If you have never heard of Call the Midwife – and I’d be surprised if you haven’t, it is a popular long running television series created by the BBC based on the memoirs of Jennifer Worth.
It’s set in the East End of London during the 1950’s and 1960’s where Jennifer worked as a midwife.
Jennifer wrote three books about her life during that time and what she had experienced and witnessed over the years working as a midwife and nurse.
The television show follows the lives of a small group of NHS midwives who live and work with a group of nuns who were also trained nurses and midwives.
It’s a beautifully made show packed full of nostalgia. It’s full of great uplifting stories, but it also tackles a lot of hard to watch painful themes.
Call The Midwife is well known to lubricate the eye sockets. Every week people are left weeping while watching the show.
On a Sunday evening after the show has ended social media is awash with people saying how much they cried watching the show.
The really sad part of the Call the Midwife story is that Jennifer Worth died the year before the show hit our screens. Unfortunately she never got to watch the show or see how popular it has become.
Another show that is getting rave reviews lately is The Responder starring Martin Freeman.
Martin plays Chris Carson, a police officer in Liverpool, who is spiralling into chaos trying to keep his mind focused on the job while trying to save the life of a girl who stole a big bag of drugs worth hundreds of thousands of pounds from a drug dealer who just happened to be an old friend of Chris’.
Chris is caught between the two worlds of trying to be a good and decent cop while also trying to find the missing drugs for the bad guys to prevent harm coming to him, his family and the young woman who stole them.
Martin Freeman’s performance as the crisis-stricken and morally compromised police officer has been hailed as one of the best with many calling for him to win a BAFTA award.
So why am I telling you this?
The story was written by ex-police officer Tony Schumacher who just like Jennifer Worth, drew on years of personal experiences.
The story is fiction and not an actual series of memoirs but the fact remains, The Responder was based on a series of actual life events.
Another incredibly popular and long running BBC series is Silent Witness. Silent Witness began in 1996 and has been running ever since.
Again, this is a show which was originally based on real life experiences as the creator Nigel McCrery was a former murder squad detective from Nottingham.
Nigel also went on to create New Tricks, another BBC detective series.
Drawing on his knowledge as a murder detective and his time spent working with forensic pathologists; Nigel created a factually accurate show which captured people’s attention and has lasted an incredible 26 years.
You may be wondering where I am going with this.
People’s real life stories and real world experiences are interesting to other people. People love watching true stories and learning about history and other people.
You yourself may have more than enough real life experiences to create a book which could quite easily make you money… and possibly change your life.
If you yourself have not had a career as exciting or varied as a midwife, police officer or murder squad detective, you have eyes and ears to record what is happing in the world around you.
The people I’ve already mentioned above are chroniclers.
They are recorders of history.
They put down on paper the events that are happening around them then they either publish those records as memoirs, social observations or fictitious stories.
Is keeping a daily diary a good idea for you?
A lot of people laugh at the idea of keeping a diary.
They think of books such as The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole, Aged 13 ¾, or The Diary of a Wimpy Kid, but the truth is, a diary is a collection of daily records which grow into complete books of history.
A history which you can publish for the world to enjoy.
Some people like to use traditional diaries because it feels more personal and special to them, whereas others prefer to publish their diary entries online as part of a blog.
The bestselling book and popular television series The Secret Diary of a Call Girl is another set of real life memoirs which was originally published online as a diary blog.
Personally I think writing a diary either online as a blog for the world to see or as a collection of Word or Google documents is better because you can work with them better.
If you use a traditional diary, you’ll need to transfer all those pages to the computer if you wish to use them as part of a book or product and that can be a bit of a ball ache.
Keeping with the online theme, your memoirs can be published to a website as blog posts AND they can be used as email content.
Maybe your memoirs can be used as an exclusive email newsletter instead as a way to grow an email list… and as we know, having an email list is a profitable thing to have.
An email list is like having your own personal cash machine. You can promote products and services to the people on your list and earn money when people buy.
Your emails can become your diary entries… and your diary entries become your emails.
You write your diary entry into a Word document, copy it over to your chosen email service and then hit send.
Write one diary entry email a day and you will have 365 entries after one year. That is more than enough content for a book or two… and who knows where that will lead to once they have been published.
If you would like to know more about how to make money using email, go to:
The Email Secret
Kind Regards
John Harrison
PS… An email a day – or every few days – takes very little to write. You do not need to write thousands of words for each email. If you want to share a long memoir you can also break it up over several emails.
Here’s that link again: