Imagine: You sit down to work on your memoir. You’ve made an outline of significant life events, and you’ve identified where you want to start. Or you decide to just go through life events chronologically. As you write, you’re attempting to craft a story, but you don’t yet know where you’re […]
When you journal about the people in your life, do you take the time to describe their physical appearance and personality traits? Do you write down the gist of conversations? You might think it’s too time-consuming to record these kinds of details. Or, perhaps you feel you know the people […]
Journal writing is a powerful tool for capturing significant events and memories. For future memoir writing—or if you just want to capture the memories as fully as possible—you’ll want to do more than just write about what happened. You’ll want to go beyond recording the emotional impact of an event […]
Do you write memoir or use real events and people as models for fiction? If so, using your writing journal to flesh-out your characters can do more than help you create well-rounded characters on the page; it can also enhance your powers of observation and improve your descriptive writing skills. […]
When I want to write memoir, the first places I go for research (other than my memory) are my journals. They are my memory-keepers, containing more details of events and my responses to them than my feeble mind could ever hold. In addition to my perception of the facts (what […]
TODAY, WE STRADDLE an invisible timeline between two calendar years, one foot raised, prepared to step into the next year. Before we do, let’s engage in a tradition — a worthy one, I think — in which take a look back at the year we’re leaving, to remind us where we […]
ON TUESDAY, FEBRUARY 12TH, I traveled to San Miguel de Allende, Mexico as a presenter for the 13th annual writers’ conference. If you love writers’ conferences and you’ve never been to San Miguel de Allende, you’ll want to add this to your calendar next year. The San Miguel’s Writers’ Conference […]
THE 2017 READER SURVEY RESULTS ARE IN, and here’s what you told me. Who you are — No real surprise here. The vast majority (95%) of you who completed the survey are women, age 55+ (82%), are retired or work part-time, and have incomes of less than 100k per year. […]
ANYONE WHO HAS WRITTEN A MEMOIR KNOWS that it’s hard work. Not at the beginning, necessarily, but when you’re part way through, and that nice, round idea you had of your story has become fragmented by scenes and summaries of scenes, and reflections about those scenes The memories aren’t clear […]
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 […]
TODAY’S POST is an interview with Margaret Holland & Delana Reese, co-authors of Ms. Holland’s memoir, The Brotherhood of Silence. According to the description on the back cover, The Brotherhood of Silence “gives voice to the recollections of a woman who suffers debilitating injuries in an accident and then faces working […]
I can’t help but breathe deeply. The world is blossoming around me, coming to life through leaf and stem, flower and fragrance. With the late spring rains and near-constant cloud cover, it hasn’t been nearly warm enough for me, but the pink dogwood outside my back door doesn’t seem to […]
