9 Keys To Writing 
Your Family’s Memoirs

My young children know my Mom as their sweet grandmother with a touch of Alzheimer’s and limited mobility due to a stroke.

They don’t know her as a Holocaust escapee who went on a five-nation odyssey, including being smuggled from occupied France into Spain in a hay wagon when she was just 4 years old.

They will one day, because a writer from the company I run sat down with her, interviewed her at length, and turned her recollections from those years (still sharp, by the way), along with family photos, and documents from the 1940s into a hardcover memoir.

Every family has great stories to tell, but what happens if those stories aren’t preserved?
 
So how can any family create a book that captures family memories without headaches, hassles, or revisiting family drama?

Here are nine tips to capturing your family memories:

1. You don't have to cover an entire life. You can just pick one extremely powerful time in a person's life. Coming to America, wartime experiences, or starting a family business are three strong options.  As in my Mom’s case, there may be a period of years that deserves full attention. That way, you don’t have to get into periods of time involving divorce or other family drama that doesn’t need to be relived.

2. The first draft is often what I call the “therapy draft.” Sometimes there's psychological release from writing the story exactly as it happened. But then we step back and ask, if the book were published in this manner, would people's feelings be hurt? Do we really need to bring up the story about Aunt Fannie, now that she's been gone 30 years? Once we see the memories on paper, we realize that not all of them need to see the light of day.

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