Deadlines provide the memoirist with great incentives to complete their books. Without deadlines, you easily can muddle along producing only small amounts of your manuscript and possibly never finishing it. You also may continue writing, editing, revising or tinkering with your memoir, never deeming it “finished.” I both love and hate deadlines. I love that they force me to write. I’m a perfectionist, and deadlines make me quit revising and submit my work. This allows me to move on to the … [Read more...]

  by Anna Mitchael   When I was 23, I wrote a novel about a Southern girl who leaves home and then returns after two decades away.The novel was completely fictitious and had nothing to do with my own story except the theme of leaving the South to make it in the world—at the time I was writing I was also fully engaged in my own experience far away from where I grew up. At the age of 29, I returned to that same story but wrote it from a completely different point of … [Read more...]