Messing with Memoir

Post 2 – March 21, 2021

Arriving at a workable outline is often the first task of any major piece of writing whether it is a thesis, a theme paper, or a book. The bigger the task, the more you need an outline.

For a book, it can serve as your eventual table of contents if you have such. Even my first-grade grandson had to write an outline and table of contents for the booklet he was writing. What really shocked me was that the teacher even assigned them to edit their chapter titles—to tighten and improve them. First grade!

As I began this book, I struggled with bits and pieces of stories and narrative that I wanted to go into this memoir of my media life. I frequently hurried to jot them down as they came to me like spurts of memories from almost 44 years of work. Sometimes a memory came to me in the middle of the night, and then I had to get up and jot down or a note or else face forgetting the memory. And of course can’t get back to sleep after such a moment!

How do you even condense 43 years of energy put into hundreds if not thousands of separate projects whether they were hour-long TV documentary scripts, 30-second radio spots, metro transit messages, full page ads in Newsweek, board reports?

I can’t tell you how too good it feels, finally, to be working on another book, before I get too old. Before the memories don’t come, before I no longer need to make sense of it.

If you haven’t started on such a project yet but have dreams of doing so, now is the time.

An author I worked while I was an editor is Margot Starbuck, and she has come up with some marvelous tools to help writers and would be writers with outlines, proposals, and more. Check out her stuff here!

I also found this resource very helpful for me personally.

Happy first Sunday of Spring!

***

Do ideas or memories ever keep you up at night?

How many years was the longest job you held? Share highlights?

Comment here!