text: "Who's Going to Want to Read My Book?" - From Memory to Memoir - Mark David Gerson - Self-Help - Bublish Book Bubble
  Get the stories of your life onto the page today! Share your wisdom naturally, spontaneously and without struggle. Craft rich, compelling stories regardless of writing experience or perceived ability. Engage, entertain and inspire with eloquence, confidence and ease. Whoever you are, whatever your experiences, whatever your perceived writing ability, From Memory to Memoir will connect you not only with the stories you remember but with the stories you have forgotten. It will serve up the inspiration guaranteed to get you writing and keep you writing, the tools and techniques guaranteed to help you craft a rich, compelling narrative, and the support guaranteed to sustain you from the initial word of your book's first draft to the final word of its ultimate draft.
  "Who's Going to Want to Read My Book?"
  I often hear that question in memoir-writing workshops and it's one I always answer with some version of this excerpt from From Memory to Memoir. Then one day at the end of one of those workshops, a little voice whispered, "It's time to write your memoir." And before I could stop myself, I found myself asking that same question! It's true that we teach what we need to learn. It's also true that we teach what we need to remember. And I needed to remember my own oft-repeated words! So I wrote my memoir (Acts of Surrender: A Writer's Memoir), and then I wrote this book – for you, of course...but also for me!
  You are a storyteller — not because you are unusual (though your experiences may well be), but because we are all storytellers. We each carry an infinite potential for self-expression-through-story that, if we open to it, can reshape our lives and the lives of others in ways we cannot begin to imagine.
  In a sense, we are also all memoirists. From the moment the first caveman returned from a day's hunting and grunted his experiences to his mates over the cooking fire, we have been not only telling stories, but telling our story. From the moment of our first newborn gurgle, we have been communicating something of our brief life. From the moment the first diary entry reflected back on days, months or years past, we have been unconsciously crafting memoir.
  Yet writing a memoir involves more than reciting dates, facts and what-happened-next's. A memoir is an intimate journey into what underlies those dates, facts and occurrences.
  A memoir is also not autobiography. Autobiographies are vast and encyclopedic. Even should it span your life from conception until last week, a memoir is both more subjective and less comprehensive than any autobiography. Like an Impressionist painting, it includes more shade and texture than detail, more personality than panorama.
  Nor is a memoir simply a published journal. While it may draw on your journals and may even quote from them, a memoir is more focused and less self-indulgent. It's a story built, however unconsciously, around a theme. It's a story that transforms the personal into the universal. It's a recounting of your experiences that transcends your experiences. It's a story designed to be shared.
  Perhaps you have come to this book willingly — in order to leave a legacy for your children or grandchildren. Perhaps you hope to communicate your story to a larger audience — to strangers, as well as to family and friends. Or perhaps you come to this memoir-writing journey, as I did to mine, reluctantly, doubtfully, skeptically. Perhaps you don't believe you have stories worth sharing, stories that others would want to read, stories with the potential to inspire. Of course you do. We all do.
  Here's the thing: What you have lived is unique. What you have learned through your years of living is beyond price. And the value of all you share through your words, and of all the ways you awaken and grow through your words, is incalculable.