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Stories To Tell is a full service book publishing company for independent authors. We provide editing, design, publishing, and marketing of fiction and non-fiction. We specialize in sophisticated, unique illustrated book design.

Stories To Tell Books BLOG

Filtering by Category: Memoir and Family History Writing Today

The Writing Process: Your Book in Easy Stages

Biff Barnes

You’ve been thinking about creating a memoir or family history book. But you may feel a bit like you’re set off on a bit of an uncharted course. Creating a book seems like an overwhelming task. Looking at creating a book as a six-step process helps give you a roadmap which will make successfully seeing your book through to publication much less daunting.
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categories About Memoirs and Personal History Books, Getting Started on Your Book, Memoir and Family History Writing Today, Planning Your Book’s Contents, The Author’s Craft

Be a Storyteller: Dramatize Your Memoir or Family History Book

Biff Barnes

Many first time memoirists and family historians think that their first responsibility is to create a complete record of everything that happened. As a consequence their initial draft often reads like a list. All events great and small get equal treatment. Unfortunately these lists are missing the elements that make stories interesting and compelling: conflict, emotion and drama.
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categories Memoir and Family History Writing Today, The Author’s Craft

Sidebars Add Color to Memoirs and Family History Books

Biff Barnes

Newspapers have long used sidebars, short stories presenting sidelights to the main news story. Textbook publishers do the same thing. A science text offers a short biographical sketch of the scientist who developed a particular theory to accompany the chapter explaining his ideas. Sidebars are a tool that memoirists and family historians might use as well. Here are some examples of ways you can use sidebars to include interesting stories or bits of information to provide interesting sidelights to your book without interrupting its narrative flow of a memoir or family history.
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categories About Memoirs and Personal History Books, Family History Research and Preservation, Memoir and Family History Writing Today

Guide for Memoirists: David Brooks' Life Lessons

Biff Barnes

The holidays are a time when lots of us resolve to get a record of our lives down on paper. That’s great! But before you begin banging away at your keyboard take some time to consider your goals for the book. There are several ways to tell your story. We work with a lot of genealogists who have been researching for years and want to turn their research into a factual chronicle which documents their family’s history. Others are raconteurs who love to spin a good yarn. They are practiced storytellers who want to regale their audience with the best stories from their lives. But others seek to reflect upon the facts or the stories to draw meaning from them and to see what lessons their life experiences have to teach. These are the memoir writers. It is with people from that last category that New York Times columnist and author of the recently released book, The Social Animal: The Hidden Source of Love, Character and Achievement, David Brooks, conducted a project that should interest anyone who cares about memoirs.
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categories About Memoirs and Personal History Books, Getting Started on Your Book, Memoir and Family History Writing Today

Family History Books: Using Literary Techniques to Tell Stories

Biff Barnes

A family history writer is something very different from a family history researcher even if they are embodied in the same person. A researcher ransacks the vital records to discover the facts. A writer goes beyond those facts to find their meaning. “History at best has to be literature or it will go to dust,” said historian David McCullogh during his 2003 Jefferson Lecture in the Humanities. How does that transformation of fact to literature occur?
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categories Family History Research and Preservation, Memoir and Family History Writing Today, The Author’s Craft

World Building in Memoir and Family History Books

Biff Barnes

In science fiction and fantasy, writers refer to it as “world building”. They must create a believable universe that allows a reader to feel as if she were there. But the problem is the same for writers dealing with less fanciful settings. Strunk and White observed in The Elements of Style, that, “If those who have studied the art of writing are in accord on one point it is on this: the surest way to arouse and hold the reader is to be specific, definite and concrete. The greatest writers…are effective largely because they deal in particulars and report the details that matter.”
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categories Memoir and Family History Writing Today, The Author’s Craft

Family History and the Race for Mayor of San Francisco

Biff Barnes

The next time somebody asks you why family history is important you might want to share a story that recently appeared in the San Francisco Chronicle. In January, 2011, Ed Lee, was chosen by San Francisco’s Board of Supervisors to serve as interim mayor to fill the remaining year of the term of Gavin Newsom who had been elected Lt. Governor. Lee was the first Chinese American to become mayor of a major American city. A few weeks ago Lee, who had previously said he would not be a candidate, decided to run for mayor in the upcoming election. What does family history have to do with city politics? Chronicle reporter heather Knight explains, “Shortly after Ed Lee became interim mayor in January, the rumor spread around Chinatown…Lee, the whisperers said at banquets and festivals, was not a Lee at all.”
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categories Family History Research and Preservation, Memoir and Family History Writing Today

Rock Memoirs - The Good and the Bad

Biff Barnes

I recently ran across a blog post on TheWrap which boasts it “Covers Hollywood” titled “Sex, Drugs & Publishing: Music Memoirs on a Rockin’ Roll.” Leading with the news that Keith Richards of the Rolling Stones has collected a $7.3 million advance for his just released memoir Life, the post notes that Rock memoirs have become a reliable cash cow for the publishers.

“They’re pretty easy to produce, and with an already built-in audience, fairly cost-effective,” a NYC-based publishing executive told TheWrap. “Pretty much all you have to do is interview the subject and just get a ghost(writer) to polish it into prose.”

Richards leads the Amazon preorder list.

That might lead to a bit of justified cynicism.

But on the same day I saw the post I heard Terri Gross on NPR interview singer Patti Smith, a punk icon, about her memoir Just Kids which has been nominated for a National Book Award in non-fiction. What a contrast.

Smith’s book recalls the late 60s and 70s in New York City and her relationship with Robert Mapplethorpe. Together they grow up in the avant-garde world of Andy Warhol and Allen Ginsburg.

Smith described their life together in this way, “We gathered our colored pencils and sheets of paper and drew like wild, feral children into the night, until, exhausted, we fell into bed.”

N.Y Times reviewer Tom Carson called Just Kids “…the most spellbinding and diverting portrait of funky-but-chic New York in the late ’60s and early ’70s that any alumnus has committed to print.”

The book deals with events before either Smith or Mapplethorpe had achieve the fame that would come later.

As Carson put it, “Just Kids captures a moment when Ms. Smith and Mapplethorpe were young, inseparable, perfectly bohemian and completely unknown, to the point in which a touristy couple in Washington Square Park spied them in the early autumn of 1967 and argued about whether they were worth a snapshot. The woman thought they looked like artists. The man disagreed, saying dismissively, “They’re just kids.”

It’s nice to see that the rock’n roll genre can produce art as well as schlock.

Click here to read the complete NY Times review of Just Kids

Click here to read TheWrap’s “Sex, Drugs & Publishing: Music Memoirs on a Rockin’ Roll”



categories About Memoirs and Personal History Books, About Publishing, Memoir and Family History Writing Today