Practical guidance on writing memoirs that capture a life with the stakes and meaning intact. These articles draw on 54+ ghostwritten books and a focus on the stories that disappear if no one writes them down.
AprilMaya Angelou was born on April 4, 1928, in St. Louis. An editor told her autobiography as literature was close to impossible, and she answered with I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. She wrote it, and six more volumes,…
HistoryYbor City was a company town built by a cigar manufacturer in 1885, run through mutual aid societies that owned their own hospitals, and used by Jose Marti to fund a revolution. For a writer it is the densest square…
Book MarketingSixteen pieces on the writing life in Pinellas County and Tampa: where to work, the history nobody mentions, and getting shelved.
Memoir WritingPinellas County has more writing groups than most people realize, mostly meeting in library rooms. The useful skill is telling a group that will make you better from one that will correct your commas for two years.
HistoryPinellas County is full of people who did something substantial somewhere else and then moved here, and almost none of them have written it down. The reasons are always the same three, and all three are wrong.
HistoryThere is a Tocobaga temple mound in a county park in Safety Harbor, and the park is named for the Frenchman who showed up in 1842. Which name ends up on the sign is the useful thing to think about.
HistoryA man built an eight-story pink hotel on St. Pete Beach because a woman in Spain was forbidden to marry him. It opened in 1928, three hundred percent over budget, and the Fitzgeralds spent a week there in 1930.
HistoryThe Safety Harbor Public Library began in 1938 with a hundred books and $2.35 raised at a tea party. It is now open seven days a week and is the best free workspace in town for anyone writing a book.
Memoir WritingThe Clearwater Main Library is a landmark building with maker studios, a digitization station, and a harbor view. It is also closed on weekends, and part of it may become something else.
Memoir WritingFailed memoirs know what they cover, not what they are about. Coverage is the events. Aboutness is the question the book answers, the meaning under the events
Fiction WritingThe first Behind the Book essay: how my first novel grew from a Facebook message, fourteen hours of Skype interviews under a no-lying rule, a pen name I later retired, and an ending that refused a rescue.
GhostwritingIf you are technical and weighing a memoir, your biggest fear is that a ghostwriter will not understand your world and will flatten your career into something unrecognizable. That fear is correct, most will. The fix is one who actually…
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