What is a memoir or life writing?

Memoir / life writing is simply, writing about you in whatever form you want. It is a means of expressing yourself through words (or in combination with pictures, photos, audio, video).

With memoirs you can write as many as you want, unlike an autobiography, which is typically a chronological story of your life, you know the sort of thing the ‘stars’ often write.

You write a memoir in the first person, because it is about you and your point of view.

Memoirs usually have a theme or voice, these might be a journey through depression, living with abuse, being kidnapped, taking yourself off to live in another culture, managing an illness, what your faith means, etc. Etc.. You are showing us how you were affected by your experience.

Your memoirs will contain what you want to share and not a step by step blow of every event, you will weave your experiences together.

When we write about our lives we uncover things about ourselves which when revealed enable us to make changes, take back control, build confidence and a myriad of other great things.

For others the recording of our lives leaves behind a legacy of times gone past, experiences never to be re-created, but never the less enjoyed.

Quick things to remember about memoirs:-

• A memoir is a story about something that happened to the writer.

• The author is in the story somehow (either physically or is telling it from their point of view).

• Many memoirs are stories about the author’s family or friends.

• The story will make you feel something, an emotion: happy, sad, mad, etc.

• Memoirs are stories about events that are important to the writer.

• Often, the book will end (or begin) with the writer explaining why that event is important to them now or how it changed their life.

• The author doesn’t tell you how he or she felt about the event, but shows you through the actions and conversations of the characters in the book.

• A memoir is not an autobiography. It is typically a story about one important event in the author’s life.

What is memoir?

The Merriam-Webster Dictionary defines a memoir as "a narrative composed from personal experience". It is often confused with an autobiography which is described beautifully by Gore Vidal. "A memoir is how one remembers one's life, while an autobiography is history, requiring research, dates, facts double-checked."

For me, the memoir is a slice of life, my life, a part of my personal story and my healing journey. Told just as I want to. The first memoir I wrote felt immensely self-indulgent. However, it was incredibly healing. It’s what I call a healing book. Later I wrote another healing book called Rude Awakenings, and in this book, I discovered the power of self-love. Writing that book changed my life so that when my spine fractured, I was in a loving space and was able to do whatever I needed to heal.

There are many different ways to write a memoir and in this lecture we are exploring what kind of book you might want to write. This is important as it sets the scene for how you write it and what you do with it.

Consider each and ask what you like or dislike about each concept. Then ask which would suit your purpose. Remember this can change, but it is interesting to explore at the beginning of this process.

• Memoir / Personal story

• Memoir / How to

• Healing memoir

• Family

• Book of love

Memoir / Personal story

I’ve separated this from memoir, as I see this as a combination of self-help book and memoir that you could use for your business. Your book would chart a period of your life, tell a story, offer research, practical experience and advice.

This could be a cause-related book where you write it to support others and to raise awareness, but which you do not want to build a business around. Alternatively, this book might be a business book, and it could be your business pivot book. If you have experienced something which is life-changing and now want to coach and consult in this area, a book that is written like this is a) very rewarding to write and b) adds credibility to your brand and c) is something you can build products and services around.

Memoir / Self-help non-fiction book

In this category, it can be any kind of self-help book, be that one on healing trauma, being a carer, diet and health and a multitude of other subjects. I’ve clubbed them together, whereas on Amazon they would be classified by genre, e.g. business or mind, body, spirit. The essence is the same that they support the reader on a journey. The stories are probably case studies rather than your story. This could be an easier first book about your healing process.

Healing memoir

This is a book, which may never see the light of day. Imagine if you have been through a crisis of some kind and you want to move on. While there are many therapies that you could choose, writing is known to support healing. You could argue that journaling would serve the same purpose, and it might. However, with this book, you are following the flow of planning and writing a ‘normal’ non-fiction book, but instead of writing to publish, you are writing to heal.

Family

You are writing for family and friends and it could be about your family.

The book of love

Is a story for someone you love.

Whichever you choose, remember it will only get written if it speaks to your heart. Where writing is concerned nothing gets done if it feels like you have been airlifted into purgatory.

Why do you want to write?

Outside of the purpose of the book, it's also about understanding why you wanted to write and share the story. So, who are you writing it for? Why are you writing your story? How are you going to write it? And exactly what are you going to write about?

Dig out the journal and start looking at some of these questions, because that'll help you to find the purpose of your book.

· Who are you writing it for?

· Are you writing it for you, friend, family, some kind of cause?

· Will you publish or not?

These things aren't set in stone and can be changed at any time.

Why?

The biggest question is why you want to write a book. Are you putting things behind you? Is it about finding your voice and having that opportunity to share your story in your way and your truth? Is it because it's cathartic and healing? Do you want to support a cause? Is it about helping other people and who are you here to serve?

In the course, as I've said, we're going to go through 10 chapters, the 10 chapters of your life. There are lots and lots of exercises and you will find lots and lots of memories coming up that you can use for your memoirs. You will certainly be able to find your why.

ACTION: In your journal explore your why.

Your Writing relationship with you

Writing is very intimate where you are connecting to a deeper part of you and it's important that you have confidence in your voice. The desire to write about your life is creating a connection with your heart and soul. What spills on the page is what wants to be written and you have to trust what comes out.

Naturally when you come to edit you can craft it so that it connects emotionally with your reader. When you start - just write.

ACTION: Explore in your journal, perhaps use the insight timer, you only have to meditate for a minute. Connect to your muse, write, reflect, but always take some kind of action, even if it's minuscule.

Getting ideas

Getting ideas and exploring your stories is the most exciting part for me. Of course, you will be full of ideas and wondering which one to share, I always am. The key to this is to get it all out, to reflect and then hone them to the one that speaks to your heart.

ACTION: Spend a week noticing what you notice. I call this a week of observation. Keeps notes on everything, you never know what you will discover.

Which slice of life?

Just as important as knowing what kind of memoir is knowing which slice of life you want to share. You will like many people have lots of stories to tell. But there will be one that outshines the rest. By considering which slice you are narrowing it down. When you find the 'right' slice, writing it feels so much easier as there is a greater purpose.

ACTION: Think about which slice of life you will be sharing. Make some notes of which one, sleep on them, in the morning write a bit about each, reflect and then choose.

Timelines

Timelines provide a visual roadmap, which gives you the big picture in the form of a map. Clarity will come because the human mind sees things in patterns. When you see patterns, you make connections.

No matter where you are, discovery through timelines is a vital part of discovering connections and patterns about your life and enabling you to see where the stories are and how they connect. Discovery is about going deeper and resurfacing more about your life. Regardless of career path or life roles, you will have learnt and experienced an enormous amount, and very often these are things that you take for granted.

Timelines are a useful way to discover locked away thoughts, memories, skills, talents, experiences. Their value comes from observing and reflecting on what has been captured on the paper, your visual storyboard. When you stand back and observe your life, you gain much clarity. You also need to be prepared to keep walking away to reflect, coming back and trying to see what is missing or what needs moving around. You are looking for patterns, connections and themes.

You are at the heart of your memoir

A memoir is about you, you know that and its job is to draw on selected stories from your life to support a theme and make a point. E.g. how you got from A to B. We’ve already talked about themes, consider these:-

Themes

From

• A broken home

• A victim of abuse

• Addiction

To

• Health

• Wealth

• Happiness

• Faith

• Love

The key questions now are who are you?

• What is your story?

• Why are you writing your memoir?

• What is the most important thing that you want to discover?

ACTION: Take these questions, open your journal, and start writing, and allow whatever needs to emerge to emerge.

Next, if your life was a book, what would it be called? What would it be about? And who are you writing it for?

Then go back to that question again, why do you want to tell your story?

This is all designed to get you closer and closer and closer to what this memoir is going to be about.

What is going on?

Often you want to write a memoir because you have reached a point in your life, where you feel that you have to share your story.

There's something going on that triggers this desire to want to share your story.

It's important to understand what is going on and ask what's happening now that has triggered this big desire.

We are looking at joining all of the dots of your life together.

ACTION: Dig out your journal, go through the questions, and do enjoy exploring where you find yourself now and all the stuff that's coming up because it will inform you about what your memoir might contain.

Understanding change

The only constant is change.

The reason that you are looking at writing your memoir is because of the changes you have been through. When you write it, you're going to change. Writing memoir is writing about the changes in your life and when you write you will experience change.

In this lecture you will look at understanding change so that when you take your readers on a journey, you can take them through, potentially, the changes that happened for you.

This does of course, depend on the type of memoir that you're writing.

We are using the Kubler Ross change curve to explain the journey that we go on.

Open up your journal and explore the changes you have been through and consider how that maps to the story of you.

Start with the end in mind

When we think about a memoir, we think about what's the effect it's going to have on peoples who read it.

There is a lovely exercise in Stephen Covey's book, Seven habits of highly successful people. Habit Two is Begin with the End in Mind.

I often use begin with the end in mind when I'm setting goals and visualising what the end point is and then working back to today.

In this Habit Two, he starts off by saying, you're at a funeral.  You walk into a church and you can see all kinds of different things and there are people gathered around a coffin.

As you approach, you realise that it's your coffin and there are your family, friends, business colleagues, and all sorts of people standing around.

The question here asks is how do you want each of them to remember you?

Imagine that they have your book in their hands. Take each person and write a little bit about what they thought of your book and the way that you'd written it. Because that'll help you to really visualise how your book is going to come alive.

We're looking at what they felt, and the impact that was created, when they read it.

Writing exercises

These exercises give you an opportunity to explore you. Remember you are at the heart of your story and these will give you a chance to consider what aspects you want to share.

Writing about your family

Writing a memoir when family are involved can be tricky. It’s an area where it is as much about what you leave in and what you exclude. Your family become characters in your ‘play’ and they may have seen and remembered events differently to you. This can be quite tough and will bring up lots of questions. Explore these:-

• What will happen if I write about my family?

• How will my [insert name] react?

• Should I tell the truth?

• Should I take care to write more gently—and less controversially?

I read stuff out to my mum if I am writing about her. Several things come from this. She will describe the event from her perspective which is always interesting and I can check if it is ok to include. For me, it is always about respecting some else's feelings. However, I do understand that you may not have a great relationship with this other person and your thoughts and emotions may be running high.

My advice is to be careful of the law, increasing family tensions and what you hope to achieve by including them without sharing first. I’d also consider asking them to write that they have given you permission to write this.

Know Your Purpose

Knowing the purpose is vital so that you can focus on how to tell your story. You will be looking for themes and may use comparisons to highlight this. When you look at your family stories how could you use them. Consider these:-

• Complicated family which you could use to compare with families today

• Health struggles and how you found a new approach

• Culture as you experience it, changes over time and comparisons with the family member you are writing about

Consider your purpose and what they may think of the way that you are treating your story and sharing stories about them.

Motivation

Thinking about your motivation is vital. Your motivation should always be to share a good story, not to destroy someone else, especially a family member. Writing about a family member could help you to heal what has occurred between you. Of course, it may not.

Write to understand

If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. Anne Lamott

You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories and remember that your objective is to understand why people behaved the way they did and what their actions or words actually meant. Explore a story looking at trying to understand it from all angles.

Explore, and look at things from different perspectives, look at the words that you are using and, what these words actually mean.  Always write to understand, and not to get revenge.

Use these writing exercises to explore how you might want to include or exclude family members and how you want to portray them in your memoir.

Memories and your stories

A great place to start your memoir is by looking at your earliest memories.

The question is what do we remember?

Do we remember the truth or are we remembering something from a photograph or something that we've been told? It's quite a contentious area.

I invite you to start to think about the earliest memories. Cast your mind back, while asking if you can trust your memory?

When I've shared memories of my childhood with my mum, and she has countered with, "That's not what happened." She then tells me what she remembers - it is often quite funny and illuminating. We all recall the same event differently and their memories may be faulty as well.

Going back to those earliest memories really helps you to start to build a story, a picture of your life and things for your memoir.

Choose one of your earliest memories.

• Write a quick sketch of the event and describe everything that you think you can remember.

• Who was with you?

• What do you remember - smells, and sounds, and tastes and what else was going on around you?

• Why were you there?

Just jot down everything that you can possibly remember about the first memory that comes to mind. Why do you remember this particular event? How is it connected to your memoir?

You may not know right at this moment. But have a think about that memory and think about the journey from that memory to now and the impact that it might've had on the rest of your life.

Imagine you're now writing your life story, your memoir. Would you include this? And how would you include this memory?

Add these onto your timeline.

Stories

Let's explore those stories a little bit further.

Memories and story obviously are a fundamental part of creating your memoir.

You have the story that you tell yourself - your beliefs and things like that. Then there's stories that you might tell other people. You might choose to miss parts of those stories out or you might embellish them and you may just miss whole chunks of your personal story out completely.

It is our stories that make our memoir something that others want to pick up.

These stories are where we've come from. But, also, most importantly, who we've become. People, when they read our memoir, want to see this story of personal growth.

Every memory has some kind of emotion and feeling attached to it. There will be some learning, some challenges, some gifts, some deep inner wisdom that you find.

Go back to your timeline and map out your memories.

You could create a storyboard (one page of A4 or A3 that is just about this story) outside of the timeline around your stories and in the storyboard just put down what's happened today, triggers, emotions, behaviours, and stuff like that, links to memories, and you can mind-map it, you can scribble it, draw it, make it as a list, however it works for you.

Then asking yourself, as you look at that storyboard, about the things that are going on, what do you learn? Where are the challenges, the gifts, the lessons? And where's the story? And how will you use that story in your memoir?

Add any relevant ones onto your timeline.

Life's experiences

We all have many, many, many life's experiences. Things that have helped to shape and grow who we are as people, who we have become.

Another great way of exploring memory story and experiences is to make a list of critical life experiences. The things that you think you want to include in your memoir.

Make a list with you and carry the list with you all day.

Then as something comes to your memory add it to the list, link it to the experience.

When I'm talking about experiences, I'm talking about, more about themes, things that repeatedly have happened, things that you think you'd like to shape your memoir around.

What you are looking at is how they're all linked together.

Go and find that earliest memory and then come back, track it forward again and find that story in that experience.

• Who was involved?

• When did it happen?

• Where were you?

• What were you thinking?

• Why do you think you remember that event?

• Was there anyone else there?

• What kind of day was it?

Ask yourself lots and lots of questions.

Then I would invite you to write that story.

Consider the learning point that you want to share.

What can you add to your timeline?

Why these memories?

Whenever I get a memory coming up I always want to know - why these memories? Why am I being shown these?

When you are looking at the stories that you've written around those earliest memories and life experiences, you are trying to bring them together.

It's trying to understand why you've remembered those particular memories. And it's asking yourself, how have these experiences affected your life, and are therefore are having an impact on the memoirs your want to write.

It's also looking at what are the actual facts.

Try taking the story and deconstructing it, where you write the actual verifiable facts.

You, the facts and your perception of them.

Don't discard anything get right back in it and be in the memory, and then see what else comes up.

What can you add to your timeline?

Writing exercises for you to explore

School Days

Our school days are quite interesting. I for one certainly didn't enjoy school, however, those days have an enormous impact on us.

We get taught about the world around us, we get prepared for things that we need in our future lives, and we get to learn about social skills, about morals and ethics, and how to behave and discipline, and the things like that.

It's quite an adventure to go back and have a look at our school days. You might want to include your college and your university days in this.

• Consider things like what happened on the first day of school.

• Did you want to go?

• Who took you, what was your teacher like?

• What about best friends?

• Who was your first friend?

• Are you still friends with them?

• Go through each of your schools and kind of, look for those first memories.

• What about the teachers that influenced you?

• Is there a particular teacher that really took you under their wing that played a major role in your life?

• What about those teachers that truly inspired you?

• Think about the schools that you went too, did you enjoy them?

• What kind of student were you?

• Perhaps how your classmates might remember you. Are you still friends with anybody?

• What are the best memories, and worst memories?

• How does school still impact you?

What can you add to your timeline?

Setting and location

Where is your memoir set?

Creating a location, a strong setting, is almost like creating a character in a novel you're bringing some real heart and soul to a story. You can bring a different mood to your setting, and it's about the influence that your setting has on you, the other characters that might come into your memoir, and all of those events that you want to share.

What you're doing, is you're going to create a backdrop, against where you act out your story, where it's set.

It's about creating a sense of place, and if you start to think about all those settings, the location, the culture, and if you  start to write out those little stories, when you come to weave it in, it will be so much easier.

What kind of things can you include?

There's the weather, local customs, those different things that might stand out in your particular neighbourhood, what people do, what they do for a living. You might have some pretty interesting characters living around you, and it's not just about streets and houses, it's trying to make that setting very multi-dimensional.

You want to bring your reader into your world.

It's about the quality of the details, not lots of uninteresting waffle.

Getting the setting right, will bring your memoir to life, because your reader will get such a great sense of you who you are and where you come from. It's about creating this atmosphere.

Pick some aspects and explore. Think culture, location, climate, people, structures and then think about how they fit in your memoir.

The neighbourhood and beyond

Let's go beyond our neighbourhood.

When we think about our neighbourhood, we think about the central location and setting for our story, for our memoir.

What do you see when you look out of the window, or maybe go for a walk or go for a drive?

What we want to do now is get sense of our wider surroundings.

If you have traveled a lot, you might have lived in many, many places, and you may want to consider these.

You might have lived in a lot of houses, these could form part of the story of your memoirs. You might be looking back and contrasting on the different feelings you had in the different places that you lived in.

We want to give the reader this sense of beyond the home or the one setting that we're talking about so that they really do get to understand who we are and where we have lived, and how this might add to our story.

The neighbourhood can create a huge difference to the story, and for example, you might live in a tiny, tiny little village that is surrounded by hills. There's no shops or bars or anything. It may be typical of the area that you live in.

That would be very, very different to maybe an apartment that's in a busy town that's very industrialized.

It's really making sure that this wider landscape that we're bringing in really fits with the story that we want to tell.

You can create that rich tapestry of going backwards and forwards in time and really adding to the memoir, to the slice of life that you're sharing in a particular chapter.

List all the places where the majority of your memoir takes place and think about how you can put them into each part of the story.

How are you going to bring them alive, and to integrate them into the memoir? Once you've listed the places, don't discard any, but it's really thinking about how relevant they are.

The natural world

The natural world brings in another layer of complexity and interest into your memoir. All stories for me have a sense of nature. Often when I wake up I can hear the birds singing. When I go out walking there's different smells every day and they evoke different emotions and I remember things based on those smells.

There's the colours of the leaves, there's the little flowers that start to grow after a big rainy session.

Where I live there's foxes, wild boar and ibex and they always create such a sense of the beauty of Mother Nature and I can bring them into my memoir because they're part of where I live and part of who I am.

Look at what the natural evokes in you, maybe put them in the context of the seasons, you might link certain events to the changing of the seasons. Are the changing of the seasons within Mother Nature linked to the changing of the seasons within your life, or within an aspect of your life.

Make a list of places, adding your natural world. Think about the feelings that these evoke. Maybe the pictures that are conjured up in your mind and how do they connect to the pieces of your story.

Local customs

How do local customs add to your memoir?

Look at those local customs, the good, the bad, the ugly, your feelings about them and how they connect to perhaps some of those events that you are currently writing about or want to write about.

Make a list and then consider how they fit with your story.

You can add these things in with the location, in with the setting, there might have been an event that you stumbled across that changed the course of your life because you met somebody.

Writing exercises for you to explore

Love

Who or what do you love?

Now we don't just fall in and out of love with our boyfriends and girlfriends. We create relationships with all kinds of people and our beautiful pets.

When you're writing and you write from a place of love and indeed if you're writing about love people get that connection because they will have experienced it on some level, somewhere in their lives.

They may not be experiencing it now and it might be that your memoir inspires them to believe in love again.

Think about people that you've loved.

You can look at a photo of someone that you have loved or you love, that you want to bring in your memoir, but it's really finding a way that you can describe who they are so the reader can get that same kind of connection.

It might be that it's someone that you've loved and lost, someone that you love and absolutely don't like anymore or someone that you have loved and still love.

Make a matchstick person and make lots and lots of scribbles around it have the photo by your side, it really is a great fun exercise to do.

Show don't tell.

This is an important part of writing.

Imagine if your dad was a very kind person. How do you get that across in your writing. Listen to the example in the video.

Your job is to paint a picture for us, physically but also with the heart and soul. So that we get why you have loved or do love them.

• Make a list of the people that you are or have been in love with.

• What was it about that relationship that was good, or maybe not so good?

• What feelings and emotions are stirred?

• What memories come up?

• What feelings and emotions around those memories do you have?

Instead of writing something about all of them, think about the memoir that you want to write and pick a few of them and really explore the relationship.

Explore them and think about the actual connection that you have with them, that emotional connection.

Explore, explore, explore and think about the people that you want in that memoir and really get into the memories, the feelings and emotions.

Speaking your truth

We're now going to explore speaking your truth. This is such a fundamental part of writing a memoir. So when you value and respect yourself and you speak truthfully to yourself and in your memoir then your readers get really connected to that.

They really feel the emotion and they understand the experiences that you have been through.

The thing about speaking truthfully in whatever way that you do it, whether that's to yourself or to your readers, what you have to remember is words have the power to heal or to harm.

How we can create a healing process, so that we're healing ourselves but we're also enabling our readers to get connected to our story, see what's possible for them and for them to heal.

You may feel at some point that you've chosen not to speak your truth. Is now the time to share?

There are ways of doing it and we have to really think about filling ourselves up first before we start to write these things and then turning off the inner critic that says ooh, do I really want to say this?

There's a way of sharing the truth that will enable your readers to get what you're saying.

When we don't write our memoir and we don't get this stuff out and we're not speaking our truth, what happens is we feel like we're shrinking. Our energy seems to deplete because we're not getting that stuff out.

Obviously you can write whatever you want in a journal but when it comes to a memoir, you're putting on a face for the outside world. You may find that other people try to colour your judgement. They might tell you to not do this and they might even try and stop you writing the memoir. You need to be a little bit prepared for that.

However, you've come to this point where you know that you want to write it and you just have to trust that it's your birthright, your right to share your story your way.

When you write from a place of love not from a place of anger or hurt or any other emotion, you will get a great energy that will spur you on.

Before you dive into any of this, what does speaking your truth mean to you?

What is your truth?

I always think there's my truth, their truth and the absolute truth.

I would encourage you to think about using your heart and really courageously speaking your truth. Because you truly do deserve to have this moment, to get your, whatever it is, your story out there.

Writing exercises for you to explore

If only

If Only is about the regret.

Regret is that feeling of sadness, and perhaps disappointment over something that had happened or perhaps we had missed opportunity.

E.g. I wish I'd had the courage to, wish I hadn't worked so hard. I wish I had the courage to express my feelings, I wish I stayed in touch with my friends, I wish that I had let myself be happier.

Bronnie Ware did some research - she calls it the Regrets of the Dying.

One of the things that I love about memoir is that we have this opportunity to not regret the fact that we didn't share our truth, and we didn't write our story.

The fact is that we're leaving a legacy behind for other people to share in our life and our experiences and our wisdom. And the question is, should we regret? Personally, I don't think we should. I think that every experience we have goes to make us who we are.

Some of the things that other people might see as regretful actually are massive gifts in our life.

For example, you're very, very young and you decide to have a child. Others say to you that this is not a great decision but actually you decide that it is and this becomes one of the most important parts of your life, being a mother or being a father.

You might leave someone and others might say, "Yeah, that's great. "That's what you should've done. "I told you to do it years ago." And then you might wonder, well, what if I had stayed, if only I had.

What you might recognise is you have repeated patterns of behaviour when you're in relationships with certain kinds of people. So should we regret anything?

I think some things are regrettable but that fact is you can't change the past and it's about looking for those lessons and thinking  how do I use that in my story, again to connect to my reader so they get a sense of who you are, why you made those decisions, and how that has brought you to this point.

So do you regret anything?

Have there been times of failure or times when you thought or felt that you've made a big mistake?

What are those times?

What would you have changed about any situation, and if you had an opportunity to go back to an experience, how would you give it a makeover?

Is there an opportunity that you regret, that you didn't take.

How do all of these things that we call regret, the if onlys, how do these inform your memoir?

The thing about regrets and if onlys is that in memoir, they bring you face to face with a very human side of the story.

Regrets can be uncomfortable and they can be uncomfortable to write about and you might get things coming up, but it enables your reader to get a deeper understanding of who you are and about those decisions and choices that you made that makes you who you are and why you're writing your story.

My invitation is, when you think about the incident, write about it, leave it and reflect, and think it through.

Why did you do what you did, and what were you thinking at the time?

How did your actions affect other people?

Were there things that I wish I could've told other people about why I did what I did?

Explore those insights and those ha's.

Should you include these things?

If you're not sure whether to write something or not I'd say write it out, write it out as full as you possibly can, then  sit back and look at it and reflect on it.

When it's out on paper, you can't actually take it back and I think there's a way of writing stuff that means you don't have to share everything but you can give somebody a taster of it.

I think if it's worth putting in the story and it's part of the story, then you put it in because the majority of people will get it. They'll understand why you did something regretful because you're leading them through the story into the choices you made, the decisions and things that make you who you are today. But do be careful.

So what can you do with your regrets? If they become things that keep repeating in your head and writing out of them is not serving you, please go and talk to a counsellor or a therapist.

Writing exercises for you to explore