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What I Learned from Writing a Memoir in 30 Days
Memoir writing is a fascinating process, in that much of it is focused on making sense of key moments in one’s life through the context of constructing a complete narrative. In order to ease this process for myself, I purchased the book How to Write a Memoir in 30 Days and spent a little more than a month working through its various exercises.
The book itself is structured in a way where you can get through the pages as quickly or as slowly as you would like. In an attempt to complete the writing process as quickly as possible, I began writing two days worth of exercises a day for the first week. In particular, I found the exercises that the book gave to be the most beneficial resource due to their ability to assist in generating a large word count.
Unfortunately, as I began to work through the more organizational and thematic aspects of the book, my writing process slowed down and I began to get bogged down in defining what I wanted my memoir(s) to focus on and the purpose of writing the memoir in the first place. So, while I would recommend other memoir writers use How to Write A Memoir in 30 Days to get started on their own work, I must also add that I found a lot of the book’s questions to be quite frustrating and somewhat futile.
