Everyone has a story worth saving, and most people wait too long to write it down. These posts are for anyone who wants to write a memoir — where to start, how to structure a life into a book, formats to choose from, and why the time to capture your story is now, before the witnesses are gone.
Skilled trades hold knowledge that does not move through textbooks, certifications, or YouTube, the kind that takes thirty years of apprenticeship to build and dies in a single generation when the master retires silent. Here are ten trades, master electricians, stone masons, watchmakers, boatbuilders, organ builders, where the knowledge is vanishing now, and why a book is how it survives.
Veterinarians hold an authority almost no other profession does, because they are the last person in the room when an animal dies and the first on call when one is sick. The right book is not a pet-care manual; it is a meditation on the human-animal bond, witnessed across decades of those moments. Here is the veterinarian book nobody has written yet, and why it should exist.
If you are a veteran, especially Vietnam- or Korea-era, the window for your memoir is closing faster than you think. Once you are gone, your children get fragments and your grandchildren get less than that. The memoir is what survives, in your own words and your own voice. Here is what I tell veterans when they ask whether they should start now, before it is too late.
A 71-year-old writing his memoir uses AI better than most professionals half his age, to find the gaps in his draft, to refocus when he loses the thread, to leave his ghostwriter notes on what to tackle next, and never once to write a word. He is the living model for augmented work. Here is exactly how he uses AI, and why it makes him a sharper writer than he was.
A revenge memoir is a bad idea for the writer and a worse one for the ghostwriter. I once turned down a former mob informant who wanted to name names and settle scores, then promised to keep my role secret, and I asked how he expected me to trust that while he wrote a book to expose everyone else. Here is who should not write a revenge memoir, and the better book hiding inside it.
A client goes quiet for two days and my brain writes the entire catastrophe: he hated the chapter, he is firing me, the refund, the career-ending review. From he hasn’t emailed to professional ruin in under an hour. If that loop sounds familiar, here is my honest account of catastrophizing, and the strategies that actually quiet it.
Christmas is brutally hard to write, because its cultural weight pulls you toward generic warmth, the lights, the cookies, the sentiment every reader has heard a thousand times and feels nothing for. The fix is specificity: not Christmas in general but one particular Christmas, to particular people. Here is how to put the holiday on the page so it actually lands.
The hardest part of a memoir is never the prose; it is the people, the parent, the ex, the business partner whose presence the story needs and whose inclusion creates a problem no amount of craft can fully solve. All 54+ of my memoir projects hit this wall. Here is how to write about real people in your life without destroying relationships or getting sued.
Roger Enrico ran Pepsi during the Cola Wars and signed the biggest celebrity endorsement of its era, then wrote a memoir that defined the story rather than just telling it. That is the power these books hold. Here is why the most successful people in business, entertainment, and public life write memoirs, and what those books do for a career.
You are not short on material; the hard part is shaping decades of experience into something that holds a reader and captures what truly mattered. Some of my most rewarding projects have been memoirs for clients in their seventies, eighties, and nineties. Here is a practical guide to organizing a lifetime into a memoir worth reading, written for seniors.
At seventeen I wrote my first memoir, my grandfather’s, a Navy cook captured at Corregidor who survived the POW camps and a march through Manila. The family’s version was secondhand and partly wrong, so I interviewed him for dozens of sessions and checked every fact. Here is what that taught me about turning a life into a book people actually want to read.
Should the memoir run chronologically, circle a single theme, or jump across time? Nearly every memoir project hits this wall, a lifetime of material and no obvious shape, and the wrong choice can turn a remarkable life into a book nobody finishes. The format decides how a reader experiences everything. Here is how to pick the structure your story actually needs.
A client once delayed a memoir of his 85-year-old father for six months. The day he finally committed, his father had a heart attack. He survived, and the book happened, but it nearly did not. Here is why the right time to write your book is now, told through clients who learned it the hard way.
I built a pretend computer out of paper clips in kindergarten, already obsessed with how systems fit together. That obsession drove four decades of choices, from running tech for a $16 billion company to publishing 113+ books. Here is how an education that never looked perfect built a career and a writing business.
Thanksgiving hands a writer everything at once: gratitude and guilt, warmth and dysfunction, food, family, and a tangle of uncomfortable history. It has fueled stories since long before it was a national holiday. Here is how books and movies have mined the ultimate family pressure cooker, and the craft lessons hiding in the turkey.
In his nineties I sat with my grandfather and his lifetime of journals to write his memoir, and discovered the story I grew up on, that he survived Bataan, was wrong; the truth was a march through Manila, no less harrowing. Family narratives drift. Here is how to turn a lifetime of stories into a memoir, and how to tell which memories hold up.
At seventeen, my grandfather handed me his World War II diary and asked me to turn it into a book. He had served on the USS Panay and survived being marched through Manila as a prisoner. That first project became a career of 54+ books. Here is how it started, and where it led.
Moehringer moved to Las Vegas for two years and logged 250 hours with Andre Agassi to write Open, a memoir that aired the hatred of tennis, the abusive father, the drug use, everything a sanitized celebrity book leaves out. The result changed the form. Here is the real story behind one of the greatest ghostwritten books, and what it teaches about the craft.
My grandfather never spoke about the war, three years a prisoner, marched through Manila, held in Japanese camps, not at dinner, not when asked directly. It stayed locked inside for decades, until one day I asked the right question and it poured out. Here is how to capture a loved one’s story yourself, before it is gone, as the most lasting gift you can give.
Sit people with complicated histories around a table with too much food and no easy exit, and wait. Someone says the wrong thing, someone drinks too much, someone raises the forbidden subject, and every buried family tension surfaces at once. That compression is gold. Here is why Thanksgiving scenes are some of the best material going in memoir and fiction.
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