Explorations Beyond the Traditional Memoir: Taking the Authority to Write another Person’s Story – Signup

Denis Ledoux

July Member Teleseminar

July 21, 2017

11 AM PDT  12 PM MDT   1 PM CDT  2 PM EDT

When you write your own memoir, you have access to the expert: you. While this is not easy, there are fewer hurdles to manage when writing about your life than when you write someone else’s story. You have to get into the point of view of someone whose life you have not lived. While writing through the eyes of someone else is related to ghostwriting, it’s different and Denis will discuss these differences.

In this presentation, Denis Ledoux, memoir writer, teacher, coach, editor and ghostwriter will share what he sees as the differences between ghostwriting and claiming another’s point of view. He wrote his mother’s memoir We Were Not Spoiled [written with her as a somewhat-passive informant] and his wife’s, A Sugary Frosting—A Memoir of a Girlhood Spent in a Parsonage and My Eye Fell into The Soup—A Journal Memoir of Living with Stage 4 Cancer [written after her death].

Denis will discuss:

1. Assuming the authority to write the memoir of another person from the first person and why that is essential. Assuming this authority separates memoir from biography.
2. When you can do this and when you can’t.
3. Using Memory Lists to outline and explore the person’s life. Memory Listing is perhaps as close as you get to a magic bullet to banish writer’s block and keep you writing month after month.
4. Researching the bigger picture to have a context for writing about a life with perspective and historical insights.
5. Interpreting the person’s life using the Memory List, your intuition, and research. Interpretation can be dangerous territory, and Denis will offer suggestions for navigating it safely to publication.
6. Finding and working with review persons to help authenticate / validate what you wrote.

Denis Ledoux’s flagship book, Turning Memories Into Memoirs / A Handbook for Writing Lifestories [available both in e- and hard copy], has been joined on Amazon by a number of other how-to books. Among them are Don’t Let Writer’s Block Stop You, Start Your Memoir Right and the free Memoir Writing 101. In the summer of 2017, he published the e- and the hard-copy of My Eye Fell Into The Soup / A Journal Memoir of Living with Stage 4 Cancer. It is drawn both from his wife’s journals and his own. My Eye Fell Into The Soup is the third in a series of five memoirs focused on his wife. The first in the series, The Nice-Nice Club Holds Its Last Meeting, is available free on Amazon.

1. To access the most current catalog of his writing books, his memoirs, and other titles, visit the memoir store.
2. To read over 500 free articles on memoir writing, go to http://thememoirnetwork.com/memoir-blog.
3. To participate in the free membership offering multiple downloads: http://thememoirnetwork.com