I spoke with Mag Dimond on Facebook Live, on her show, “Writers Coming Together.” We talked about writing memoir — what’s needed in a book people will want to read — and much more. I talk about what I learned creating my book Girlhood in America, about some of
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No matter how unique and compelling your story is, you set the bar impossibly high when you say you want a bestseller and nothing less. There’s no way to know that’s what your book can be. The publishing market can be a tough world to enter with anything less than
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Music has captivated over the airwaves for almost a century, with every decade defined by its trends. Like me, you may feel that some incidents or time periods in your life have a soundtrack. Music describes a feeling and an era like little else can. (Bing Crosby is the ‘40s,
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We live in a world of specifics. Specifics define people and places. Specifics point to the moments that make up the bigger picture. They are the details that give writing a feeling of immediacy. They take your readers along with you. Well-chosen details bring the world of the story to life.
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When is a writer vulnerable? How about every day. In her still-popular Ted Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” a research professor who has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, and the best-selling author of several books on related topics, Brene Brown says that part of
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You’re at the movies and the lights dim. A camera pans a cityscape. This is called a long shot. There’s no action but you get a sense of a location. Next, the camera moves in, focusing on something specific, maybe a particular building in that cityscape. The camera moves in
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When I started teaching memoir in 1996, twenty-two people came to my class eager to write their life stories. Some of those stories kept them awake at night, and they got up and wrote into the wee hours. A few followed my suggestion and kept a notepad by their bed
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To give you an idea of what I do as a memoir consultant and developmental editor, I’ll share some about the path I helped this author take to complete his memoir and have it successfully published.
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As writers, some of your best mentors are successful writers in your genre. But you have to read them! Stephen King says, “If you want to be a writer you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.”
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Recently, a woman I know received a surprise in the mail. A relative of nearly 90 years old had sent a photograph she’d never seen before. It was an old black and white family photo that raised more questions than gave answers — and she already had questions, plenty of
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