Kia ora lovely,
How’s that memoir of yours coming along today?
Yesterday I met with my Golden Bay memoir group, and someone was saying they were unsure whether to dive deeply into one aspect of their story, or write more generally. They saw they could very quickly end up with waaaay too much info for their book.
This is a great point, and I happen to have three suggestions to share with you, based upon a few books I’ve recently worked on.
- If you plan your story and realise you’re going to struggle to fit it all into one book, consider breaking it down into two or three books. Two people I’ve worked with recently have done this. It’s meant they’ve used Book One as their ‘learning curve’ (and believe me, there is a lot to learn), so that when they were ready for Book Two, they wrote a better quality story and knew what they were doing.
- You could commit to a specific word, or page count, plan out your story, and roughly try to stick to it. This would leave you less potential for unnecessary info and tangents. Though the downside of this option is that your story would be more general, and less detailed.
- You could niche down. For example, instead of writing about your entire life, you only write about your travels overseas, before you had kids. And you stick to that subject. Maybe you throw in a bit of life reflection, but you focus on those two years of travels, and you still learn lots as you write it.
I hope these ideas are helpful for you!
Most importantly, keep writing, because the world needs your story.
Charlotte x
PS if you’d like my help to write your story you can:
- Join my year long memoir programme and attend our lovely online, monthly meetings;
- Gather up some friends in your community learn online, together, with me via your very own year long memoir programme;
- Write the first draft of your story and my team and I can edit and publish it for you;
- Or I can write your story for you.
Charlotte Squire 