Sneeze post

If you’re not following Spiritual Memoirs 101 on Facebook, recently you missed these and many more:

In How to Capture Your Toughest Memories, Amy Jo Burns says, “…the hardest scenes to write were also the ones that had been the hardest to live, and certainly the hardest to relive and remember. How do we begin to dissect the moments that changed the trajectories of our lives? These difficult scenes are often the most integral to our narratives, and they take time to develop and understand.…”

Do you want to remember more details to include in your memoir? Close your eyes and see what happens! Read more at Closing your eyes boosts memory recall, new study finds.

Following up on that idea, here’s a quick exercise Amber Lea Starfire developed to help memoirists remember sensory details—and yes, she is a fan of closing one’s eyes to retrieve those memories. This is a practical, helpful blog post. You’ll find the exercise at her blog post, From Memories to Memoirs, Part 3—Remembering vividly.

In Polish Your Prose, Nephele Tempest writes, “… the time will come when you need to edit.… I’m referring to that nitty gritty editorial process of looking at your work word by word, sentence by sentence, and examining the language you’ve used.” She offers storytellers and wordsmiths a cheat sheet to help with editing.

Patty Kirk offers another tool to help rework your stories: Read them aloud. “Hearing your sentences spoken lets you know whether they’re clear and natural-sounding—whether someone actually could speak them…. And it doesn’t work to read to an empty room. You need a warm body, a listener, to complete the communication.” Read more at Revising Aloud.

Happy writing!