On authoring change: Listening and looking at your life candidly, searchingly, and feelingly

 

What kind of difference could you make, or do you want to make, or need to make, with the time you have left on this earth?

 

Here’s another question for you:

 

“ . . . How do you turn your dream of making a positive and meaningful difference in the world into a reality?”

 

Nina Amir asks the question and then she answers it for you: “You author change.

 

“You write and publish a book that inspires positive action or change. . . .”

 

Here’s another question for you:

 

“Can we listen to ourselves in the silence? Can we sit and wait for the whispers of our souls to come creeping, slowly, falteringly, letter by letter through our pens? Can we allow our truest selves to tell their stories through the gateway of broken language . . . ? Catch it before it is gone, capture it in a jumble of letters. . . .” Edith Ó Nualláin

 

Always remember: Your story is part of God’s much larger story.

 

Jesus said, “Go tell your family everything God has done for you” (Luke 8:39). That means writing a memoir is a holy work, a ministry.

 

As a memoirist, you have the privilege of working with sacred stories—stories that are for the most part stories of everyday events and ordinary people. It’s a holy calling to tell the next generations about God’s involvement in their lives and their families’ lives (see Psalm 145:4 and Deuteronomy 4:9).

 

“The writers who get my personal award are the ones who show exceptional promise of looking at their lives in this world as candidly and searchingly and feelingly as they know how,” writes Frederick Buechner, “and then of telling the rest of us what they have found there most worth finding. We need the eyes of writers like that to see through. We need the blood of writers like that in our veins.”  

 

What have you found that’s most worth finding?

 

Write it in your memoir before it’s too late. “Catch it before it is gone.”

 

“The world needs change agents,” says Nina Amir. “It’s your time to make a positive and meaningful impact with your words.”

 

Your words, your stories—your memoir—could do that. It’s your time, Nina says.

 

It’s your time!