One day a talented student arrived a little late for our writing & performance workshop. She apologized and said she was late because she had a 'hand job' that morning. What?!

It turned out she worked as a hand model and while she had been doing funny material about other things in the class, this was the first we'd heard about her day job. And everyone was fascinated.

Emily Aiken is a brilliant strategic consultant known as 'the Brand Dominatrix' who came up with a great phrase: Low-Hanging Content.

That perfectly describes a whole category of potential material that a lot of writers and comedians overlook because it just seems too obvious and too familiar (to them). Too easy.

Over the years we've worked with a lot of very talented people who kept searching farther and wider for material when they had a wealth of great stuff within easy reach. For the writer referred to above it was hand modelling, for another

It seems like right now almost everybody has a story to tell. This is like the Age of Memoirs.

My theory is that post-Watergate we realized that we can't trust the government. Post-911 we feel like we can't really trust the media to know (or tell us) what's really going on either. So who can you trust? Only the personal testimony of credible individuals.

To me that explains the rise of the written memoir, the continued popularity of This American Life, the spread of alternative comedy including Un-Cabaret, live storytelling shows and personal essay reading nights like Say the Word, The Moth, Sit 'n' Spin, Afterbirth, Mortified and others across the country, plus wider trends like blogs, user reviews, tweets and the surge of subjective news like Jon Stewart.

So what about your memoir? If you're interested, I've worked with an number of first-time writers to plan, write and re-write their stories and have developed a simple 5-step plan (which I also think would work for any book project). Here it is: