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When I wrote The Heart and Craft of Lifestory Writing to help readers begin writing their lifestories, I knew that some readers would eventually be ready to publish story albums – collections of short stories – or full-length memoirs. To help them produce professional looking volumes, I included instructions for assembling and preparing the documents to take advantage of free Print-On-Demand services like CreateSpace.com . I gave detailed instructions for using Styles to simplify formatting and ensure uniform results. I explained how and why to adjust line spacing for easier reading and suggested a number of reader-friendly fonts readily available for free download. I gave instructions for setting custom page size and effective margin settings. You’ll find everything there that you need to know to create a “real” book that doesn’t scream BEGINNER BOOK! But, I admit it, there is a learning curve, and it’s more effort than many people want to invest. Until now, if you didn’t feel up ...

Although 99% of my writing is stored electronically in several places, I have a  filing cabinet in my office, with drawers 24" deep. The back of of them is hard to access. That’s where my oldest stories are stored, the ones I wrote in 1979 on my old Smith Corona electric at the beginning of my journey along my Writer’s Path. Every few years I pull those stories out and am reminded again how utterly pitiful they are. True, they were fiction. Sort of. I didn’t know about lifestory writing yet, and would not have been brave enough to write openly anyway. Although some content is touching, descriptions were flat as Kansas, dialogue stilted and contrived. They jumped around. And they were preachy. I had an agenda when I wrote those stories and it wasn’t hidden. They were a start. Twenty-five years ago, I knew nothing of creative writing classes or writing groups, and never thought to look for books on how to write. I was shooting from the finger tips, buoyed by A’s on research pape...

In 2007 I wrote two posts, “Color Me Obsessive,” Part 1 and Part 2 , about a collaborative effort to compile a comprehensive list of terms describing emotions and feelings. With the help of classes I later taught, that list has grown to include 1100 words. Many other posts here and on my Writing for the Health of It blog cover the physical and emotional health benefits of labeling and expressing emotion. But there’s a lot more to it. It’s not just for and about you. Feelings and emotions are a corner stone of connecting with readers . Readers want to know what is going on in a character’s mind and heart. In the case of writing memoir, the only character you can speak directly for is yourself. That doesn’t mean that other people are restricted to the role of paper dolls. You can tell readers what you observe, assume, and hear them say. The most obvious way of conveying these emotions is to express them directly as adjectives or verbs, but that’s limiting, and tends to keep a ...