I'm new to this site/blog. I recommend writing down, over the next few weeks or months, any and all of your recollections from the time period of your life that you think you want to write about. Don't decide now what that is exactly. Just write, just riff. Collect details and reflections. After weeks or months of that you may see a pattern, a focus. Then try to hone in on that when you write subsequent notes. After you have done this riffing and refocusing for a few months, you will be ready to write an outline.



I've just been through it, having recently completed a memoir, so this is my advice, based on experience. As always take it or leave it. And good luck.

I am so glad this group was started! My current project is my first at writing for a commercial market. As an Intractable Pain patient who can't sit - I need to learn to be as thrifty with my writing time as I can be. I am really looking forward to interacting with others who have a story that needs to be told.

My memoir started out mostly true. But it's turned into mostly lies. Is that bad?

Hi! I joined this group since I have wanted to write a memoir much like the Laura Ingalls Wilder series. Her motivation was about preserving the details about moving about the country as a girl, and of all the adventures the family encountered. My idea is to preserve the details of my childhood, of staying in one place, growing up with the same neighbors, the same group of girls, in one place, for 30 years. It was a very special place, and each of us girls took different paths. My personal journey is almost unbelievable; I would make a great stand-up comic, except all that has happened to me is true! Any thoughts on this idea would be helpful. I read, "Chicken Every Sunday", a book from my Grandma's shelves (very old), which was a memoir about a house that became a story about all the boarders the family had to take in due to the Depression. It was very interesting. I read it about 30 years ago. My memory is very good, but I am "disabled", and it hurts very much to sit.

I wrote my memoir 4 years ago and left it on a shelf, in favor of birthin' them babies! I am now back as a freelance writer and have taken that memoir out again.



I'm changing the entire book from third person to first person. I don't know why I feel the need to do this but I do, and the book is long. It'll take forever but after reading other works, it simply reads and sounds better (and less pretentious) in the first person.



And after that - I have no idea what I'll do. Sometimes it's easier to write, edit, rewrite, and edit again, instead of finishing up and actually DOING something about getting published.

Good luck to everyone.