Two Topics for National Lifewriting Month:
What To Do with Your NaNoWriMo Download AND
A Technique for Getting Unstuck: Write a Few Pages at a Time
With guest Denis Ledoux
November 16, 2018
11 AM PST | 12 PM MST | 1 PM CST | 2 PM EST
Denis Ledoux and I have hosted an NAMW member teleseminar for several years during the month of November. We like to celebrate National Novel Writing Month–NaNoWriMo–a challenge that takes place every November. The challenge is to write 50,000 words in 30 days. Yes, that means you write fast just to get stuff on the page–and the organization very much welcomes memoir writers! After all, novelists and memoir writers are all writing stories.
It’s also National Lifewriting Month! For memoir writers, the pressure is to get your memories down on the page and not write about everything in your life. But perhaps having a lot written down can help you to sort out what the main moments of significance are for your next draft.
Denis and I have in mind for this teleseminar to talk about how to sift through the morass of words you will have this month and find a way to highlight the significant stories and keep track of them.
Denis is also going to present the idea of writing short–very short pieces of 4-6 pages–as a technique to get your memoir done. Whether you write short or long, we both find that it’s all too easy to get stuck in the writing process. NaNoWriMo and our special teleseminar are ways to get you unstuck and get your story back on track.
What you will learn:
- How to boil down your word download from NaNoWriMo so you can revise it
- Reasons and techniques to write short pieces–a series that builds your story
- How to develop a memoir memory list
- Timeline–your visual guide
- Research with family and friends to get the details right
- Sequencing and context–important pieces of the process
Bio
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.
- To access the most current catalog of his writing books, his memoirs, and other titles, visit the memoir store.
- To read over 500 free articles on memoir writing, go to http://thememoirnetwork.com/memoir-blog.
- To participate in the free membership offering multiple downloads: http://thememoirnetwork.com
