I ran across an interesting tip I want to pass on for people working on memoirs. One concern most memoirists have is with deciding what to include and what to leave out. Sometimes the best way to make the choice is to get a little help from your family and friends to see what is important.

The author of the Quirky Pickings Blog suggested this technique (the decisions about capitalization are hers):

several years ago, i took a creative writing nonfiction course at the university of texas at san antonio. for our final project, we had to write a memoir. not knowing what to write about myself, i invited twenty people — friends and family — to each pose a question to me. something that didn’t require a yes or no answer. something they didn’t already know about me.

The questions are ways to jog your thinking. It’s certainly not necessary to treat your memoir as a Q & A. Not all of the questions may prove valuable to you. But the ones that do may help you set priorities as to what’s important in your story. What’s more important, the questions may trigger lines of thinking that had not previously occurred to you.

If you have given some serious thought to the audience for your memoir, surveying some representatives of that audience can only help you improve your ability to connect with them. Think of it as market research for your memoir.

To read the post at Quirky Pickings click here

You have decided to tell the stories of your life in a memoir or in a family history. What next? You may feel you have a thousand stories you might include, or you may imagine you can’t remember enough. In fact, you’ll need to generate a big list, then whittle it down. Trust that with a little effort, you’ll have more than enough stories. The question then becomes, which ones will make the best book?

The answer is found through the process of prewriting. Prewriting is everything that a storyteller does before she begins telling her story. It is a process of remembering, gathering and organizing ideas and details that you want to include.

Let’s look at just a few of the many activities you might use:

Top ten lists get David Letterman a lot of laughs. They will also get you a lot of ideas. All you need to do is select any potential topic and make a list of the top ten memories you associate with that topic:

• The ten most important turning points in your life
• The ten family stories you would most like to see preserved
• The ten most influential people in your life and how they influenced you
• Your ten greatest accomplishments and why they are important
• Ten things you value most in your life

There are almost unlimited possibilities for lists. Those above are only examples of how the process works.

You’ve probably written a resume. A life resume is a great way to generate ideas for a memoir. Some of the things you might want to include in your life resume are:

• Work experiences
• Relationships
• Health history
• Places you have lived
• Travel
• Hobbies
• Successes
• Failures
• Favorites (books, movies, music, recipes)
• Lessons (insights you have gained about life)

Look at each of the items you have included in your resume and think of a story associated with it or illustrating it. You’ll be amazed at how many ideas you will generate for stories to include in your memoir.