On Writing Memoir, by Mary Hollendoner

By Mary Hollendoner

I always hated writing. English class was my least favorite subject at school – writing essays about obscure points of literature and having to hit a certain number of pages – none of it inspired me. 

So I never imagined that I’d write a book… but here I am! My book was published two months ago and has been an Amazon bestseller many times since publication. And now I’m eagerly drafting my second and third books. So what happened?

For me, it was all about the story. If you have a story that you want to tell – that you enjoy sharing and that you want as many people to read as possible – then you’ll find the inspiration to write the book.

This article is about the writing process, but I need to share some background for it to make sense. In 2017, after a decade in the corporate rat race, my husband and I quit our jobs, pulled our six-year-old daughter out of school, and moved into a camper van. We spent the next four years living as nomads, driving from the USA to South America. We had countless adventures, but the most memorable experiences were the surprising personal connections we made with local people. My conviction to tell my story grew each time we were welcomed in by a family or helped by a passer-by. 

But at first, my writing was simply a mechanism to let my mum know we were still alive. When we drove over the border from the USA into Mexico, we didn’t know how reliable our phones would be, and I started jotting down tidbits about our experiences to share. I’d text my family and my friends, eventually starting to copy and paste the same update across multiple text messages, ultimately concluding of course that there was a better way. I’d created an empty blog website before we left, so I started using that to describe the beautiful places we camped and the generous local people we met. I shared the link with my friends and family and delighted in reading their comments on my stories.

Then an astonishing thing happened. Several months into the trip, I started receiving comments from complete strangers. They invariably said that they were loving my stories and had heard about our trip from a friend. With the knowledge that strangers would be reading my posts, I found myself adjusting my writing style somewhat. After all, you tell a story differently to an audience of strangers than you do to a group of your own friends. I would ruminate over a blog post for a few days until I came up with a good “hook” introduction, and I started including informative snippets about exotic creatures we saw or first-hand experiences of local food and culture. The word-of-mouth growth continued until there were hundreds of people reading my personal stories! I started getting more and more comments saying that they “felt like they were there” due to the style of my writing. And then there was the first suggestion of, “You should write a book!” It seemed like a crazy idea, something I could never possibly achieve, but it came up more and more from different readers until I started giving it serious consideration.

With that idea secretly tucked into the back of my brain, I tried to approach my next blog posts more like chapters of a book. I thought more carefully about how to chop up our trip into logical chunks, rather than reporting chronologically everything that happened to us. I left out sections of our trip that weren’t particularly enthralling, and put more effort into describing all the tantalizing details of a unique or exciting event. Although I didn’t publicly admit it, by the end of our trip my blog posts were specifically written and designed as chapters of a book.

Then COVID struck. We found ourselves in a small town in central Argentina under one of the strictest lockdowns in the world. We couldn’t leave the house for any reason except to buy food, and even that was on a schedule. I decided to give the book idea a shot. I built a semblance of a desk out of some discarded bricks and a part of our van, and my husband agreed to distract our daughter for three hours a day while I wrote. I entirely rewrote the first year of blog posts, mostly rewrote the second year, and partly rewrote the rest. It took so much more time than I ever imagined! When we were eventually kicked out of Argentina (that’s another story) we landed back in California and I had my second shot at writing while our daughter was at school each day. There I tackled the first and last chapters, which were definitely the hardest to write.

Once I was comfortable with the first draft, I revised and edited countless times. Then I found trusted friends, and eventually strangers from an online memoir group, to “beta read” my book. The feedback was overwhelmingly positive! I was ready.

Publishing was a whole other project that would need to be another article. Suffice to say, I researched and studied for six months, reading endless articles on the subject, and got my book published by December 1st just in time for the holidays. I’ve now sold over 1000 books and have covered my costs of publication, but I know this is unlikely to be a viable way to earn a living. However, I’ve thoroughly enjoyed the challenge and, yes – even the writing that I used to hate – so I’ve convinced myself to do it all over again… I’d love it if you join me! www.monkeysontheroad.com

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Author Bio:

Mary is passionate about travel and the outdoors. Originally from England, she moved to California for its rock climbing and sunshine, worked a season on the Yosemite Search and Rescue team, but ended up climbing the corporate ladder at Google for a decade to fund her travel obsession. 

She has bicycled across Central America, motorcycled across Mexico, driven the length of Australia, and backpacked around Africa, Europe, and S.E. Asia – all as a prelude to the epic drive through the Americas that is referenced in this article.

She’s written for travel, climbing, and retirement magazines, and is the author of the book Monkeys on the Road about her Latin American driving adventures.

MONKEYS ON THE ROAD

Thirty thousand miles driving from the USA to South America with a 6-year-old kid in a camper van. Will they make it?

After a decade in the corporate rat race, Mary was ready for a change. Too much stress and not enough time with her family left her feeling that her priorities were all wrong.

So she and her husband hatched a crazy plan to change their lives…

They quit their jobs.

They pulled their six-year-old daughter out of school.

And they moved into an old camper van to attempt a drive to the southernmost tip of the world!

What followed were three-and-a-half years of heartwarming personal encounters, breathtaking wilderness campsites, and occasionally terrifying situations…

Surrounded by an angry mob in Mexico, threatened by exploding batteries in Colombia, caught up in a political revolution in Bolivia – they grew closer as a family as they navigated through adversity. But what stuck with them the most was the endless generosity of the local people, from whom they learned invaluable lessons about happiness and priorities.

Will they survive whale sharks, police searches, and volunteering in local schools? What happens when COVID hits?

Find out in this heartwarming read about a family trying to find their place in the world.

http://smarturl.it/MonkeysontheRoad

Tags: featured, women writers

Category: On Writing