EDUCATIONAL ARTICLES, VIDEOS, AND PODCASTS FOR FOUNDERS AND FAMILY BUSINESSESÂ
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Your family business is a living testament to generations of hard work, sacrifice, and unwavering determination. This blog offers expert guidance for founders and family businesses who want to capture and preserve their family story.
Click on one of the pictures below to dive into the material relevant to your project.
CAPTURING AND PRESERVING YOUR FAMILY BUSINESS STORY
Capture Your Family Business Story Before It Slips Away
In this workshop, we help leaders of family businesses identify the first few steps of creating their family business story.
How to Begin to Write Your Family Story
Do you want to write your family story? But don’t know where to start? A family story is one of the best ways to preserve your history for future generations.
Tips for Producing a Family History Documentary
You want to capture your family history. That’s great! But where do you start? Most people automatically think of a book. It’s the default. But a book has its limitations.
What Is the Best Format for Your Content?
“You should write a book!” Most thoughts leaders have heard this at least once in their life. It’s the go-to format for content. But is a book the best format for your content?
PRESERVING YOUR FOUNDER LEGACY
Giving Founders the Language of Spirituality
Baby Boomers are dying like they lived. Even late in life, everything is big. Full of promise. Unprecedented. Now that the day is lengthening for them, there is no shortage of second-half-of-life self-help books, relationship advice, and promises of vibrancy to one hundred years and beyond.
Memoir as Genre vs. Memoir as Strategy
What is memoir as a genre and memoir as a strategy? Senior Vice President of Editorial at Harper One Mickey Maudlin identifies the differences.“So what? Why does memoir categorization matter?” It’s a question that all writers setting out to write a memoir must ask.
Memoirist Donna Freitas on Identifying the “Why” of Your Book
Every book has a heart. It’s not just an idea; it’s why the idea matters. The “why” is your answer to the question: “Why am I writing this book?” And if you don’t have an answer to that question, then you might need to spend some time wrestling with it.
How to Start Your Memoir: Three Questions to Ask Yourself
How do you start your memoir? Some people just start telling stories from their life. That’s one way. But it’s shortsighted. A memoir, like all books, requires a strong idea—a thesis—that governs the book.
How to Write about Difficult Topics in Memoirs
Writing a memoir is a deeply personal journey. It’s a journey that leads writers through the most profound, intimate, and traumatic moments of their lives. For many, reliving past experiences is challenging.
How to Structure Your Memoir
“I have an idea for a memoir. But I don’t know how to structure it. What do I do?” A memoir, like any book, needs to be structured. It needs to provide a compelling story and maintain your reader’s attention.
How to Write a Memoir: Legacy vs. Commercially Viable
Are you writing a memoir? Do you know what type of memoir you're writing? Some writers are writing a memoir to share their family history.
The Key Tenets to Writing a Commercially Viable Memoir
Crafting a captivating memoir is all about structuring pivotal moments, embracing vulnerability, and ditching binary narratives. Join award-winning ghostwriter Cristen Iris as she provides insights for writing a commercially viable memoir.
Determining The "Why" of Your Memoir
Memoirists often believe a memoir is all about them. It's their story, after all. However, crafting a memoir isn't just about telling your story. It's about what your readers take away from it.
How to Structure a Commercially Viable Memoir
Writing a memoir is a personal journey. But when it comes to creating a commercially viable memoir, there are key structural elements to consider.
How to Write Tension in a Memoir
Writing a memoir is more than just recounting events. It's about bringing your story to life in a way that captivates readers. One key element that can elevate your memoir from a series of events to a gripping narrative is tension.
TIPS ON CRAFTING YOUR FOUNDER OR FAMILY BUSINESS STORY
A.C.T.S. - the 4 Essential Elements of Writing a Great Story
Story. Story. Story. No one argues with the idea that stories are one of the primary ways we communicate as humans. It's one thing to enjoy a great story. And quite another to write a great one. But what are the essential elements of writing a great story?
Cristen Iris on Thinking Like a Filmmaker When Writing Your Memoir
Commercially viable memoirs are akin to novels. They engage the reader through storytelling techniques. But new memoirists struggle to write an engaging story.
Cristen Iris on How to Move Your Story Forward with Scenes
Scenes are the building blocks to good storytelling. But too many new writers struggle to conceptualize their story in scenes. They think a scene is a dinner table conversation. Or a mere stroll through the forest.
Authors of I'll Push You Offer Tips on Story Structure
We’ve all studied basic story structures in our high school English classes. And if you’re anything like me, you probably purged them from your memory. What will I ever need to know this for?
Jon Krakauer’s Into Thin Air
"None of them imagined that a horrible ordeal was drawing night. Nobody suspected that by the end of that long day, every minute would matter.”
On Writing by Stephen King
Stephen King’s On Writing chronicles King’s life from adolescence to his late fifties. This memoir provides insight to his creative genius, how writing shaped his life, and the hardships faced as an author.
Falling Leaves by Adeline Yen Mah
Falling Leaves is a memoir that chronicles the life of Chinese-American author and physician Adeline Yen Mah and her coming of age in war-torn, Communist China, a “society that kept girls in emotional chains.”
