START HERE Before You Write Your Memoirs

START HERE Before You Write Your Memoirs

Everyone asks me where to start writing their memoirs.  You can make this as simple as possible, starting with a childhood photo of yourself, whether you have a memory of that time or not. You can simply describe the photo from both the omniscient and personal first-person point of view. In this photo (obviously from…

I Earned The Pedestal

Writing About Yourself in Third Person

I’m offering a free “Morning Pages” writing group that meets for less than an hour on Zoom weekly. Use the contact form on my website here if you are interested.   For the last four weeks, our Friday writing theme was a short prompt that came to me on Thursday, and I sent it out…

Why It Costs So Much

Finding a photo of a Piper Cub, so I could envision my client’s first plane, was easy. That took about one minute. But tracking down his transcripts from seven different schools beginning in 1939 on Long Island—that took some time. Each school had an online form that had to be found, filled out, printed, put in…

Obscure Books: Mark Twain and Medicine, Any Mummery Will Cure

My favorite books are the ones most obscure, which will never make the NY Times top 20 list. To be honest, many, if not most, of the books on the best-seller lists aren’t worth my time. Give me books that were written out of a pure passion for the subject. Such a treasure is Patrick Ober’s…

The Secret Weapon Esther Levow

Download the entire Levow-chapter2 of Esther Levow’s biography we produced.

First-Born Asian Son Bears Great Responsibility

Some of my clients are the first-born sons of Chinese, Taiwanese, Korean, or Japanese parents, and these men hire me to honor their parents with an heirloom biography. Non-Asian people can hardly imagine the weight placed upon the shoulders of the first son of Asian descent. In a tradition passed through many generations before him,…

How To Merge Historical Events in Writing a Memoir

One of the most difficult exercises in writing a memoir or biography is to condense world history into the most pertinent strains that can be gracefully merged with the events of an individual life. In the sample here, I begin with the personal event, “Celia’s father and brother escorted her out of Poland in 1906 when…

Creating a family memoir

Creating a family memoir takes time, but don’t let that intimidate you. One step in the family memoir is to preserve the oldest photographs. Those old black-and-white photographs, or the daguerrotype tins that preceded photographs in the late 1800s, become part of the musculature of the family memoir. While the photographs are important, the stories…

Write Your Memoirs in 5 Minutes a Day

I’m giving lots of advice, mentoring and expert tips on writing in general and memoir writing in particular, in an easy-to-follow blog at http://www.writeyourmemoirs.com. By taking only five minutes each day–you gotta start somewhere!–you can kick-start your momentum, establish a relationship with your muse, and begin getting meaningful words onto the page.