Tag: memoir writing

Celebrating the ‘we’ in reaching a Memoir Milestone

Celebrating the ‘we’ in reaching a Memoir Milestone

Today we have reached a very exciting milestone. It was exactly a year ago to the day I met my then ‘potential client’ to discuss his book. He wanted to publish a memoir about ‘how he became a psychic/spirit medium’ so we discussed the possibility of me being his ‘ghostwriter’. (I’ve already made all the jokes possible about a medium having a ghostwriter …lol)

I say ‘we‘ because as you will discover reading through this blog – writing a book takes so much more than just one person to make a project like this happen. In fact, right from the very beginning, it was a mutual friend and former President of Gold Coast Writer’s Association Angelika Heurich who put us in touch. Thank you for that kind recommendation, Angelika. This was the first step in helping ‘client A’ towards his publishing aspirations.

So there we were – a year ago today – we met at the beautiful Bamboo Buddha to discuss what he had by way of notes and how far we needed to go to bring that project to a submission-ready manuscript – so it seems timely indeed that we should be hitting the ‘send’ button today.

Since that sunny day, it has taken hours of phone interviews to scratch below the surface of more than a decade of life, to find the emotion of the little moments. It’s taken a few more hours to transcribe those hours of interviews to pick through and find the diamonds in the dig. Structures, outlines, arcs, timelines, scene constructs, memoir mapping, themes, messages, quotes, research … and that was all before the drafting began.

Then there was the writing itself. As most writers know, this is the easy part. Slowly but surely we turned his head full of notes and a few thousand words into a 60,000-page body of work.

I do a lot of editing for clients, however, I knew I was just too close to edit this manuscript. So I wanted to personally thank Marian Gobraiel at wordsbymariangobraiel for stepping in to the breach with her professional editing services. It’s great to find an editor who really gets to grips with the brief very quickly – just makes life so much easier. Thank you Marian!

My ‘client A’ (as he will be called until after publication) also worked with a great design team taking care of photography and post-processing. Doing your own photography is a great way to keep control of your brand, look and feel especially in the early days when you are building your author platform.

The marketing has already begun. Yup I said that bad word. For those of you not familiar with my Blog – ‘You want me to what my book?”, check it out. It’s often a nasty shock for writers to realise they have to market their book too – luckily the Butterfly Bureau at McRae Comms can help you with that. It’s their thing.

We all have a book inside of us – but getting it out, onto paper and then out into the world is as much about perseverance and ‘process’ as it is about creativity. It is also about having a great team of professionals and supporters and family around you, willing you on to cross the finish line. For my part, there is something very satisfying about helping people become writers, and writers become authors. I truly love what I do.

Today all of that is done. We are now ready for submission! Yay for ‘client A’!

The difference between Autobiography, Biography and Memoir

The difference between Autobiography, Biography and Memoir

If you are new to writing you may not have given too much thought to Genre at the start of your project. We’ve all been there. That great idea you have to get down on paper before you forget – or worse still – someone else pips you to the post.

Spending a few moments considering genre at the beginning will help in more ways than you can imagine, but none more so than when it comes to pitching your book idea.

I am often asked about the differences between memoir, autobiography and biography – the nuances in the modern age are often lost – particularly when you have the likes of Amazon lumping things in together … sigh.

An Autobiography is a self-written account of your own life. You write it – you tell the ‘whole’ story. I like to think of it as a ‘personal history’.

Autobiographies are generally chronological and require knowledge of lots of dates and facts from beginning to end. Out of all these facts a ‘theme’ may emerge and that is generally the more interesting stuff for the reader.  Many autobiographies are actually written by ghost-writers who are skilled in bringing the story out of content that may otherwise read with all the creativity of a police statement.

A biography is all of the above – written by someone else. An authorised biography is written with the permission, co-operation and sometimes participation of the subject.

A Memoir is about your truth and generally covers a much shorter period of time – say 10-15 years. A memoir is very much about starting in one place (whether it’s a point of view or something more literal) and ending up in another. So Memoir shows ‘change’ or ‘evolution’ or ‘transformation’. The structure of a memoir can vary depending on the story you wish to tell. If you want to tell a chronological story from point A to point B you will most likely use a Linear structure, however you may want to keep coming back to a pivotal scene or part in your story, in which case you would use a Circular style. The thing I love about memoir though is the takeaway message. The end of a memoir should leave the reader feeling they need to take action, or change their mind on something as a result of what they have read. As a writer that is the fun, creative part of the project in my opinion. As with autobiographies many ghost-writers make their living in this genre.