaling for Memoir — This article describes the benefits of using your journal for research, mining past entries and writing for the future.
– - How to Bring Memories from the Fog to the Light of Day — Of course, one of the big challenges of writing about your life is bringing memories to life with engaging detail. How do we accomplish this if our memories are vague or fragmented? This article gives you memory recovery technique that really works!
– - Entanglements – Writing About Family — We all worry about what might happen when we write about family or close friends. I discuss this issue here, bringing in perspectives from famous memoirists such as Natalie Goldberg, Mary Karr, Philip Lopate, and Patricia Hampl, and the conclusions that I have come to through personal experience.
– - My entire From Memories to Memoir Series — Okay, I’m cheating a bit here. This is not one article, but a series of ten articles. If you are embroiled in the memoir-writing process (or thinking about becoming so), then bookmark this link and take some time to read through these posts. I hope you will find them helpful and encouraging along your writing journey.
If I have other articles here that you’ve found helpful and you think should be featured in a future link round-up, please let me know.
And if you take a chance and read some or all of the above recommended articles, I’d love your feedback. What did you find most helpful?
My favorite among your articles about memoir was from the series, Memories to Memoir Part 2: Mapping Your Story. I’m a visual learner. When my husband and I went back to Guam for a visit in 2010, I had bought a map of Guam and we used it to visit all the places I had forgotten how to get to. My family had lived there for many years when I was growing up. It was a tourist map and there were pictures of beaches, trails, waterfalls, etc. After we came home I started to blog a series of short memoirs about my experiences. I used that map again and again, and it helped with my memories. From the blog posts I wrote a collection of poetry about the years I had lived there. So that was a key article for me. I find all your articles helpful. Congrats on your 8 years of helping writers write. I know you have helped me. Cheers!
Thank you, Barbara. I love stories like that!