Focusing on your Area of Expertise

At the beginning of our journey we don’t know how we’re going to achieve what we’re planning to do, or what hurdles we’ll encounter along the way. But along the way we’ll learn a lot, and our memoirs need to focus on how we accumulated our area of expertise.

Making this transition from where we were to where we reached, is driven by our area of expertise.

We lived through the experience and have a personal tale to tell.

Our memoir should focus on what we know now and the lessons we learnt along the way. By the end of our memoir we know a lot more about the how and the why, than what we knew at the beginning of the journey.

The key to area of expertise, is choosing only one per memoir, because if we try to combine too many into a single story it’s going to be really difficult to write (I have first hand experience of that!), and confusing for the reader to try to untangle the lessons from your expertise.

Writing About an Area of Expertise

I don’t know about you, by my life has multiple threads running through it.

At the same time I was planning to abandon my corporate career to become a nomad, my Mum was battling with dementia.

Initially my memoir was about my life change, and then along the way I felt I needed to incorporate the dementia element, because I was writing a chronological account, and they were both happening at the same time.

This is where my writing ran into trouble, and progress ground to a halt.

These are two very different topics.

Two very different life journeys, appealing to two different audience groups.

Looking at it from the lens of expertise = I have two different sets of expertise to share.

Two different stories that overlap from a chronological perspective.

It’s only natural that elements from one gets mentioned in the other, but they shouldn’t be combined. By separating them there’s an opportunity to create a memoir series. You can tell the same chronological time in your life in multiple ways by shifting the area of expertise you focus on.

So if you’re struggling to untangle your memoirs structure and plot, take a look at your area’s of expertise. If you’re trying to show too many areas of expertise, then maybe you’re trying to combine too many memoirs into one.

Next Steps

So what are the next steps for my memoir? Making sure I’m clear about my area of expertise, and the topic I’m writing just focuses on one.

If you’re on the same path, and want to write your memoir and are looking for some inspiration (or can provide some inspiration), please join in the conversation in the comments section below and lets get our memoirs written.

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