Writing a book can take a short specific period of time or go on forever, depending on the writer’s definition of what “writing a book” entails and whether they get support to see them through. Find out how long it takes to write (or write) a book and see what you need to get yours written, too ~
If you’re feeling low from winter, rather than let it affect your writing, instead, try hunkering down and getting cozy! By embracing the attributes of the season, you can use winter as a highly productive time, especially so if you’re working on memoir. Make the most of the cold months to delve into your most authentic, insightful, and emotionally diverse writing and experience great productivity as a result.
Putting pen to paper (or fingers to keyboard) is the first step to telling your life story. But fairly early on in the process, you will need to pause to consider what kind of book you’re writing. Should you write your life story as an autobiography, a memoir, or another nonfiction sub-genre? The purpose, frameworks, audience, and marketing options differ dramatically from one sub-genre to the next, so you’ll want to get clear on how you’ll craft your story if you wish to meet your readers in the ways you intend.
Memoir is a valuable way to bear witness, both to ourselves and to others. The memoir writer gives voice, shape, and meaning to their life and those in it, and the reader, as a result of connecting with the memoirist at such a deep level, forges a stronger relationship with their own humanity. Why is bearing witness important? The more we do it, the more we truly see one another and grow. In this way, memoir becomes the connective tissue between people and forges important bonds.
Writers question all the time whether their stories are worthy of memoir. If you know that telling your story will be meaningful to you, give you a valuable chance to examine your life with inquiry, and show others how you transformed to give them as much opportunity to transform, too, then you know you have a memoir worth telling.
Modern memoir writers issue disclaimers in their books to indicate how they’ve dealt with aspects of the genre and protected the innocent (or the not-so-innocent) by managing their subjects’ privacy. What the memoir disclaimer covers and how it’s written can alleviate the memoirist — to a degree — and enable them to write their story as it needs to be told.
For many writers, the bridge from a first draft to rewriting a short story or novel is long, shaky, and leads to an uncertain destination. Rather than despair, use these 3 techniques (and watch the video below!) to rewrite your first draft, and you will be able to successfully prepare it for publication!
