Friday, January 8, 2010

CREATIVE WRITING INSIGHTS: “How to Write a Memoir in Twelve Easy Steps,” by Lorilyn Roberts






All of us have lived through dramatic times of ecstasy and pain. For the sensitive and sensate person, memories of these events are etched in the psyche and have molded us into who we are. A memoir is a way to touch at the heart of those feelings and allow them to be shared with others.

A memoir is different from an autobiography because it takes a “snapshot” of certain events in a person’s life. A memoir tends to read more like a novel. Usually, a memoir is written in more colorful language than an autobiography and only relevant information is included—not everything about a person’s life should be shared.

So how do I get started, you may ask? Here are twelve steps I followed in writing my adoption memoir in Children of Dreams.

1. A memoir should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. There should be a problem, a conflict, and a resolution.

2. It might be helpful to pull out old pictures, diaries, and objects to bring to memory the experiences you are writing about. If possible, go to the scene and relive the events in your mind.

3. Allow your feelings to flow freely from your mind and heart—they may be painful, terrifying, hurtful, crazy, or not understood, but to write a good memoir, you must bring the buried nemeses to the surface and write with passion.

4. Listen to music that will transport you from your surroundings to the time and place of the memoir. I like classical music, but anything that stirs your emotions and allows your mind to be absorbed back into that moment will work.

5. Don’t do any major editing until you’ve written all that you can remember. Worry later about clean-up. If you edit too soon, you may change something that is important.

6. Expect to feel like you are going crazy. Your feelings may create powerful emotions that are buried deep, but when you write those hidden passions and distorted thoughts on paper, it can be cathartic. The story may even write itself and come to a resolution you never thought possible.

7. Make sure you validate facts. A memoir is based on truth, so dates, times, names, people, and sequence of events are important. Otherwise, your credibility may come into question if something you have written is shown not to be true. It may be necessary to change names or locations, and this is acceptable provided you put a disclaimer at the beginning.

8. A good memoir is rich in color—metaphors, similes, descriptions, dialogue, and feelings will make your memoir come alive.

9. After you’ve written around one hundred pages, take some time to reflect on what you have said. Then put it aside for a few days, don’t look at it, and come back and re-read it. It will be easier to spot things that need to be revised or rewritten. Save deletions for later.

10. Be kind to yourself. Writing a memoir is a very personal, gut-wrenching journey.

11. After you have written the rough draft and edited it as much as you can, including deletions, give your memoir to some trusted friends for feedback. You may see a pattern in their comments, and that’s a good indication of what needs further revision. Don’t be shy and seek a professional editor if needed.

12. Never give up. Never, never give up. Need I say it again? Never, never, never give up.

Why write a memoir, you may ask?

First, the memories are important to you. The intimate details will soon be forgotten if they are not written down. The memoir validates your experience and gives meaning to your life. Your memories become a treasured journey for others to learn from and enjoy.

A memoir can be a gift to your children, your parents, your friends, your country, and the world. Only you can tell the story that you’ve been given, and other people’s lives will be enriched. Most of all, if you’re like me, you will be set free from the past and empowered to write your next story.

You will be changed and healed in ways that would not have been possible without writing your story. Having gone through the journey twice, you will be wiser. Perhaps you will touch others in a way you couldn’t have imagined because the “gestalt” of your experience is universal. Most importantly, you will have accomplished what you set out to do, and that is to write your memoir.

I say it again, never give up. It will be worth it when you have finished.

Wednesday, December 30, 2009

BOOK MARKETING: “Reflections on What Worked and What Didn’t,” by Lorilyn Roberts



NOTE: While this piece was written in 2009, remarkably, book marketing in 2022 hasn’t changed, except perhaps to be even harder.

Reflecting on marketing Children of Dreams this year brings me to some interesting conclusions. The things I thought initially would be the most effective weren’t. Some of the things that cost nothing except my time were. To focus my efforts for my next book and how I will market it, I will share some of my results. Hopefully, I can help another person to make wiser choices about where to invest their efforts who, like me, may be a new author without huge sums of money to spend.


First, Children of Dreams was written as a memoir and published POD. If you have published a romance fiction or nonfiction book as an expert in some field, or some other type of book, your results may be different using these same marketing strategies.

Now to the Marketing Aspect:

Most of the things I spent a significant amount of money on marketing Children of Dreams, I doubt I would do again. The marketing people will say, “We guarantee exposure, not book sales,” and they have that one right. You can easily Google my name and find twenty or more pages where my name pops up. Based on these results, you might believe I am a best-selling author. I am not. What marketing experts guarantee is exposure, not book sales. 

As far as I am concerned, considering that information now borne out in experience, it makes me much more leery to invest dollars in the future on expensive marketing campaigns.

Some of the methods I used included the following:

1. Email blast. I spent around $250 on an email marketing campaign. I don't know that I sold one book out of it, and for that amount of money and not being able to document its success, I feel like it was a waste of money.

2. Email of my book cover and relevant information to all libraries and independent bookstores in the United States and Canada. This cost around $400, and again, I don't know that I sold a single book out of this campaign. Would I do it again? No.

3. RTIR, or Radio-TV Interview Report: Cost around $400. I was promoted two weeks in a row on radio only, and received two radio interviews. I am not aware of a single book that I sold as a result. One of the radio stations was in Canada and one was in the Boston area, I think. 

Would I do this again? Yes. I felt like it gave me a great experience and I enjoyed being interviewed. I was also able to take one of the interviews off the radio station’s website as an MP-3 audio and posted it on my website. If I had the money, I would have done the TV portion of the promotion, but it is very expensive and I couldn't afford it. Maybe with my next book, instead of wasting money on email campaigns, I will put it into this marketing venture.

4. Other things I did that were free or inexpensive and more effective as far as book sales.

Videos: Make lots of videos. I made five and posted them all over the web, not just on YouTube. There are many other video websites and they get picked up in the search engines as if they were magnets. The interview of me personally wasn’t particularly “exciting,” I suppose, but I think what the viewer can see is who I am; my character, and that I am a real, live, living, breathing human being. 

Besides, I know the next one will be better because the first one of anything is always the hardest and usually the worst. You are testing the waters, breaking new territory, going where you have never gone before. Experience counts for something.

Book Reviews; I found it very difficult to get friends of mine to post reviews of my book on Amazon.com (or any place else). Most people, unless they are in the writing or marketing field, are intimidated by the thought of having their words on the web. I submitted free books and e-books to several different sites for free book reviews, which met with only limited success. 

Would I send out free books for reviews again? No. Most of them produced no reviews, and they probably took my free books and advertised them on Amazon.com or eBay. Some of the free eBooks I sent for reviews, however, did produce reviews.

My goal was to get twenty-five reviews on Amazon. When I found it so difficult to get book reviews in a timely manner, I paid for a service that was very reasonable and legitimate, in my opinion, and rounded my review total to twenty-five reviews for five stars. 

Was it worth paying for some of the reviews? Absolutely. They were real people that read my book whom I did not know. I wasn’t paying for five stars. I was paying to have my book read and reviewed, and I don’t mind doing that. I would look at a book that has twenty-five reviews with five stars before a book with only two reviews with five stars. I feel this was money well spent. 

Also, the inside-the-book program on Amazon is excellent. If I can’t look inside someone’s book and I don’t know the author, I won’t buy the book, plain and simple.

The Masters of Marketing: The elite, the best, I believe, in the U.S. and probably the world is QVC. I close caption it almost on a daily basis, and have watched with interest how it is they can sell so many kinds of products and make millions annually. From hours of captioning, what I have observed goes like this.

The head person of the company actually appears on the network programming (and I mean “the boss”) and they are passionate about their product. They eat it, sleep it, dream it, and whatever else comes to mind. It is their life. I have captioned an hour of a product that I had absolutely no use for, and at the end of the show, have been convinced that I can’t live without that product. That is advertising and marketing as its best. If someone can be passionate about cleaning supplies and vacuum cleaners, I better be passionate about my book. Otherwise, I am in trouble.

To sum up what was only going to be a few comments is this: You must believe in yourself, in what you are writing, and have a passion never to give up or compromise, and finally, to give your book every ounce of tender-loving care that you possibly can. Then it’s your job to be the best writer you can be. 

That might mean you need to hire an editor to help you. Then you need to do everything you can to be that excellent writer—attend writer’s conferences, enroll in writing classes, read books about writing, and search the web for all the information you can find. And there is a lot of good, free information out there. 

Finally, you must have something in your book that will make a difference in people’s lives. It’s your job to convince everybody they can’t live without your book. I know that’s easier said than done. But with POD, you have that time. Your book never goes out of print.

Don’t forget, you need a good website, you need to have a blog, you need to be on social networking sites to connect with people, you need to be willing to get out and speak to the public about your book, and you need to get on as many free e-zines from marketing people as you possibly can. There is more I could write, but this is a start.

Am I discouraged I have only sold about two hundred books so far? Hardly. I have the rest of my life as a POD author. I am working on my next book in connection with my Master of Arts in Creative Writing, and look forward to “meeting” new people on the web, appearing on more radio shows, blogging about things that interest me, and sharing information like I am doing here. 

I have complete control over my book Children of Dreams, I love marketing, and as far as I am concerned, it doesn’t get much better than that. I truly believe the sales will come because I won’t give up. I am going to continue to write about the things I am passionate about, do what I can to promote good information that people can use, and because we live on a big planet, with the Internet, I know there are others out there that are interested in the same things I am. My job is to find them. It’s intriguing to me when I see people have visited my website from as far away as Japan and Israel.

If you have learned anything here, please let me know. Hopefully, my reflections will help you to use your money more wisely in your own marketing campaign. Happy Writing and Marketing in 2010 and beyond.

You can visit my website at http://lorilynroberts.com/.

Saturday, December 19, 2009

BEAUTY AND WRITING: Devotional by Lorilyn Roberts




It’s interesting to me that Jesus never said in the Beatitudes, blessed are the beautiful, blessed are the popular, blessed are the smartest, or blessed are those who are the bestwhether it be as a teacher, artist, carpenter, or writer. But He did say (Matthew 6:33), “Seek ye first the kingdom of God, and his righteousness; and all these things shall be added unto you”      

I have sensed in my spirit that when I am creating I am most like God than at any other moment. There is a subconscious link between the creative aspect of who we are and God. When we choose to glorify Him in that endeavor, the beauty is far greater than we could have created (or written) on our own. When our motives are tainted, we lose part of that beauty. By tainted, I mean by fame, money, popularity, or acceptance.

One thing that has struck me is I have scuba-dived all over the world, and there is a good possibility I have seen things that no one else on earth has seen—beauty that surpasses anything that I could describe here. I wonder why God would create beauty that would only be seen by me, or create beauty that would never be seen by even one person. New species are being discovered every day in science, and if I were a betting woman, I would say there are hundreds if not thousands of things out there that are still not seen or known. If we ask ourselves that same question, it can lead to some profound answers. Why create beauty if no one else will see it, believe in it, appreciate it, pay us for it, or give us accolades?

It’s because that is the way God is. We will always have the Audience of One, and if that Audience of One chooses to bring us recognition here, then we can be grateful for that. But I believe our rewards will be far greater in heaven if the beauty we create here is for Him, and maybe even more so if never appreciated by anyone, because the rewards we receive in heaven from our heavenly Father will dwarf anything that we could receive from man.