edit first or after?? help

I have just taken a look at the two short stories that you have shared.

To be honest I struggled with both. This could be just me.

On the positive side I found both concepts interesting. As someone said though they became almost broken into bullet points. Also at times you repeated information in adjacent sentences. E.g. car keys picked up are going to be for the Audi - unless your character owns a number of cars: which seems unlikely. You can cut this back to "the Audi's keys". To be unforgivably sexist - would a woman think in terms of either the make or the colour of the car in this context? Old, in need of a clean and even (possibly) in need of a trip to the garage would seem more appropriate.

I am writing this here because I would like your memoir to be successful.

I suspect that you can facilitate that by working on your short story writing. You will, after all, be writing the story of your life.

Your life wasn't bullet points (I hope!). Therefore you want to create a flow through the story. I hesitate to use the word "theme" but that or something like it might apply: possibly a number of "themes" within each of the elements I suggested before.

Have you found that your life story is similar in form and stylle to the examples you have shared? If so it would seem to me that it would tend to come over as brutalised. This is particularly a result of the effect of those bullet points.

In writing a fight can be accentuated by things happening bang, bang, bang - but most of life is much more a progression or even a drift.

The thoughts that I started with and that I am finally getting to are that you might think about taking a look at Ultimate Betrayal with a view to re-setting it as something observed rather than described.

A subtle difference? What I mean is that the edges need softening, the material needs to be more relaxed. Perhaps the idea of telling the sotry from across the street and seen through windows would give you an idea of what I mean. (This would mean for example that someone else would see her pick up keys and later - possibly - head toward her black car as usual). Remoteness from the event can give a broader perspective.

As far as biography goes I know that there are things that I would find it very difficult to not write about as though they were fights that went with a series of blows. It would be very difficult to stand back. I would probably have to write them that way first - but then I would at least try to take a second, more remote, look at the subject. I know that I would have to let off steam - but then I would (hopefully) be able to do the thing more justice with another writing.

I hope that this helps.

I also think that what I have said applies to other people trying to achieve the same sorts of thing. You are not the only one. However: you are the one that has taken the great step of asking others for opinion. That is impressive.

memoirs and autobiographies are real beasts I think. The trouble is that our lives don't conveniently stand still while we do them.

I would suggest that rather than try to work from one end to the other (with the issues of changing style etc. that you mention) one solution would be to design something like a skeleton or family tree. Onto this you can hang different significant elements or events in your life. This will provide a reference framework for you to attach "chunks" of writing.

Then you can write about each event or element as an individual item. This can be complete in itself if you want. It is also possible to provide links to other elements.

Hopefully as the bare tree fills up with "foliage" you will see that you can link the elements together.

To some extent you will have a choice. You can edit and rework any element whenever you want: with the additional advantage that you can add in or correct material within each part without diturbing the rest. However, the more that you tinker with what is already done the less time there will be for getting new work into words. The cleaver part is to establish a balance.

I happen to use this method for most of my longer pieces of writing. This has taught me that it is essential to not only keep the work in order within folders in my IT equipment but in hard copies as well. It can be pretty much garuanteed that any pages that are just numbered will be dropped and become mixed up with other pages that are just numbered.

I use the footer of every page to uniquely identify each element, its page number and the last time it has been modified - at the least. I sometimes also note the last printing and the last time it was backed-up to disc or external drive. This may sound like a lot of work but, once you have a set pattern for the footer you can copy and paste from any document to the next. then all you have to do is modify the new copy to make it specific... and discipline yourself so that every time you make a modification you update the date in the footer. (I highly recommend not making the mistake that I made which was to initially use the self-updating date - all that does is tell you that you have opened the document today. It isn't even any use for the "last print" etc - except that it does get the correct date on the paper).

Of course it is quite possible that you will end up with a whole pile of elements with varying styles and levels of editing/revision... But you will at least have put it all on paper/ into documents. From there you will be able to work on the whole to move it into whatever style you have settled on by the time you get that far.

I hope this suggestion is useful.

David