Write Your Memoir: Turn Your Life Into a Story Worth Reading
Learn how to shape your real-life experiences into a compelling, publishable memoir — even if you've never written anything before.
Perfect for: Adults aged 35–70 who have a meaningful personal story they've always wanted to tell but haven't known where to start. This includes first-time writers, journal keepers, retirees documenting their lives, and anyone who has lived through a defining experience — illness, immigration, grief, reinvention — and feels compelled to put it into words.
You've lived through things worth writing about. Maybe it's a decade of hard-won lessons, a relationship that changed everything, a chapter of your life that still doesn't make sense — or one that finally does. The problem isn't your story. The problem is knowing how to tell it.
This school teaches you the craft of memoir from the inside out. You'll learn how to mine your memories for the scenes that matter, find the narrative thread that holds your story together, and write with the kind of honesty and specificity that makes readers feel like they lived it too. We don't just talk about writing — we do the work, page by page.
Whether you want to publish traditionally, self-publish, or simply leave something real and lasting for the people you love, this course gives you a clear, proven path from blank page to finished draft. No writing degree required. No perfectly dramatic life story required. Just a willingness to sit down and tell the truth.
By the end, you won't just have writing skills — you'll have a manuscript you're proud of, a voice that's unmistakably yours, and the confidence to call yourself a writer.
What you'll be able to do
- Identify the emotional core of your memoir and the central question that drives your narrative forward
- Select and structure real-life events into a compelling story arc with a clear beginning, middle, and end
- Write vivid, specific scenes using dialogue, sensory detail, and interiority — not just summary
- Develop a distinctive, authentic narrative voice that readers will trust and want to follow
- Navigate the emotional and ethical challenges of writing about real people and real events
- Overcome the most common memoir-writing blocks, including perfectionism, shame, and memory gaps
- Produce a polished first chapter that can serve as a writing sample for agents, publishers, or self-publishing
- Build a sustainable writing practice and a realistic plan for completing your full manuscript
Curriculum
6 modules · 19 lessons
Your teacher
ellen greenfield
I've spent the last fifteen years helping people find the words for the stories they were afraid to tell. I'm a writer and writing coach who came to memoir the hard way — through my own drafts, dead ends, and the eventual realization that the stories we resist writing are almost always the ones most worth telling. I've worked with first-time writers who had never shared a page with anyone, and I've watched them finish manuscripts that made their families cry and strangers feel less alone. That process — from silence to story — never gets old for me. This school is everything I wish I'd had when I started: practical, honest, and built around the belief that your life, told well, matters.
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