Oh boy!

I will venture that there is probably some writer (maybe many writers( who writes a book straight through from beginning to end.

I am not one of them.

I know a lot of writers but none of them go from A to Z.

For most (ALL) of us, writing a book is a series of starts and stops and jumps—usually to a section that feels easier to write on that particular day.

You can see the problem coming at ya like the proverbial freight train, can’t you?

Yep.

At some point, you have to tackle those sections of your book that you’ve carefully avoided. (Now would be a good time to get a cookie or perhaps clean the entire house.)

Why Do We Avoid Some Stuff?

All sorts of reasons. It could be that the scenes we avoid are traumatic and painful and we’re not ready to process that. Some life events are hard to face and worse to relive. Therapists often recommend that their patients journal to process their trauma. Many traumatic incidents reside as a jumble in our brains. Journaling helps us organize our thoughts as well as the sequence of events. Writing about an event actually helps to calm the brain and lower your blood pressure. (Who knew?)

And your journal is a safe space to get it all out. If you’re having trouble writing out emotionally charged events, pick up one of those pretty journals that you haven’t written a word in because it’s too pretty, and write out the scenes. This journal is private and you can put anything in there. Then you can decide how much or what parts of the experience you want to share in your memoir.

There’s also that fear of judgment hanging over us. We worry that the reader will judge us for bad choices or dumb mistakes. If we could, we’d all be like cats who stumble and then lift their heads up and pretend it never happened. But, in memoir, cat-denial is not allowed. Your mistakes are part of what formed and transformed you; people will be able to look at how you are now and see how events changed and shaped you. And, your mistakes can help others recognize a bad decision before they make it. Some might even thank you.

One of the biggest reasons we avoid writing certain sections is that we are worried about hurting someone or invading their privacy. There are several ways to handle this, including changing people’s names or obscuring some details. In some cases, you might ask people to read what you say about them before you publish to get approval. This is not for people who might be dangerous or toxic to you—this is more for friends or colleagues you mention who might not want to be included in your memoir. Or they might be okay with it. (More on the level of we “crepe-papered the teachers’ lounge” rather than “we purposely bankrupted the small business we worked at because the boss was a jerk.”)

Which brings us to legal issues. You may fear that speaking out will lead to a lawsuit or might break a legal agreement (like a nondisclosure). In that case, consult a competent, licensed attorney in your state. Don’t take legal (or tax) advice from the Internet.

A Little Trick

If you’re having trouble (i.e., outright avoiding!) writing certain sections of your book, write that part in reverse. Start with the outcome—how did it end? What changed? Then ask what was the one thing that led to that outcome. After that, write how it came about, how it started. You’ll have the three major points done and all you need to do is flesh it out.

Don’t try to tackle more than one of those difficult scenes a day. There’s a lot to process there and you need to give yourself some grace. Take them slow and make sure you have plenty of cookies nearby.

Need help writing your memoir? Don’t know where to start? My self-guided course, Spill the Ink, takes you from idea to published book. This course has 8 modules that include video, a course manual, as well as worksheets prompts, and checklists. Find out more here: SPILL THE INK

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Belief, in any form, evolves over time.

Belief in yourself, belief in ideals, belief in other people.

Sometimes you have to take a leap of faith and trust that your belief is well-placed.

Other times, a feeling in your gut is telling you that something about the situation or person is wrong, and you need to hold off, take a pass.

Think about a time when you played or passed based on faith or doubt.

Prompt: Write about the role faith—or doubt—has played in your life.
🕊️ What moments tested it or strengthened it?

If you’ve been thinking of writing a memoir and don’t know where to start, I can help. My self-guided course, Spill the Ink, takes you from idea to published book. This course has 8 modules that include video, a course manual, as well as worksheets prompts, and checklists. Find out more here: SPILL THE INK

Writing after reinvention is really a matter of reconciling the new you with the old you. In fact, the best memoirs are about the transformation process—what your life was like as the old you, what the catalyst was that initiated the change, how you made that transformation, and how things are now, the new you.

There are some people who live their entire lives without much change. They live within twenty miles of where they were born. They did all the normal things: went to school, got a steady job, got married, had kids, took a vacation every year… in short, not a whole lot of changing going on. And that’s fine if they’re content.

But some of us see life as a place to grow and change, to learn, to try new and different things. Change sometimes looks like a sudden reinvention, but if you examine your actions over time, you can often see a pattern that has led you to the new person that you have become. It was always there; you just hadn’t achieved it yet. Or perhaps hadn’t acknowledged it.

Then there are “those people” who seem to reinvent themselves every six months or so and we’re treated to their journey via social media. If you’re writing a memoir about your professional/business journey, I strongly advise you to keep it to yourself until you are well into the new-you phase.

Yes, it’s normal to not have all the answers, but no one is going to put their trust in someone who is undergoing constant professional transformation. Why? Because it looks like you don’t know what you want to do, can’t make up your mind, and are trying to find something—anything—that works.

When I rebranded my writing business, I looked at all the things I did: ghostwriting, content marketing, my own nonfiction books, course creation, editing, branding and marketing, reports and white papers, and all sorts of odd jobs over the years. But they all came under the banner of writing. As a business, I didn’t reinvent myself so much as found the umbrella that 90% of what I did fit under, then focused on the main revenue streams, cutting the things I didn’t enjoy as well as the things that had narrow profit margins. I didn’t reinvent so much as evolve.

On a personal level, it’s okay to be a work-in-progress. Hopefully, we all are. But you need to have achieved some level of stability and come out of the process with some valuable life lessons or practical advice to impart. Otherwise, why would someone want to read your book?

If you want to focus your memoir from the perspective of the reinvented you, you need to give a little history of the transition to support and validate your new-found ideas and viewpoint. Then give people the insights you gained along the way, in the hope of inspiring them to start their own journey.

Maybe not every cloud has a silver lining, but many of them do. You just have to see cause and effect.

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• Sometimes you take a wrong turn and end up finding a great little town with a coffee shop that makes you feel like you’ve found your forever place.

• You date someone who turns out to be all wrong for you (and you for them) and they introduce you to their friend… who is just right.

• You blow a job interview, learn from it, and nail the next one—at a better company with higher pay.

Life is all about twists and turns and what sometimes looks like an irreparable mistake leads you to something even better.

Prompt: Write about a mistake that turned out to be a blessing in disguise.
🌈 What did you discover in the detour?

It’s August here in Europe and that means the entire continent goes on vacation. I am taking two weeks off (starting yesterday apparently).

I’m traveling in Ireland for about 10 days and I was going to post from the road, but… I had a little scooter accidentthe day before I was supposed to leave. Okay, it was a kind of a big scooter accident—don’t worry, the scooter is O!K! Me… well, I’m stiff and sore and grateful I still have an eye. I’d post a picture but it’s really nasty. On the plus side, I scare small children.

I will return in two weeks, rehabbed and rested.

Go have fun.

Barbara

This prompt makes me think of Mary Tyler Moore. Whenever Mary Richards spoke up in opposition to Mr. Grant (Ed Asner), you could see her steel herself, working up her courage. She’d say what she thought needed to be said even though it was hard for her and then wait for Mr. Grant to berate her.

And he’d surprise her by seeing her point. Even though he said, “I hate spunk!”

It’s not easy to speak up, especially in a room where you know you are either in the minority or at a disadvantage. But finding your voice can change everything.

Prompt: Describe a time you spoke up when it wasn’t easy.
🎤 What was at stake?

If you’ve been thinking of writing a memoir and don’t know where to start, I can help. My self-guided course, Spill the Ink, takes you from idea to published book. This course has 8 modules that include video, a course manual, as well as worksheets prompts, and checklists. Find out more here: SPILL THE INK

Oh, boy! How’s that for a title? As if all that could be put into one blog post.

So. Many. Things.

And really, a lot of it is advice I’d give to younger women but that’s a whole different topic that has nothing to do with memoir.

In terms of memoir, what I understand now that I didn’t get that I was younger…

So. Many. Things.

1. Time and Relativity

First: time and relativity. Not in the Einsteinian (is that a word?) sense, but in the way time is perceived. Time really does go faster when you’re older. Part of that is information processing: The more information we process, the slower time seems to pass. When you’re very little, you’re constantly learning new things. When you’re older, you’ve been doing a lot of the same things for years and you don’t need to think about things as much—things like cooking a batch of brownies or writing a meeting summary. They’re just things you do.

I thought old people were lying or exaggerating when they said time goes faster when you’re old. Nope.

2. Nobody Cares.

Now, this sounds like a bad thing, but it’s actually a good thing. We worry about so much, thinking other people won’t approve or we’re going to look foolish or whatever. No one is paying that much attention to you. Everyone is wrapped up in themselves and their own worries. Yes, friends and family and the current lover care about you to various extents, but outside of that small circle, what you’re doing at the moment is not on anyone’s radar.

Hell, I’ve been living in Portugal and writing about it for five years and I still have people I know fairly well who say, “You moved to Portugal?”

I’m like, “Yeah, it’s all over the freakin’ internet. Are we not Facebook friends?”

People don’t care. (Well, you know, they care, but they don’t.)

So, feel free to try various things. Take tap dancing lessons as an adult. Go to the sci-fi convention by yourself. Do what makes you happy because no one is going to notice that you’ve done it.

3. You Don’t Need Anyone’s Permission.

This kind of follows the “Nobody Cares” mantra.

If you want to try something, try it.

If you want to do something, do it.

You’re an adult and you get to sign your own permission slips now.

STOP waiting for someone to give you the okay to do something. And STOP waiting for someone to do it with. If you really want to do something, and no one else wants to do it with you, then go do it by yourself. (Except swimming and diving—always take a buddy.)

Okay, so that was more life than memoir.

If you start with these three things: learning as much as you can, which slows down time, doing what you want without caring what people think, and going out into the world to accomplish what you want to accomplish, see the things you want to see, then you will probably have plenty of fodder for a memoir.

Maybe several.

PS: Use sunscreen.

Ha! I could write a book!

Hey… wait a minute…

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Sometimes the bruise is the teacher. Which sounds a little abusive, doesn’t it? Sadly, we often do it to ourselves.

What is it about us humans that makes us have to try it out for ourselves?

• Wet paint? Let me check.

• Didn’t trust your instincts and ignored all the red flags? Stop doing that!

• Pretty sure that you can squeeze the car into that narrow parking….. scraaaaape!

Some days you just have to shake your head at yourself and laugh or you’d end up crying.

Prompt: Write about a lesson you learned the hard way.
💥 Would you undo it if you could?

I write for a living and you know what? Sometimes I’ve got nuthin’.

I bounce from tab to tab to tab, look at what I need to write and go play Websudoku. (I’m at Evil Level, which tells you how much I play.)

I don’t think I’ve ever written a book in order, from beginning to end and I’ve written (ghostwritten and my own books) over 60 books, eBooks, and courses. Probably 70, now.

Sometimes you just go with what is working for you that day. This works best when you first start because it ALL needs to be written and you can start with whatever catches your fancy. (Well, once you’ve got your outline done.)

Right now, I have a manuscript with about 30,000 words that have been “plunked in” from notes and research and I have to tell you, that feels pretty good. Yes, I know darn well that I will have to smooth things out, rewrite, change the order, add to, whatever, but guess what? I’ve got 30,000 words sitting there and that is about half the book.

Which is half the battle.

Allow me to illustrate. (Teehee!)

Have you ever seen those fundraising thermometer signs that show how much money has been raised?

Why do they work so well?

First, the thermometer is a graphic illustration of how much has been done (raised) and how much still needs doing. People see the gap (an open loop) and want to close it—the Zeigarnik Effect. You’re looking at an unfulfilled goal, unfinished work, and you feel a need to see it to completion.

But here’s something that surprised me: Campaigns that showed at least 30% to 40% progress have a significantly higher conversion rate (more people donate) than those sad thermometers that show minimal progress. So, if you’re trying to raise funds for something, don’t even **think** about putting up that thermometer graphic until you’re about a third of the way there. Or, just start with the thermometer at 30% and trust that you will get there. 😊

Now, more fun: Donors contribute more generously when the fundraising campaign gets closer to completion—80% and more. Being close to reaching the goal creates urgency and people want to be the one who puts the campaign over the top.

It also helps to put markers at 25%, 50%, and 75% because these are milestone goals. People like to get the campaign over that next marker. (Think about losing weight, when you “break” a five or a zero. What? Just me?)

What does all this have to do with writing a book?

Each time you add to the manuscript, you’re moving the red in the thermometer closer to your goal of finishing. If all you can do is write in pieces, a few pages or scenes at a time, that’s okay because every piece moves you closer to your goal.

And the closer you get to your goal, the more motivation you have to finish.

You might not have a word count goal for your book, but if you have an outline written, you will probably know how many chapters you have. (And yes, the number of chapters can get slidey.) If you’ve got 25 chapters, make a little chart and keep track of the progress on each chapter and/or fill in your thermometer each time you complete a chapter.

Are you playing games with yourself? Yes, but at least these games keep you focused on writing your book. Playing endless rounds of Websudoku does NOT. Trust me on this.

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Support can come from surprising places. Sometimes it’s a teacher or a neighbor. Maybe it was the guy everyone was afraid of because he didn’t say much who stuck up for you—whether it was on the playground or in the boardroom.

Many times, it’s a friend who takes the time to really listen and let’s you quietly work your way to the solution.

Support can be a grand gesture or a quiet hand-holding.

The people who show up when you need them most are heroes in your life story. They not only support you through a rough time, their example teaches you how to show up for others when they need support.

Prompt: Who helped you through one of the hardest times in your life?
🤝 What did their help look like?

I am working with a client right now who is trying to gather a lifetime of memories (well, a couple of decades, really), to help organize things in her mind.

She’s lived a heck of a life—lots of family, lots of travel, she’s worked in theatre and done stand-up comedy, and scuba-dived (scuba-dove?) in the big tank of a major aquarium, gone around the world, and really has wrung out of life about all it has to give.

And now, we’re trying to reconstruct a couple of decades where she has made numerous trips to certain places along with all the other stuff she was doing and she can’t quite remember what happened on which visit.

I feel ya.

And as you get older and those years drift further away in time, it gets hard to remember who was there and what the heck happened, never mind when.

So, we’re reconstructing. Putting in the big boulders first, the markers that we’re sure about. Then some of the medium and smaller ones. I ask questions, because sometimes the information is in your head, you’re just not asking your brain the right question.

But we’re also going through stuff. Well, she is, I’m 4,000 miles away. She is going through boxes that have programs and certificates and playbills and tickets and all those receipts from hotels and restaurants and who knows what.

We might shudder when we think of all the memorabilia we’ve kept for way too long, but when it comes time to write a memoir, you’re going to be feeling pretty darn smart for keeping it all. I was not good about journaling, but I did keep appointment books and planners for well over a decade. They are quite helpful.

You’ll also want to go through photos (and hope you put names and a date on the back). Nowadays, much of our life is on social media so anything from the early 2000s forward is sitting in a digital file. You can go into your Facebook profile (or a friend’s profile for that matter) and filter the posts by year to help narrow things down. You may have kept the hard drives from your old computers. (Maybe shift that stuff to thumb drives, while you’re playing with it.)

Memory is faulty. We remember things in certain ways but there are also gaps or things that we didn’t think were important enough to remember, but someone else remembers. Once you’ve gone through your mind, your hard drive, your pictures, your memorabilia, spend some time with old friends talking about the time period you are writing about. They may have known someone better than you or were at an event and remember aspects that you’ve forgotten.

If you’re writing about specific events, you might check Mr. Google and see if there’s a write-up about them or even photos that help jog your memory. Old newspaper articles can be found in digital archives and, if you can’t find it online, check your local library—they are treasure troves.

Relying solely on memory is just making it harder on yourself. There are lots of ways to jog your memory and help create the layers that bring meaning to your story.

If you’ve been thinking of writing a memoir and don’t know where to start, I can help. My self-guided course, Spill the Ink, takes you from idea to published book. This course has 8 modules that include video, a course manual, as well as worksheets prompts, and checklists. Find out more here: SPILL THE INK

To love someone or even to have a passion for something, is one of the strongest powers we can experience. Sometimes we love someone or something so much that we are in awe and perhaps a bit in fear of the pure force of that emotion.

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As high as that emotion takes us, losing a loved one plunges us down, down, down, just as deeply.

To live with loss, especially the loss of a loved one, is perhaps the worst part of being human.

We feel like nothing will ever be right again. We are crushed. We feel it in our chests, we can barely breathe.

Gradually, our breaths become deeper, longer. The world starts to right itself. We can move again, slowly, perhaps, but yes, movement.

Grief never leaves us.

Grief reshapes us.

We figure out how to accommodate it, how to live with it. How to fill that hollow space in your soul.

Prompt: Write about something you lost—and what filled that space over time.
🌾 It might not be a person; it could be a dream, a home, or a way of life.

If you’ve been thinking of writing a memoir and don’t know where to start, I can help. My self-guided course, Spill the Ink, takes you from idea to published book. This course has 8 modules that include video, a course manual, as well as worksheets prompts, and checklists. Find out more here: SPILL THE INK

Well, you could kill them…

No?

Okay. {{Eye roll}}

First, don’t take this as legal advice because I’m not a lawyer and I didn’t stay at a Holiday Inn Express last night.

Do take this as common sense.

One of the questions that comes up over and over when people start writing a memoir is, “What if the people I’m writing about are still alive?”

The short answer?

Most of them probably are.

Unless you had a very unusual childhood involving pioneers, dinosaurs, or the Revolutionary War, chances are your parents, siblings, ex-spouse, children, coworkers, neighbors, and that woman who stole your parking space at Costco (the WENCH!) are all still wandering around the planet.

So yes, it’s a legitimate concern.

The first thing to remember is that you own your story. If something happened to you, you have every right to write about your experience of it. Notice I said your story, your experience. That’s different from declaring your version of events as indisputable fact.

Your brother may remember Thanksgiving 1998 very differently than you do. That’s okay. Memory is funny that way. Two people can walk out of the same room with completely different versions of what just happened.

Where memoir writers get themselves into trouble is when they stop telling their own story and start assigning motives.

Instead of saying, “My mother hated me,” consider writing, “I felt like I could never earn my mother’s approval.” One is a statement about someone else’s inner thoughts. The other is your lived experience.

See the difference?

It’s also worth asking yourself one very important question before you hit Publish:

Why am I including this?

If the answer is, “Because I’m still furious and this will show them,” you might want to let that chapter marinate for a while.

If the answer is, “Because this event changed the course of my life,” that’s a much stronger reason.

Not every family disagreement belongs in print. Not because you’re obligated to protect everyone else’s feelings, but because memoir isn’t supposed to be a decades-old scorecard.

Another question I hear is whether people need to sign a permission slip before you mention them.

Generally speaking, no. You don’t need Aunt Shirley’s written consent to say she made the world’s driest Thanksgiving turkey. People appear in memoirs all the time without signing release forms.

That said, you can make choices that reduce unnecessary drama.

Change names if identities aren’t important. Combine minor characters. Leave out details that don’t matter to the story but make someone instantly recognizable. Ask yourself whether identifying a person actually adds anything.

Sometimes it does.

Sometimes it doesn’t.

Finally—and this may be the hardest advice of all—you have to accept that not everyone is going to love your version of the story.

Someone may say, “That’s not how I remember it.”

They’re probably telling the truth because they’re remembering their story.

You’re writing yours.

The goal of memoir isn’t to win a courtroom case or prove you’re the hero of every chapter. It’s to honestly explore what happened, what it meant to you, and who you became because of it.

Write with honesty.

Write with compassion where you can.

And if you’re writing solely to settle old scores...

Maybe write that version first. Get it all out of your system.

Just don’t be in a hurry to publish it.

Sometimes bravery shows up quietly.

Courage is often a self-confidence issue; you’re not sure you’re able to do something or you think someone else would do a better job. I think we can all remember times when we had to “work up” the courage to do something, whether it was jumping off the high dive at the pool, asking for a raise, or asking our crush out for coffee.

Other times though, courage surprises you. It shows up all at once and you ACT! before you have time to think things through.

Something happens and you look around and realize no one else is going to do what needs to be done.

You see something that is wrong—a kid being bullied or a someone takes credit for a co-worker’d idea and you can’t stop yourself from going into protection mode, even if you’re not physically or socially powerful.

You blurt courage.

It’s out of your body before you are ready and then, Well, I guess I have to follow through.

Prompt: Describe a time you surprised yourself with courage.
What pushed you to act?

If you’ve been thinking of writing a memoir and don’t know where to start, I can help. My self-guided course, Spill the Ink, takes you from idea to published book. This course has 8 modules that include video, a course manual, as well as worksheets prompts, and checklists. Find out more here: SPILL THE INK

I could never get into the habit of journaling. For a number of years, I did “Morning Pages” – three freewriting pages a day before the coffee kicked in ala The Artist’s Way by Julia Cameron. But it wasn’t journaling. It was whatever crossed my mind that morning and when I moved to Portugal, entire notebooks filled with literally thousands of pages got tossed.

I do blog and my memoir, American Expat: Moving Abroad Solo After 60 is largely comprised of blog posts from my first year in Portugal. The benefit to me was that the blog posts were chronological and that worked for structuring the book.

If you journal, you get that same benefit. You also have the benefit of knowing your real-time feelings and observations, which is a lot easier than trying to remember things from scratch twenty or more years later.

Just as I didn’t use every blog post, you might not want to include every journal entry. Some are, let’s face it, mundane. Or you may have written an entry in the heat of the moment and later found out you had the wrong information and the entry is no longer valid.

You will also want to add to the entries, finding a thread (aka structure and theme) to tie the entries together. While you have the benefit of chronological entries, you may want to shift things around to create a better story, heighten the suspense, or to create a clearer narrative. You don’t need to use the journal entries word for word. And you probably won’t.

Sometimes the journal entries themselves don’t go anywhere or have a point—they’re just a chronicle of what happened or how you felt. That’s okay. Often you only see the lesson in hindsight. Or maybe something else needed to happen, something that acted as a catalyst that gave meaning or action to the original entry—it just happened later. You can combine entries into stories, add context, bring the lesson to the forefront or use it as foreshadowing for a later event. The entries themselves don’t have to be standalone chapters and in fact, probably won’t be. Many of the chapters of my book combine several blog posts and I then added in the narrative.

But if you have journaled during the time you have set your memoir, you have the benefit of pre-written chunks of content, material that can work as the foundation of your book. From there, you can add, tighten, and rearrange as needed. Your journal can be the start of something great.

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If you’ve been thinking of writing a memoir and don’t know where to start, I can help. My self-guided course, Spill the Ink, takes you from idea to published book. This course has 8 modules that include video, a course manual, as well as worksheets prompts, and checklists. Find out more here: SPILL THE INK

Failure leaves fingerprints on our stories.

It leaves fingerprints on our confidence, too.

We’d like to think we’re the type of person who can take a failure and learn from it and yes, eventually we may.

Failures shape us—they may make us grow. They may make us more fearful or risk averse. Best case scenario: They may make us stronger or even smarter.

Prompt: Write about a time you failed—and what came after.
Did it lead to something unexpected?

I was in the Aldi the other day, searching the dairy case for ricotta cheese (you wouldn’t think it would be hard to find and yet… you would be wrong). There were two young women who were shopping for what seemed to be a dinner party. They were excitedly searching the aisles and checking off items on their lists.

One of the young ladies had picked up a parfait type dessert cup and she looked at it and then put it back on the shelf.

“I shouldn’t.”

Ladies, you know that voice in your head.

Now, this young woman was fit and trim and she obviously had that thing we miss most of all: a metabolism. I looked at her and her friend and I gave the advice I would give my younger self:

“EAT DESSERT. Eat as much of the foods that you love while you can still burn it off.”

I didn’t go into my whole “your body will betray you” because really, they will find out soon enough. But honestly, all the desserts I passed up because I didn’t want to get fat and guess what? Doesn’t matter. A woman’s body just does whatever the hell it wants at various times in her life and no matter what you do, you’re going to have to fight with your own body at some point.

You might not think that is advice worth going back in time to give. Probably not, but it’s at least part of the advice I would give. (The other part being anytime you go five pounds over your comfortable weight, take it off—don’t let it slide to eight or ten pounds and keep up a fitness routine. Actually, I have lots of advice for my past self; my life has been a cautionary tale.)

The things that we think are important enough to tell our younger selves are clues into the lessons we learned the hard way and the way they shaped us. Those hard life lessons are turning points but we might not have recognized them as such at the time. It’s only in hindsight that we realize we may have taken a wrong turn or could have, at least made a better choice.

Part of revisiting those times is giving yourself some grace. You may well have made the best decision you could with the information you had at the time. You might not have had someone in your life to tell you the downside of a move.

Maybe you wouldn’t have listened to older self. You might have thought “What does that old biddy know about life in general and my life in particular?” Sometimes we really do have to learn things the hard way—only because we insist on it.

What you would tell your younger self indicates what is important to you. Maybe, like me, you’d want to tell your younger self all sorts of things, big and small. But if you could only tell your younger self ONE THING, what would it be and how would that knowledge have helped you live a better life?

When did you realize you’d become an adult?

HA HA HA!

Does anyone really feel like an adult? Do we all walk around feeling like teenagers in adult suits? Just me?

Okay then.

Being an adult is not always tied to age.

Maybe you were always an adult. Some people are.

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But for most of us, at some point, there comes that time when you’re in a situation that requires an adult. You look around and realize it’s you. Whatever needs fixing, it rests solely on you.

That’s when you realize… it’s time to adult.

Prompt: When did you realize you’d become an adult?

🕰️ Was it a responsibility, a loss, or a quiet moment of knowing?

When I talk to people about writing their memoir, they tell me, “I don’t know where to start.”

Pro Secret: It doesn’t matter where you start.

Yeah, it’s great to have an outline and some idea of how you’re going to structure things. In fact, it’s one of the first things we look at in my memoir course, Spill the Ink. I like to help people build a structure first because it helps you figure out where to “hang” your stories.

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But if you’re at the very beginning and stuck and maybe even a bit intimidated, let’s take some pressure off.

Simply describe a room you remember from the time period that your memoir is set in.

Why?

Because describing that room is going to take you back. It will trigger emotions and memories. It puts YOU in the scene.

In college, I lived in a townhouse apartment with three (at least) other roommates. My bedroom was upstairs, to the left, over the kitchen. It had a twin bed and an old bureau from home. I had two sets of bed sheets, yellow and light blue with butterflies on them. (I’ve come a long way, baby.) There was a granny square crocheted afghan folded at the foot of the bed. The closet had those metal louver doors that scraped when you opened them. The rug was some sort of beige/brown shag and there may have been a window—that I can’t remember.

You know what I did remember while I wrote out that (very) short description?

The walls were paper thin.

And the people next door had a kid named Dana. Dana never got up in time for school. Every morning, Monday through Friday, whether I had to get up for class or not, I was awakened by the parents yelling “DANA!”

Then I’d bang on the wall and yell at Dana to get up, too.

Dana is all grown up now and I have no idea if he found a job where he didn’t have to be a morning person. I hope so.

The point is that just describing that room brought back the memory of that kid. And he is probably one reason why I decided not to have kids. 😊

If you’re not sure where to start, pick a room, any room as long as it belongs to the time you want to write about. See what pops out of your memory banks.

I think every kid can’t wait for the day they can be in charge of their own life. Go to bed when they want, not eat their vegetables (just me?), decide where to go, what to do, and who to do it with.

Some of us get a taste of freedom while still in our parents’ house, usually by doing something we shouldn’t: skipping school, going to a party when you say you’re staying at a friend’s house, taking a bus or train to a town where no one knows you.

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Then there’s that first time you are truly on your own. There’s rent to be paid, groceries to buy, meals to cook, laundry to do and you look around to see who can help and… nope. It’s on you.

The first taste of freedom can be fun and wild and it can also be intimidating and scary and maybe even all of these things.

There’s nothing like realizing you’re truly on your own.

Prompt: Write about the first time you felt independent.
🚗 Was it thrilling, scary, or both?