Yes, absolutely. In your initial session, we’ll draw up a plan together for how you want your coaching to be structured, and you can adjust this at any time. The scope and structure of our work is entirely up to you. Memoir coaching is tailored to the individual, and people’s needs and wants often shift over the course of a project.

We can certainly start our work by helping you decide which path to take; by discussing the various threads in your history and helping you choose the ones you find central. Memoir is unlike autobiography in that it needn’t necessarily focus on the whole of a life. You can choose which strands are more important than others, and which points you’d like to make by where you put your focus. I can help you orientate yourself before you’ve begun as well as stay with you as your memoir develops.

Writers do need to think about the reader’s experience, but an excessive focus on how your words are received will impede your writing. It’ll produce a state of mind similar to stage fright. I’ve seen evidence of this, and I think writers need to keep a sense of balance here.

If you intend to publish your memoir, you know your work will be read, probably widely, by strangers and by people you know. If your book recounts experiences that were traumatising to live, they’re going to be upsetting to read. There’s a natural urge to protect the people we love from discovering things that will hurt them. We can discuss that in the course of our work. As for strangers, it’s not a writer’s job to shield the general reading public from their own emotional responses, but nor should we include disturbing details without good reason.

There is a line between emotional honesty and gratuitousness. It’s for every writer to decide where to draw that line. It’s different for everyone because it depends on what details you’re dealing with, and where they sit in the overall framework of your story, and why. This is something I can certainly work through with you, having wrestled with it many times myself.

Traumatising experiences are part of all our lives. Bereavements, divorces, family estrangements and relationship breakdowns of all kinds, debilitating accidents and illnesses, house fires and so on. I think people who’ve never been traumatised are the least fortunate among us, because that just means their trauma is ahead of them rather than behind them.

At times, writing about your life is going to hurt. There were painful times for me in writing my own memoir, and at those times I just retreated a bit and slowed down until I felt better able to confront what I needed to describe. It’s okay to be immobilised as long as you push through it at your own pace. I think it’s important not to pressure yourself if you begin to feel overwhelmed.

That said, I wrote some of my most evocative lines with tears on my face. There is a balance to be struck between not overloading yourself emotionally and not slamming the laptop shut every time a painful feeling comes up. If you begin to feel traumatised and overwhelmed while you’re writing your memoir, we can discuss what’s going on for you exactly, and why, and how you can practise self-care while remaining committed to your writing project. Remember that you can take a break at any time and for as long as you need to.

People will have different demands on their time and different writing schedules they can stick to, and there’ll be some fluctuation within that, but it’s a good idea to give yourself a word count goal. Especially if you are booking enough sessions to see you through the duration of your memoir, you’ll want to have completed your memoir by the time sessions run out. I find that 400 words per day, five days a week, is an undemanding writing schedule that most people can achieve. This is over 8000 words a month. If you stick to this schedule, you’ll have completed your memoir in about eight or nine months.

I certainly hope you’d be happy with your coaching and will go out of my way to make sure that you are, but if for any reason you’re unhappy I would hope you’d tell me early on so we could address the problem quickly. But for this or any other reason, it’s completely up to you whether you want to proceed or halt your coaching at any time.

Many people experience a kind of frozenness while writing where they simply don’t know where to go next, how to phrase what they want to say, or what to say at all. This happens in all forms of writing. With memoir, coaching can be very useful in helping you get unstuck. We do this by discussing your work up to the point you felt frozen, what you want the ultimate shape of your memoir to be, and how to bridge the gap between the two.

Absolutely – there is no other way. Memoir is the most intimate and sensitive form of writing. It is deeply personal and it’s essential that the privacy of the author and the confidentiality of their work be respected. You can be 100% confident that your writing will never be discussed, copied, or shared with a third-party in any way.

Yes, of course. You can email any questions to me at the email address on the Contact page, or if you’d prefer, you can book a forty-minute exploratory session where I’ll answer all your questions before you make a decision. The fee for this is €60.

The fee is €150 per session and sessions must be booked at least three at a time in advance. If you block book twenty sessions, which should be enough to cover the duration of your memoir’s development, the fee is €120 per session.

I do ask that you don’t book 20 sessions until you’ve done three already, in which case we’ll just add 17 and refund you the difference in the hourly rate. This is to ensure we’re a good fit for each other and are happy with the way the work is developing before you make a significant investment.

If you have always had a niggling urge to put your life on the page, or to write about some experience you’ve been through, but never knew how to go about it or where to start, memoir coaching could be perfect for you. If you find the idea of writing a memoir exciting but daunting, a memoir coach is someone who can help you get the work done and function very much like an accountability buddy. The advice and guidance of someone who’s been there, in particular, can be invaluable. If this is something you’ve always wanted, memoir coaching can be a hugely beneficial investment in yourself.