Reflect | October

My writing life this month: part business as usual, part aha moments. Plus an extended reflection on the parallels between writing a first draft of a memoir and undertaking a PhD research project.

Part 10 of my monthly Reflect posts: a check in with my writing goals for the month that’s ending, where I’m at with the memoir project I’m hoping to complete a first draft of by the end of the year, and any interesting ideas emerging from what I’ve been writing about.

I’m taking a slightly different approach to my regular check in post this month. Let’s start with a quick look at where I’m at with three of my four writing intentions for October, and then I want to spend the rest of the post really digging into the fourth, and an important realisation I’ve had about the memoir I’m currently writing.

Submit my writing to 2 places

So far this month I’ve submitted a short piece of writing to MSlexia and I’m working on another piece to submit another to Tiny Memoir (50-200 words of memoir, submissions open til 31 December 2025). This is actually my second attempt - I wrote a piece of flash memoir I was really pleased with last month, but ultimately decided not to submit it because it didn’t feel like my story to tell.

---

2 Substack posts

Completed. I’ve published my two regular posts this month: Compost and today’s Reflect. I made this one deliberately easy so I could (hopefully) focus most of my writing time and energy on my memoir project.

I’ve also spent some time mulling over whether to set myself a writing challenge next month. In November 2024 I took inspiration from NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month) and challenged myself to write and publish 1000 words a day on Substack. You can find these posts here: 30k Hath November (have I mentioned that I love a good - or bad - pun?). It was a great challenge and it gave me such a confidence boost both in writing my memoir and in publishing on Substack. I want to set myself a similar - but different - challenge this year: maybe weekly (or biweekly posts), maybe a mini series on stories from my family tree.¹

---

Pleasing light and shadows and a glimpse of autumn colours through the window of the engine shed at Tanfield Railway in Gateshead.

Take part in Dr Lily Dunn’s memoir course

We’re almost two weeks into the course now and I’m so pleased that I signed up for it. It’s lovely to be writing again with some familiar faces (hello Miranda R Waterton and Jaimie Pattison!) as well as lots of new ones. I find it so rewarding to write in community with other people - Lily’s course is largely asynchronous so we’re all writing at different times, but we’re sharing what we’re writing with the group and receiving feedback on it from the other members.

The course feels like a perfect complement toLily’s latest book Into Being: the radical craft of memoir and its power to transform, which was published on 7 October 2025. I’d pre-ordered a copy, which arrived a few days earlier and which I dived into as soon as it arrived. It is already marked up with multiple post it notes, underlined passages and scribbled conversations I’m having with myself and the many memoir writers Lily quotes from in the book. If you are interested in writing - or reading - memoir and creative non-fiction, I highly recommend getting a copy!

Both Lily’s course and her book are already shaping my own memoir project: I’m currently writing about five linked memories from different points in my life (aged 4, 8 or 9, 15ish, 21 and 33) that I think might form the heart of the narrative - the central theme (or a central theme?). It’s one of those aha! moments when things suddenly come into focus and you wonder why you didn’t see them before.

---

Write 10k on my memoir WIP

Now to my final intention for this month, and a long overdue realisation that (1) I am not going to have written 10,000 words by the end of this month, and (2) I am not going to end 2025 with a finished first draft of my memoir.

It seemed so achievable back in January: a whole year to write about 80,000 words. Sure I can do that, it’s less than 7,000 words a month. But the further I’ve got into writing this memoir, the more I have realised quite how big a project it is, and how much other work there is to do beyond just getting the words down on paper. There’s been false starts, research wormholes, ethical dilemmas and dark nights of the soul when I wonder why I ever thought I could do this and why I’m even bothering to try.

I will probably end the year having written over 70,000 words of this first draft - and this is a BIG achievement that I want to try and properly celebrate come December. I have a bad habit of underplaying my successes and focus instead on the things that have gone wrong. But a chunk of those 70k words are me revisiting and rewriting certain key moments of the narrative, and there are whole months in my mapped out structure that I am yet to write a word on. So. A completed first draft it will not be.

I’ve found it interesting to compare my experience of trying to write a first draft of a memoir with my PhD studies, which I completed back when the world was young in 2004-2008.² When I started my PhD I imagined that I would write a chunk of my thesis during each year of the course: the introduction and literature review in the first year, the fieldwork chapters in the second year, data analysis and findings in the third year, maybe dipping into a fourth year to write up my conclusions and do any redrafting that might be needed to make it all hang together as a finished piece of work.

Reader, it was not like this at all.

I spent the first six to eight months of the PhD reading huge swaths of literature - from dense academic texts to popular history books, community blog sites to first person narratives - and developed my research questions. I explored every aspect of my chosen topic, starting to make connections and map out the ideas I was interested in investigating further. I drafted and redrafted the introduction and literature review chapter of my thesis, endlessly revising it to include a new avenue of research I’d gone down, or a new text my supervisor was adamant I needed to include. By the end of the first year I was sure of nothing except how little I knew or understood of my research topic, and how much more there was to find out. I couldn’t imagine ever finishing this project, let alone producing a finished book length thesis that I felt happy to submit for examination.

It was deeply frustrating and mildly soul destroying, and - with the benefit of hindsight - a vital part of the process. To me, it feels like completing a PhD inevitably involves being broken down and building yourself back up again: repeated dark nights of the soul when I wondered what the hell I was doing, what on earth had possessed me to believe that this was something I could do, it was too much, I was going to fail. But I persevered and trusted in the process, and gradually all the scattered ideas and findings, the fragments of paragraphs or sentences that I was happy with, coalesced into a finished thesis. It took me the full four years rather than the optimistic three I’d been aiming for, and most of the thesis was written in that final fourth year. Almost nothing that I wrote in the first two years of my PhD made it into my final draft.

My experience of attempting to write a first draft of a memoir this year has been very similar: I’m not where I thought I’d be by this point, I’ve cycled through at least three dark nights of the soul so far, and I’ve spent more time than I expected mapping and remapping a structure, thinking about themes and settings and symbols that I want to weave into the narrative. I’ve read a lot of memoirs by other people, possibly too many - or not enough? - which have filled my head with a myriad of different ways that I could approach the story I want to tell. I’ve taken part in lots of courses and workshops, and learned so much from the wisdom and generosity of other writers - specifically of memoir, and particularly here on Substack. I’ve tried my hand in submitting short pieces of writing for publication, and had some successes, writing around and towards the subject of my larger memoir project. I’ve slowly become more comfortable with the idea of calling myself a writer.

I know enough now to understand that it might take me years to complete a first draft of this memoir. It keeps expanding and growing the more of it I write, developing new pathways, becoming more labyrinthine. I am (mostly) okay with this. I’m having a lot of fun finally doing the thing I have been dreaming of for years: WRITING. I’m enjoying the process immensely and it feels genuinely transformative: I’m writing about big difficult things that I’ve been keeping packed up tight inside me for years, and it feels good to take them out of my body and hold them up to the light, try to unravel them in words on the page. At the same time, it is endlessly frustrating in exactly the same way that my PhD was. I have an image in my head of a book on a shelf with my name on the spine, but no idea how to get to there from here, where what I have now is a sprawling Google Doc in need of significant pruning and some seeds of new ideas that haven’t quite sprouted yet which I hope will fill in the gaps.

But I’m committed and determined to finish this memoir, whether it takes me eighteen months or three years (or longer?!) to finish a first draft.

Channeling the determination of this lone jackdaw to reach their evening roost before sunset in my quest to complete the first draft of my memoir.

1. One of my claims to fame favourite family stories is that my great-great-great uncle was hanged for murder in the 1860s and became the first person to be executed ‘in private’ - within the prison grounds rather than at a public gallows with an audience.

2. For those that might be interested, I did a PhD in cultural heritage studies at Newcastle University, titled ‘Community, heritage, identity: constructing, performing and consuming Welsh identities in the US’. You can find an electronic copy of it here.