Write Your Memoir in Six Months offers the support, encouragement, and accountability you’re looking for to write the book that’s in your heart. Brooke Warner and Linda Joy Myers are experienced memoir teachers and passionate believers in the magic of memoir. It’s magical to tell your story—to bring to life something that’s lived inside you. It’s so gratifying to offer your personal truth to others.
The Magic of Memoir
If you believe that memoir is as powerful and magical as we do, then we are the mentors for you. Each of us has guided hundreds of memoirists through the completion of their manuscripts, and shepherded many more through to publication of their books. We know what it takes to complete a memoir, and we understand that it’s often painful and challenging.
Writing your memoir can change your life
You have a passion project you’ve been working on for years. You know you want to finish it someday; you must finish it before you die. It’s a story that has its claws in you. Sometimes you think about it every day, sometimes once a month. A book project like this is a little like a lost lover. It wants you to return to it, and you long to return to it, too.
Writing your memoir can set you free
You have a story from your past to tell. Maybe you come from a messed-up family. Maybe you have had life experiences unlike anyone you know. Your friends are always saying, “Wow, you need to put that into a book.” You know your life story is unique.
You think it has potential to sell big, too. Depending on the intimacy of your story, it’s probable that your saboteurs are stalking you, telling you all the reasons it’s a horrible idea to share your story with the world. Even if you’re considering an adventure story of all the wild times you had, you might still be plagued by voices that tell you, “Why bother with that? You have better things to do.”
Writing your memoir can help you heal
You can’t keep your story inside any longer. It’s time for it to be out in the open, but you wrestle with all the reasons why you shouldn’t, why you should wait, who will be hurt if you tell, whether you can do the story justice. Maybe you’re even wondering who cares—the worst and most debilitating message of our inner critic. We want to hear your story, and we can guarantee that you’ll come out the other side feeling more empowered, more energetic, and more alive than you have in years. That is the power of self-healing through speaking—and writing—your truth.
Write Your Memoir in Six Months
In thirteen sessions over six months (including an orientation), you’ll be filled with information about process and craft, as well as given the support you’ve been craving as you delve into your life story, your memories, and the essence of who you are and what you have to say. We honor your voice and your story in this course, and it’s our job to ensure that by the end of our time together you will not only have 60,000 words written, but 60,000 words you can be proud of—words that speak your truth.
You will quickly feel much more supported in the scope of your book and where it’s going. You will have a community of like-minded writers to give you encouragement that you are not alone. And you will have two experienced mentors who have coached hundreds of memoirists to manuscript completion and publication.
To learn more or sign up, please visit: http://writeyourbookinsixmonths.com/program-details
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- Truth, Exposure, and the Reason We Write MemoirRecently I had the privilege of moderating a panel at the Bay Area Book Festival. The panel was titled “Why Write Memoir: A Conversation about Truth, Exposure, and the Genre People Love to Hate.” The title shows a perfect combination of the issues that memoir writers struggle with. In every workshop and class I teach, […]
- Where Are We in Relation to the Last Scene? Tracking Time in MemoirLately, with my memoir students and clients, I find myself writing the following query into nearly every submission: Where are we in relation to where we just were? As the writer of your memoir, it’s critical to remember that you lived the experiences you’re writing about, and that you must slow down and anchor the […]
- Why the Literary Elite Love to Hate MemoirI teach memoir, read memoir, and publish memoir. I love memoir, and I’m not alone. It’s a popular genre, the genre of the people. It’s also the most reviled genre–perhaps exactly for this reason. Every few months some literary elitist comes out with a memoir-bashing article, so replete in its criticism and condemnation that it […]
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- The Narrator of your MemoirWhen you read a book, a nearly invisible narrator is guiding you through the text—helping you to focus on the important things in your story. The narrator guides you through the action and setting, and guides you to understand the psychology of the characters, goals, conflicts, and themes being explored. Through the narrator, you learn […]
- Who’s Driving Your Memoir?In our long memoir course there’s an image I share around the halfway point to help students recognize tendencies they might have in their writing practice around control. I ask them to consider the idea that either they or their memoir is driving their memoir. In writing, we can want to be in control, which […]
- Mary Karr’s TruthIn September I had the great honor of interviewing Mary Karr, whose claim to fame is this little feat of having penned three best-selling memoirs(!). Karr’s new book is The Art of Memoir, and reading it is like having a front row seat to one of her exclusive graduate seminars, which you’ll never get into […]
