All writers strive to make their writing authentic. To make their dialogue, characters and situations real to the reader, believable. Memoir is real (while acknowledging that memory is fallible) so...

You’ve done the hard work. Written about people and places and cars and music and house-moves and jobs and relationships. You’ve edited the fragments. So, what’s the next step? Structure....

Your memoir has already been written. Now all you need to do is get the words down. Memoir is not like writing a novel or a film. We haven’t all...

A further thing that gets brought up regularly when discussing misery lit is the issue of ethics – I get asked about them a lot.  Am I not breaching confidentiality...

I was contacted by an American reader recently, who was in a state of distress.  She had posted on the Facebook page of the writer Cathy Glass.  Cathy is the...

Martin Cavannagh is a writer for Reedsy, a marketplace with tools that allows authors and publishers to find top editorial, design and marketing talent. Over 3,000 books have been published...

There were many issues involved in publishing ‘Nobody’s Business’: The Aran Diaries of Ernie O’Malley which might be of interest to anyone who reads a published diary or who might...

‘I’ve got a book in me too.’ For a writer it must be the most depressing sentence in the English, Irish, or any language; the casual conversation with a relative...

Let’s face it: memoir is a disreputable genre. It’s often miserable, sometimes ghosted, and relies upon a shaky memory to pretend its truths.  In the end the promise that we...

The truth is, Trapped in Iran was not planned in any great detail. As professional – and impressive  ­–  as it may sound to say Samieh and I sat down...