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Does the thought of finding an agent or publisher give you vapors? If so, you are in good company. Query letters are among the most important documents an author writes. Whether you are a full-time freelancer or a wannabe one-time writer hoping for publication of a memoir, your future hangs on that one page. It can make or break your chances of seeing your words between commercially printed covers. Writing great query letters is a special art form, and not one that we learn in any classes in school. Some people complete their MFA in writing without learning this crucial skill. So what’s a person to do? The traditional way to learn is to find a good book. You may find something in your library, but this is an important topic, and it’s worth having something on hand to refer to whenever you need it. I must include a disclaimer here. Since I had any clue at all about how to write, I’ve only written one query letter and received an acceptance within half an hour of sending the email....

Sometimes I’m as surprised as anyone when I hear the words that come out of my mouth. That was the case recently when I suggested to 85-year-old Jack that I was going to make  him a star chart to reward him for sticking to his determination to write at least fifteen minutes each day on his memoir project. “A star chart? What on earth is a star chart? I’m not into astrology!” he quickly informed me. “Don’t worry, it’s nothing like that. It’s a tool that parents and teachers use with kids to get them to do things like making their beds or turning their homework in on time. It’s a kind of game. You’ll get a star each day you write. You already have five. I’m going to send you your stars as soon as we hang up.” He was a little dubious, but he liked getting the email with the stars. I send him a new one every week or so with an update. He hasn’t missed a day of writing in 47 days now. Some days he writes for the minimum fifteen minutes, other days he might write for as long as two hou...

The material that makes it into a finished memoir is like the tip of the iceberg, representing only 10% to 20% of the relevant material. Deciding what to include and what to omit is a major challenge for anyone aspiring to write memoir. Many factors go into this decision. Three of the most important are retaining focus on the primary story, controlling length, and respecting personal privacy of self and others in the story. My purpose here is not to explore these factors, but to share my experience reading a memoir that disappointed me by leaving too much ice under the water, resulting in a flat, confusing berg of a book that probably won’t get much notice. I won’t identify the book, and say only that it was about the disintegration of a marriage and the author’s eventual realization that although she couldn’t fix the marriage, she could and would fix herself. Bravo!  I hope that writing the memoir was a big step along that path. The disappointment springs from the fact that th...

Boyd Lemon is the author of the recently published memoir, Digging Deep . His memoir is unusual in many respects: the depth and candor of the material, his organizing structure and his decision to self-publish and promote it like crazy. In this post Boyd answers questions about his general writing process. SL: Early in the book you mention that you’d been writing short fiction and decided to write about your marriages. What gave you that idea? BL: My young writing mentor, whom I call Kate in the book, suggested it. I yearned to write a novel, after having written about 15 short stories, and when I mentioned it to her, she told me she thought I wasn’t ready yet to write a novel and suggested that I write a memoir about my three marriages. “There’s gold there,” she said. After thinking about it, I decided she was right. SL: When did your idea of writing about your marriages evolve into a commitment to publish a memoir? BL: After I finished the third draft, I thought about pu...