Someone asked me, “When is there time to remember?” I replied simply that if she feels she doesn’t have time, this is the effect of her choice of not having time. I understand that deciding what you want to do with your life can feel like an overwhelming amount of pressure. Sure enough, the meaning will change as you experience changes. My premise here is that you can write an interesting story about small, ordinary moments of your life. Don’t try to include everything. Find a focus. Then pull stories out of your life and, I believe, people will relate to what you have written.

What I’ve learned about writing I’ve learned by trial and error. It’s just old school. But you got be courageous enough for taking the road less traveled. For some reason, we strongly refuse to put pen to paper until we have the roadmap finished on that plan. What we think sound plausible. We’re just beginners. But none of this means it’s true. Do you remember the old line, “Money can’t buy me love”? You don’t need profound reflection when you are writing the first draft of your story. Sometimes, thinking is the great enemy of perfection. You are trying to write, aren’t you? The trick of the thing is to rely upon your imagination. The truth is that you will make discoveries when you write.

What, then, is the proper method of telling a story? Simply this: search your background for significant experiences. There are various forms memoir writing can take: biography, autobiography, memoir, micro-memoir, snapshots, poetry, post-modernist multi-genre, and so on. In many ways, you can only truly learn about an experience only when you write about it. This is the struggle to define oneself. Write these things down. You can’t discard what you don’t consciously recognize. Don’t write with pomp and circumstance. If you do this, your piece will be useless to us. Write with emotion, passion, and compassion!

You mustn’t have lived an “amazing” life to be a writer. You will tell us what you did out of your private passion for life itself. Lately I realized the urgency of remembering the stories we have not written. Now is the time to remember. Your days and nights are your own to remember and fill notebooks with your stories. I’m sure you’ve got something to say right now. Just close your eyes and breathed in the smell, you will be actually there.