Scott Oldford Site

Tag: writing a memoir

  • How to Write a Student Memoir: 6 Simple Ways to Embrace Nostalgia

    How to Write a Student Memoir: 6 Simple Ways to Embrace Nostalgia

    If you’re wondering how to write a student memoir (and how it’s different than a regular memoir), then you’re in the right place.

    No matter what stage you’re at in your educational journey, writing a student memoir can be a therapeutic experience for you and eye-opening for your readers. Documenting your experiences, emotions, and growth is also an excellent practice so even if your draft never leaves your hard drive, it will still be a worthy exercise. 

    What is a Student Memoir Anyway?

    A student memoir is much like any other memoir. A memoir is a narrative told from the perspective of the author and focuses on a pivotal moment or time in their life.

    Therefore, a student memoir is written by a student and recounts a pivotal moment or time in their academic career. 

    A memoir differs from biographies and autobiographies in a few key ways.

    • A biography is written about a person from an outside perspective
    • An autobiography is more similar, where it is written by or from the perspective of the subject/author. However it spans their entire life rather than the narrow focus of a memoir

    Readers for student memoirs are usually other students, or people who have been through school. They studied in different contexts for varying lengths of time and have at least some understanding of the experiences of being a student. 

    How to Write a Student Memoir

    Similar to journal writing, a memoir is successful if readers feel like they’re experiencing life with you. Here are six simple guidelines to follow that will help you figure out how to write a student memoir that’s memorable and captivating. 

    1. Find Your Topic

    Consider your time as a student. Was there a moment or time that stands out to you? A pivotal moment where something happened or a decision was made and changed everything for better or for worse? Did this happen a long time ago or are you going through it right now? Considering examples of successful memoirs can help inspire you at this stage.

    When selecting the focus of your student memoir, consider the relationships, obstacles, triumphs and other factors that are relevant to the event or time period. Think about the central themes, transformations, and lessons that came out of that time of your life. 

    2. Give it Structure

    Once you have a topic, it is time to determine how you are going to organize your thoughts to get your story and message across. Consider the arc of your story—how you get from point A to point B and how best to guide your audience on this journey. 

    Chronological, past versus present, thematic and internal conflict are all common memoir structures. By outlining key events and turning points, you can determine which structure is best suited to effectively tell your story, keeping readers engaged from start to finish. 

    3. Develop Your Voice

    What makes memoirs so compelling, often, is the author’s voice that shines through. An epic story with twists and turns is one thing, but it is how you tell that story that sets it apart. When a story has a strong, authentic voice the reader feels like they are right there with you or are being told it by a trusted friend.

    Experiment with different tones and writing styles until you find one that comes naturally and helps you get your stream of consciousness from the eyes and mind that experienced it onto the page. Stories written with exceptional tone and voice have the power to connect with readers on a personal level. If it comes naturally, infusing humor, wit, and emotion can help bring out your personality and voice. 

    4. Write Authentically

    One element that often goes hand in hand with voice is authenticity. When you are telling an authentic story, your voice will often come naturally. What is the point in writing a memoir if it’s not genuine? Then it just becomes a work of fiction. Get ready to be raw, honest and vulnerable as you lay it all out on the pages. 

    Even if it’s difficult, it is essential that you are being real with your readers and sharing your honest thoughts and feelings from when you were a student. When writing any type of memoir it is important to accurately recount events to the best of your ability and avoid turning yourself into a hero or victim if that is not what happened. Maybe you’re the villain, and that’s OK! Remember, your readers are interested in the true story, you don’t need to make it up. Just be authentically you.

    5. Reflect and Revise

    Reflection is a very important component of writing, particularly with memoirs. You should be reflecting before, during and after the writing process. At the end of your writing journey, take the time to properly reflect on your work and make revisions to improve elements such as the flow, tone, accuracy and consistency of your student memoir. 

    We often have a much harder time critiquing and finding flaws in our own work. That is where a fresh pair of eyes come in handy. If you don’t have an editor, seek feedback from a trusted friend, classmate or family member who can point out how you can improve your memoir to produce an even more compelling narrative. 

    6. Share Your Finished Piece

    You did it! You are finally ready to send a piece of you out into the world. Depending on what your goal for your student memoir is, you have many different options for how to share it. A few options to consider are publishing it on a personal blog or website, submitting it to a writing contest, a literary magazine or self-publishing. 

    However you choose to tell your story, embrace the sense of accomplishment from finishing your own student memoir and sharing the events, genuine thoughts and feelings from a pivotal time in your academic career that led you to where you are today. 

    Student memoirs speak to the inner child in all of us and have the unique power of bringing audiences back in time to their own school days while stepping into the author’s shoes. Celebrating the complexity of student life with all its highs and lows, a student memoir makes for an engaging story when told by the authentic voice of a vulnerable author.

    The Write Life has teamed up with Self-Publishing School to create a training called, Writing and Publishing Your Life Story. In it, you’ll learn the three core elements of memorable memoirs. Click here to sign up for this free workshop.

  • Writing a Memoir: Here’s What Worked for These Travel Writers

    Writing a Memoir: Here’s What Worked for These Travel Writers

    Traveling the world while getting paid to write about it is the ultimate dream for many writers.

    Kim Dinan and Jo Piazza are two writers who have made that dream come true. Both have recently published travel memoirs reflecting on travel, love and marriage.

    Dinan wrote The Yellow Envelope: One Gift, Three Rules, and A Life-Changing Journey Around the World about the journey she and her husband took after quitting their jobs, selling everything and leaving their life in Portland, Oregon, for a trip around the world.

    Before they left, friends gave them a yellow envelope with a check inside, encouraging them to distribute the funds to people they met along the way. Her book tells the story of their journey and the people they met, and shared the money with, along the way.

    While Dinan and her husband were married for years before their journey, Piazza’s memoir How to Be Married: What I Learned from Real Women on Five Continents About Surviving My First (Really Hard) Year of Marriage is more of a honeymoon tale.

    Piazza, a travel editor and globe-trotting reporter, made her way around the world with her journalist husband asking people she met along the way for their marriage advice. It was fitting since the couple met on a boat in the Galapagos Islands where both were on assignment and married three months later.

    Read on to see what worked well for these writers in publishing their own travel memoirs.

    How to begin

    Before heading off, Piazza spent a lot of time doing preliminary research on the themes she wanted to explore. She studied the history and sociology of marriage and interviewed marriage experts and feminist writers like Erica Jong.

    On the road, she interviewed hundreds of people, typically setting up interviews ahead of time. But she stayed open to letting her travels take her in new and unexpected directions.

    “I set up a lot of the interviews beforehand, but many ended up being serendipitous as the best interviews usually are,” Piazza says. “Case in point, I went to India to research arranged marriage and then a tuk tuk driver told me I couldn’t leave the country without going to the place where the women rule to interview the matrilineal Khasi tribe in Meghalaya. Obviously, I extended my trip.”

    Have a field plan

    Once Piazza was in the field, she took notes and recorded interviews in a variety of ways, from typing on a laptop to handwriting in notebooks. When she was hiking Kilimanjaro, she even plotted chapters in her head, hurriedly recording them on paper whenever she had a chance.

    While people were eager to open up to her about love and marriage, she found finding good translators, especially for such a sensitive subject, a bit more difficult.

    ”The trickiest part was when I would have to use a translator, especially male translators translating for women,” Piazza said. “It was a big problem for me in Tanzania and Kenya because I knew they weren’t telling me everything the women were saying. I just knew. I had to switch translators several times.”

    While Piazza had a specific plan when she left home, Dinan wasn’t intending to write a book when she set out on her trip, so she didn’t conduct formal interviews along the way. However, she did journal extensively and, when it came time to prepare to write, she pored over her journals, blog entries, and emails, and racked her memory. She also printed out hundreds of photos she took on the trip, displaying them around her desk to immerse herself in her travels.

    “I was amazed at what I could remember when I sat down and let my brain wander back in time,” Dinan says.

    Writing a proposal and finding a publisher

    The Yellow Envelope was Dinan’s first book. She started with a very rough draft, getting her thoughts out on the page without concern for style or typos. After she wrote around 60,000 words she set the draft aside and began her book proposal, which took a month or two and included a query letter and sample chapters.

    Then, she went online and used AgentQuery.com to assemble a list of around 30 potential agents. She sent out her query letter and received some requests for the full proposal. Eventually, she had two agents offering to represent her, and she selected one.

    Working with her new agent, she polished  the proposal and her agent began shopping it around, eventually finding a home with Sourcebooks. Dinan detailed the whole process on her blog.

    In contrast, Piazza already had an agent she had worked with before, Alexandra Machinist. Though Piazza’s previous novel, The Knockoff, was published with one publisher, her agent shopped Piazza’s 100-page proposal for How to Be Married around with a variety of publishers, eventually placing it with Harmony.

    Marketing can be a full-time job

    While Dinan and Piazza had different strategies to write their books and get them published, they had one thing very much in common: marketing their books was a huge endeavor.

    Dinan’s publisher assigned her a publicist, but she also chose to spend a lot of time promoting her book.

    “From my perspective, I’m doing everything I can to get the word out about my book,” she says. “The way I see it is, I’ve spent years working on this book and if I don’t throw myself into publicity in the same way I threw myself into writing the book then what’s the point?”

    She planned a DIY book tour around the U.S., meeting blog readers and their families and friends along the way. Her marketing efforts include radio and podcast interviews, book giveaways, targeted Facebook ads, using writing group connections and more.

    “I’ve been saying ‘yes’ a lot and that’s great — but it’s been hard to manage the paid writing work I do to pay the bills with the time it takes to do book publicity,” Dinan says. “Let’s just say I’m learning a lot and I’ll have a better idea what to say yes and no to next time.”

    Piazza is also spending a lot of her time marketing, saying it can be a full-time job for an author. She also uses her personal connections to help spread the word, asking friends and colleagues to read the book and post about it.

    “We’ve been incredibly lucky to get great reviews for How to Be Married right out of the gate and a lot of press has been very interested in the book,” Piazza says. “But I will say that getting publicity for a book is often harder work than writing it.”

    Writing a travel memoir isn’t easy, but for these two writers, their perseverance led to the opportunity to share their experiences of life, love and travel with readers. And each used different strategies to research, write and publish, showing there are a number of ways for a writer to find success in the world of travel memoir publishing.  

    The 3 Core Elements that Every Memoir Has

    [twl_reusable_block post_id=41455]

  • Becoming a Ghostwriter Depends on This Skill. Do You Have It?

    Becoming a Ghostwriter Depends on This Skill. Do You Have It?

    “I could hear your voice on every page.”

    When a client tells me that’s what they’re hearing from readers, I know that I’ve done part of my job as their ghostwriter.

    The other part of the job is to craft an artful, compelling narrative with drive that makes a reader want to turn the page to know what happens next.

    If you’re writing a business or how-to book, the author’s voice must still be be imbedded into the pages, but the other task is to give the reader takeaways and clear, concise examples that come out of an author’s opinions and arguments.

    For purposes of this discussion, we can limit my comments to the memoir genre.  

    A memoir by definition is a discussion or biography of your client’s life written from personal knowledge.  

    With this in mind, the final writing piece needs to read as if it is coming from their thoughts and accounts, without completely losing your personal writing style.

    A memoir is one of the most difficult types of writing in which to capture a client’s voice, both because of the sheer amount of personal knowledge as well as the perspective of the piece.

    Start with a conversation

    So, how to capture your client’s voice? For starters, when you’re writing a memoir for a client, you want to always begin the process with a series of interviews which are recorded and transcribed.

    These interviews can often last for several days, depending upon the length of the story and the number of experiences that your client can describe to you.

    You can then listen to the recordings and compare them to the transcribed material. You’ll also want to take notes along the way, which will serve as prompts when you sit down to write.

    Try not to interrupt the flow of storytelling, but do guide your client to stay on point if they wander too far into the weeds — which often happens. There are times when I lose the train of thought and have to say, “What were we talking about?” Hopefully, we both laugh.

    Just the act of listening to their recorded voice gives you many clues for how to replicate that voice in your writing.

    Elements of a client’s voice

    What are some of the elements of a client’s voice that should end up on the page to ensure the authenticity of a memoir?

    Here are a few basic examples:

    Sentence structure, cadence and tempo

    Much like a piece of music, the pacing of a person’s storytelling is part of their voice.

    Expressions

    Try to incorporate the sayings and metaphors your client likes to use in telling a story. “Their Sundays were longer than their Mondays,” is something my mother used to say when seeing a woman with her slip hanging below her hem. Or, for example, “She’s no oil painting,” when sizing up a woman’s looks, for better or worse.

    Or “What’s the worst that can happen?” which was a common reaction to a situation from a ghostwriting client who survived Auschwitz and the Bataan Death March. You couldn’t argue with that, because he had seen and survived the very worst.

    Regional expressions and foreign words

    Finding those special regional expressions and using them judiciously can make writing sing.

    Think William Faulkner and take it down a few notches.

    Or listen for those foreign words — used authentically — that a client frequently relies upon when English is not their first language. Don’t be afraid to use them. Trust the reader will figure out or look up the meaning.

    A sense of humor

    Not everyone is a barrel of laughs, but there are storytellers who have an amazing array of jokes (many of which they have told and retold) that can spice up the writing and strike a familiar note.

    Aphorisms

    I have rarely met a person who doesn’t like to quote a well-known adage. I even worked with a client who asked that we include a special section on expressions that inspired them.  Aphorisms help to balance out the expressions that a client uses themselves with more well-known expressions that affected or inspired them indirectly. Using these phrases or quotes in strategic places can serve to directly retain your own writing style and voice in the piece.

    Look for opportunities along the way. For example, “A meal without wine is like a day without sunshine.” There are thousands upon thousands, and readers enjoy running across them because they have heard them said by your client (and many others) before.

    Noting the features above, along with simply spending time with the story, will ensure that the client’s voice influences the final piece without being overbearing.

    Choosing which ones to employ and which ones to jettison are what keeps your voice in their narrative. Make sure you take the time to listen to the story and become a part of it in your mind before sitting down to write.

    Ghostwriters, what techniques can you share for preserving and sharing your client’s voice?