Writing Memoir

I often get asked: what is the difference between an autobiography and a memoir? The question is a good one.

An autobiography is an account of a full life replete with dates, events and people.

A memoir is a written memory of part of a life, usually an easier read than an autobiographical account of factual details describing a life from birth to death. Memoir authors  write to speak to the reader — to share and be more connected. Memoirs take autobiographies to another level, usually provocative in an emotional way involving the meaning and purpose for the memory.

It seems more and more individuals are writing memoirs these days. We want to share our trials and tribulations, feel connected to each other, make our experiences count by putting them on paper. With the internet media and digital presses this process is so much easier than it used to be.

On May 21 I will be facilitating an online class for those of you interested in getting a kick start on your own memoir. The class is titled: My Life, My Words, My Voice. Go to www.storycircleonlineclasses.org and click on classes at the top and scroll down to the title. I hope to see you all there.

I will give each member a free email copy of my promotion booklet: How to Write Your Own Memoir. This booklet sells for $4.99 on my site: www.JanMarquart.com as well as my memoir, The Breath of Dawn, a Journey of Everyday Blessings which can also be purchased on www.createspace.com/3546000 and Amazon.com. In it you will find questions to get your juices flowing and your thoughts thinking about the parts of your life that hold memories for your memoir.

Until next time,

keep the pen moving,

Jan

Writing Good Essays

Someone asked me the other day how to write an essay. I’ll make this easy. You need three points of view:

1. thesis

2. antithesis

3. synthesis

Making sure your essay has these three steps makes for good reading. Conflict and tension keeps readers reading. And everyone wants to read how conflict can be resolved and that’s where the synthesis comes in. Essays are needy of these three components or your written work can come across as one-dimensional and uninteresting.

When writing stories the thesis and antithesis are vital to your story’s foundation in order to keep the reader between energies. This tension keeps the reader reading. A reader wants to know that they are going to arrive at an ending that makes peace with the conflict even if the conflict is unwanted news and there lies your synthesis.

Romance often keeps the reader hanging on every tense word with hopes that love will be the end result. The end is your synthesis. Who doesn’t like arriving at a solution that involves love?

Write down the three steps: thesis, antithesis, synthesis and tape them on your computer. When you edit make sure you have developed each of these steps.

You can reach me at jan_marquart@yahoo.com. Go to my site to order my books: www.JanMarquart.com. Check out my other blog www.awarelivingnow.blogspot.com.

Read my latest Goodreads blog entry: http://www.goodreads.com/author_blog_posts/2134860-heal-your-secrets

Until next time,

Jan

 

 

 

 

 

EMPTY YOURSELF

Any mental health professional will tell you stories about their clients who went on a rampage cleaning closets and organizing drawers only to report that they felt lighter and more relaxed afterwards. I’ve heard my clients claim that they were able to think better after such activities. I too have sorted clothes, and organized drawers to feel lighter and more at peace.  It also adds a sense of beauty and control to the unseen places in our homes when we clean and organize closets and drawers. Why is that?

There is no doubt that our psychological well-being is connected to everything in our environment. So cleaning and organizing is a good thing to do at the beginning of a new year when everyone is making new resolutions and want to be rid of the old ways. John Paul Sartre speaks to the aesthetic value of space and in many ways that is what we are creating when we clean and organize. Doesn’t everyone love it when we open a drawer or door and our things appear more beautifully laid out?

When we simplify our environment we enhance the energy in which we live. That new-found clean energy has a remarkable ability to help us breathe a little deeper, experience lightness, and put a smile on our faces.

Most of us know this, right? Oprah must have done a trillion shows on organizing closets and how good you feel afterwards so I know I’m not announcing anything new. But I would like to add to the concept of cleaning out the old. Have you thought of cleaning out your old thoughts? Have you thought of emptying yourself of those thoughts, feelings, ideas, old dreams, or whatever else lurks in your mind that may be clogging your mental energy?

Our minds have a great deal of power in them. We visualize in order to manifest, we pray to a higher God to get prayers answered, and yes we might even plan a long or short term goal for months or years before we take action. Our minds are full of things we need and some we don’t.

Pick up your pen, free it from censorship, and write the thoughts you want to build on and those you no longer need and get your mind cleaned and organized. For instance, I know someone who has been trying to quit smoking. But he hasn’t been able to succeed because his mind is too cluttered about not smoking. He says: “I’m going to stop smoking once 2012 is here.” But that isn’t all he says. He also says: “How am I going to do that when I am addicted?” and “What will I do in my free time?” and “This is going to be hard.” His other thoughts clog up his mind so that his goal is obscured and overcome. So write them all down writing the thoughts you want in one column and the thoughts you don’t want in another. Then allow your mind to stay on the thoughts you want.Writing in columns is a good way to organize the thoughts in your mind. How many of us pay attention to what lives in our minds? Writing is a wonderful way to do that.

Minds have a mind of their own, right? So when someone says don’t think of balloons what do you think of? Then the mind needs to be redirected. Redirecting the mind is not the same as stopping your mind because the only way to stop your mind is to die. Be patient with yourself and become aware. Know that when the mind goes to a thought that clogs your direction you can redirect it. Pretend it is a child in a toy store reaching out for everything except you have its hand so it isn’t going to go off somewhere without you and you can redirect it to go down the aisle you want to travel.

Let your pen help you with this. Remember: the pen is a mighty tool. Take at least one minute each day to read your list of thoughts you want your mind to stay on. Tape it to your bathroom mirror and read it while you are brushing your teeth. This isn’t rocket science and your choice to pay attention is one of the thoughts you can put on your list.

I would wish you good luck but luck has nothing to do with it. Let’s live with deliberate attention.

A happy and successful 2012 to each of you.

Until next time,

keep the pen moving and free,

Jan

 

 

 

 

Saturday Matinee Review

I just finished reading Maxine Neely Davenport’s book, Saturday Matinee, Scenes from Oklahoma During the Great Depression. Although this is not a formal history book, Saturday Matinee tells the history of a family, similar to the lives of many families during the Great Depression, who tried to raise their children right, with little resources except for their big hearts. The snapshot-chapters of this family’s life is told through the life of their little girl, Sissy, whom you won’t be able to help falling in love with.

In Saturday Matinee Maxine puts you right into Sissy’s life, her dreams, her hopes, her fantasies and her realities and she has written her scenes with skilled visualization so that you forget you are looking at words and swear you are sitting in a theatre.

 

You get to watch and experience:

Sissy’s terror as she catches her dress on a barbed wire fence while running from her neighbor who is pointing a shot gun at her for coming onto his peach farm while fantasizing about the whooping her father will give her if he finds out she was there,

you hear her inexplicable sounds as she burns her thighs falling against a hot stove,

and feel the depth of love and sadness as she slips some precious items into her grandma’s casket at the funeral.

 

Part of me wants to tell it all because even after I put the book down I felt Sissy and her family in my living room but I don’t want to give any more of the story away because you have to read it for yourself. It is a matinee delight.

Maxine has done a marvelous job providing us with characters who come to life in every sentence.  There will be no doubt as you read these clips of this family’s life who they are and what they are like.

If you are looking for a delightful Christmas present for either a teenager or adult, this book is it. Maxine’s style is clear, crisp as a fall day, and poetic.

About Maxine:

Maxine Neely Davenport is a native Oklahoman whose survival skills carried her through college, Oklahoma University Law School, and her present position as fiction writer. She lives in Santa Fe, NM. Maxine can be reached at maxdav17@msn.com. To learn more about her visit her site: www.davenportstories.com

What I know about Maxine:

She is a woman of grace and tenderness and her book, Saturday Matinee,  reflects that.

Don’t forget to check out my site to see what books I have written: www.JanMarquart.com

Until next time,

Jan

 

 

 

 book review

Review of Janet Boyanton’s Alone and Alive

   Alone and Alive is the chilling story of Janet Boyanton’s sudden nightmare. Her husband suddenly dies on a camping trip alone with their nine year old son. Given just that introduction, you might not want to read this book imagining that it would be grief filled only – but you would be mistaken. Alone and Alive is not just about Janet’s sudden nightmare. It is so much more. It is a powerful, easy-to-read, and structured self-help directory of what women in this position should do in order to restore matters for her life. From how to watch for the behavioral changes of grief in children, to what to consider if you ache to sell your home to move on, this short but information-packed book will empower widows to take life into their own hands, even while grieving. I’ve counseled grieving women for decades and wish I had had this book in the past so as to offer the bare bones assistance needed at such a time.

Alone and Alive is an empowering book for women who, in their darkest night of the soul, may not think they can manage it all alone. But Janet Boyanton proves they can. This is a must read.

This book is on Amazon or can be ordered at aloneandalive.com

http://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss?url=search-alias%3Dstripbooks&field-keywords=alone+and+alive&x=0&y=0

Until next time,

Jan

 

The Way We Heal

 Ever wonder how you are going to heal a deep seated devastating grief? Monhegan Windows is a poetically written account of two men, unknown to each other, who find their way to this isolated Maine Island, and seek reparation of their bodies, minds and souls after devastating family losses uproot their lives. Here is my review of this remarkably written novel.

REVIEW OF MONHEGAN WINDOWS written by Matthew Kiell
Nothing new truly starts without finishing the old. And the characters in Monhegan Windows are a testament to that. Matthew Kiell writes a
remarkably beautiful painting of unresolved grief and its calling to heal from devastating personal loss. Set in the rocky and wooded terrain of isolated Monhegan Island, Maine, Kiell’s characters have to, just like anything else in nature, compost the old before birthing the new.

Despite the seemingly simple, easy and relaxed days Kiell’s character’s spend on Monhegan Island, it is his account of their ever-present raw
internal struggles, memories of lost loved ones, broken hopes, and destroyed dreams that make the pages awaken. In the slap of the wave against a rock, the deep voice of the gull, the “fog intimately hugging the ground,” the sounds of “Mozart mixed with the wind,” Kiell’s characters are enabled to confront how their lives have, without warning, changed. Caught between the two worlds of what was and what has not yet arrived, Kiell poetically leads his characters to find their way as in one character’s note from a Rabbi: “The only way to experience
true freedom is through going beyond yourself, receiving the task we do not choose, but which chooses us.”

Monhegan Island is that safe place of which we each dream when our vulnerable and aching souls become too much to bear and when life’s
hardships choose us without permission. Beautifully written with poignant and tenderly dramatic prose, Kiell offers every aching heart the opportunity for a calm stretch of time, the kindness of strangers, the comfort of nature and, the peace of a moment as entrance to the other side of life’s unexpected injuries.

Matthew Kiell is a professional writer, independent publisher and photographer who lives outside of Chicago. He first visited and fell in love with monhegan in 1995.

Until next time, pick of a copy of Monhegan Windows. Unfortunately this inspiring book is not on Amazon so contact the author to buy this amazing book at:

book webpage: RidgewoodPublications.com/MonheganWindows.html

Facebook page: http://www.facebook.com/home.php?sk=group_61517497620

Keep the pen moving,

Jan

Do Your Main Characters Have This?

You might or might not make an outline for your book. It’s okay either way. Ken Follette, author of Pillars of the Earth, takes two years to write an outline. He maps out every detail and character before he begins to write. I almost can’t breathe when I think of it. Outlines don’t work for me. They restrict me, confine my characters, put the life of the page in a box and I can’t move into a place of creativity having such tight borders.

I start with only a general mental plan and then begin to type. Inevitably my characters take over the page and where they want to go. Inevitably my plans change, and giving my fingers total permission to feel my way in the dark allows me to be creative and see what develops. It might be the only time in my life I like being lost.

That being said, there is one thing my main characters must have: a purpose. And my main character leads in that purpose. I’ve read lots of interesting story lines without the main character leading with a purpose and I find that those characters usually feel slightly one dimensional despite the interest I have for the plot.

If the main character of a story is an ordinary person with a purpose, a mission, a drive to accomplish or overcome something, the plot thickens, as the saying goes.

A book is much more powerful when the main character grounds you in the story with a purpose because they give you a suspenseful reason to continue reading. Make your characters extraordinary. Give them a clear purpose so the reader can endear to them rather than just be interested in how life unfolds. Characters are richer and hold more of our dreams when they carry the baton. Hand it to them and allow them to run with it.

To check out my novels, the main characters, and their purposes, go to:
Kate’s Way (also in kindle $5.99) www.createspace.com/3498926
The Basket Weaver www.createspace.com/3553668

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Published on October 15, 2011 13:23• Tags:          purpose-of-main-characters, writing-tip

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