WHAT WE’RE LOOKING FOR: The following points are prompts to get you thinking about the range of essays you might write for The Magic of Memoir. We do not intend for you to try to cover all of these points, nor are you limited to what we list here.

1. What challenges have you dealt with—craft, emotional surprises, wrestling with truth?
2. What kinds of things did your inner critic say as you wrote your memoir and how did you get past them?
3. Did you have “outer critics”—voices of family and friends—who challenged the idea of you writing a memoir? What did they say and how did you cope with that?
4. What were your reasons for writing your memoir?
5. Support and accountability: what factors or people helped you to keep writing?
6. How did the issue of truth arise as you wrote? Did you have doubts about the truth of your story, or did other people’s take on the story influence you?
7. Did you combine/collapse characters and time in your story? If yes, what were the factors that led to your decision to do that and what was the result?
8. What were your concerns about exposing secrets, or revealing things that might upset your family, and how did you solve the issues that came up for you?
9. Were you worried about lawsuits—and how did you handle this?
10. What was it like to try to translate memories and moments into a story structure? What were the challenges and what helped you to sort that out?
11. How many drafts of your memoir did you write before you completed it, and what was your editing and revision process?
12. How long did it take you to write your memoir and what were the most interesting and or surprising things you learned on your journey?