Making Meaning of Your Memories

Building a new habit takes time, intention, and a fair amount of perseverance—and memoir writing is no exception. It's rarely a straight line. Some weeks you'll hit your writing goal every single day. Other weeks life will get in the way, and you'll miss more sessions than you'd like. Both are part ...

It's easy to convince yourself you can't start writing your memoir until the conditions are right—a dedicated home office, a beautiful desk, the perfect ergonomic chair, a laptop that doesn't lag. None of that is true, and waiting for it is one of the sneakiest forms of procrastination.

You don't n...

One of the reasons memoirs never get written is a subtle saboteur: an imagined audience standing over the writer's shoulder—a parent, a sibling, an ex, a future reader with opinions. Even before a single sentence is typed, that imagined judgment can shut a story down completely.

So here's a rule wo...

Some days you sit down to write your memoir with a clear memory in mind, and the words come easily. Other days you sit down, stare at the page, and nothing comes. Either way, you write.

It sounds counterintuitive—how can you write when you genuinely don't know what to say? But "nothing to say" is r...

Here's a scene that plays out in first drafts everywhere: A writer types a sentence, reads it back, winces, deletes it, and rewrites it three different ways before moving on to the next sentence—where the whole cycle starts again. An hour later, they've produced two polished paragraphs and a mountai...

You've scheduled your writing time. Good. Now here's the tool that will do more for your memoir than any fancy notebook or writing app ever could: a plain, ordinary timer.

Set it for 15 to 30 minutes—whatever length you committed to when you scheduled your session. Then start it, put your fingers o...

If you've been telling yourself you'll write your memoir "when things calm down," I have some bad news: things rarely calm down. Life stays full. The laundry keeps needing to be folded, the inbox keeps refilling, and the story you've been carrying around in your head stays right where it is—unwritte...

You might think your author platform begins the day your book is finished. It doesn’t. It begins the moment you decide your story is worth sharing. And for many writers—especially memoir writers—that moment comes long before the final chapter is written.

So… what is an author platform?

An author p...

Every writer faces self-doubt. But memoir writers face it in a particular and personal way, because the subject matter is you. Your life. Your choices. Your wounds and your recoveries, your failures and your reinventions. When you write a novel, rejection is about the work. When you write a memoir, ...

You’ve imagined it: the moment your memoir is finally in someone’s hands. But before you can get there, you need to make a foundational decision, and it’s one most aspiring authors underestimate. Not just how to publish, but which path is genuinely right for you.

The publishing landscape has change...

This week in Memories to Manuscript, my course to get started writing your memoir, three writers read scenes from their lives. Different decades, settings, and emotional terrain.

But as I listened, I found myself noticing something deeper; not just what they wrote, but what good memoir writing requ...

Memoir writing is more than recounting events; it’s about uncovering the deeper truths of how those events shaped you. As memoirists, we dig through the raw material of our lives, not just to relive the past, but to understand it, learn from it, and share our hard-won wisdom with others.

Marion Roa...