How I Wrote My Published Memoir
And the lesson it all hinged on
It’s funny how the moment a project is finished, you start forgetting how it started. You start forgetting the months of work, the endless editing and just how much the structure changed throughout.
When I’m asked how I started writing my book, my first instinct is to say that I just started at chapter one and wrote it until the end. Until the book as it is on bookshelves today.
That’s how it feels like it happened. How it all went down. But when I really stop and think about it I realise that it didn’t happen that way at all.
Lots of authors give advice on how to write a book, be it narrative non-fiction or a novel. But the advice is always in retrospect, it’s often given through the lens of how they imagine they wrote it. Or what they would do if they came to write it again.
So here I’m going to dredge my memory and try to show exactly how my first published book actually got written.
If you’ve already written your book and you want to know how I got mine published, I wrote about that here:
