The Story That Made Me Cry at My Keyboard
The scenes memoir writers skip because they seem boring are usually where the power lives. A quiet moment in a client interview proved it.
Series: Memoir Writing
How to write a memoir that people will actually read: finding the story inside a life, structuring decades into chapters, handling family and memory, and deciding what to leave out. Practical guidance from a ghostwriter who has written memoirs for executives, veterans, athletes and ordinary people with extraordinary stories.
Memoir WritingWhat a Belly dancer Taught Me About Writing
Dialogue that sounds like a police report has no life in it. A forceful bellydancer named Marjhani taught the lesson without ever reading a word.
Memoir WritingAuDHD at 64: Why Being Wired Differently Makes Me a Better Ghostwriter
At 64, after 113+ books and a tech career, I learned I am autistic and have ADHD, and probably always was, which rewrote my entire life story. For decades I thought something was wrong with me. The same wiring that…
Memoir Writing100 Life Lessons I’ve Learned: Wisdom for Success
Life hands out no instruction manual, so I learned these the way most people do, the hard way, often face-down. Approaching another birthday, I have collected a few things worth passing on, equal parts wisdom, humor, and the occasional well-earned…
Memoir WritingFrom Castro’s Cuba to America’s Courtroom: The Remarkable Journey of Judge Alex Ferrer
In 1961 a Cuban family fled Castro with their one-year-old son, traded established careers for minimum-wage jobs in Miami, and that infant grew up to become a cop at nineteen, the youngest Circuit Court judge in Miami-Dade history, a death-penalty…
Memoir WritingThe AuADHD Superpower Nobody Talks About
I wrote my grandfather's 52,000-word war memoir in two weeks, 187 pages spanning the Yangtze River Patrol to three years in Japanese prison camps. People assume discipline or a system; the truth is AuDHD. When my brain decides something matters,…
Memoir WritingWhy 2026 Won’t Be the Year You Write Your Book
You made this resolution last January, and the one before, and by March you had stopped thinking about it both times. 2026 will be no different, and not for lack of discipline or a story worth telling. Writing a book…
Memoir WritingIt’s 2026 and Still No Book
You said you would write it this year, and you didn't, same as 2024, same as 2023, because you are busy and the business always comes first. So another year passes, your expertise stays trapped in your head, and competitors…
Memoir WritingFour Weddings and a Soul Mate: The Week I Married My Wife Four Times
I proposed at Wendy's on our third date, and then we married four times in a single week. It is not a story about a couple who kept getting it wrong; it is about finding your person and watching the…
Memoir WritingWhen Grief Sent Me to the Desert: Finding Healing Through Joshua Tree
Two months after my wife died, I stood in the most spectacular wildflower bloom in Joshua Tree's recorded history, 45, newly widowed, and lost. I could have reached for medication or given up in a chair. Instead the desert my…
Memoir WritingThe Letters They Never Sent: What Iwo Jima Taught Me About Executive Books
In Letters from Iwo Jima, a soldier who knows he will die sits in a cave under artillery and writes to his mother, not about honor or strategy, but about missing her cooking. That is what the best executive books…
Memoir WritingTrigger Warnings: Protecting Readers or Censoring Art?
On trigger warnings, both camps are half right and neither is listening, protection on one side, censorship on the other. The real question is quieter: should a book tell you what is inside before you open it? Having ghostwritten memoirs…