Category Archives: Mostly Me

Memoir Writing: No. 2 Taking Notes

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Wallowing in the past can be great fun.

Thumbing through journals can enlighten and horrify.

Writing in Tokyo on my way to Viet-Nam, I observed: “Smog is very bad. I see why eight people died here in August.”

Reading old letters brings back the old times.

A postcard I sent to a girl friend (later my wife) reported: “Thing are quite a bit more expensive than I had planned, thus I am cutting everything short.”

Newspaper clippings take snapshots in time.

Richard Nixon said on March 6, 1970, “No American stationed in Laos has ever been killed in ground combat operations.” Two days later, he corrected that to say seven had died. (History books record the correct number as 27.)

Old photos produce giggles.

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Me in 1970

The smirk on my face was caused by chewing on a toothpick, something I still do.

Enjoy the stroll down memory lane. It will spark other memories, and they may be needed down the line.

But there’s work to be done. This isn’t a lark. This is memoir writing.

You have to take notes as you wallow.

Let me repeat: You have to take notes.

Otherwise, you will find yourself rereading those journals and letters and clippings and trying to find that one priceless photo that spoke a thousand words.

How you take notes and where you keep them is up to you. Whatever works for you is what works. But you have to take notes.

Blogging vs. Writing: Indecision Angst

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Writers must blog, must create a “platform,” i.e., round up a bunch of people who will buy their books — or so we are told..

The bigger your platform, the more likely an agent or publisher is to pick you up.

I beg to differ — about blogging, especially.

I was a social media content consultant back before anyone called MySpace a social medium and content was called “stuff” you put on a Web site. (I still prefer Web site to website, which looks like alphabetical diarrhea.)

Here’s the deal. We don’t, and can’t, spend all our time reading blogs by writers. Readers can’t either. Yet 8 bazillion (rounded up) books are published every year either self-dubbed or traditionally dubbed. If every writer wrote a blog or carried on on Facebook or Twitter, when would readers have time to read our “stuff,” i.e.,the stories we want to sell? Short answer: Never.

The same is true for writers: You can either write your stories (books) or you can blog. (Blogging takes time if the content is to have value.) So, do you write books or write a blog?

I vote in favor of books … and every so often guilt myself into writing a blog post. Even though I know no one is reading, and I hate doing it.

And that is Indecision Angst.

Copy Editor Misnomer

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Having bought into the Oxford comma, I now think of my copy editor as a comma editor.