THE SINGLE MOST common question I’m asked about writing a memoir is, “How do I start?” How do you begin when there’s so much to say, so many pictures and memories and thoughts rumbling around in your head? How do you sort out the core of your story amidst the […]
THROUGH THE WORK I DO to support journaling and memoir writers, I often meet people who want to write about their lives, but who are not really interested in publishing or promoting what they write. They don’t want to write a memoir — a theme-based work about one aspect or […]
I gather together the dreams, fantasies, experiences that preoccupied me as a girl, that stay with me and appear and reappear in different shapes and forms in all my work. Without telling everything that happened, they document all that remains most vivid. ~Bell Hooks YOU’VE DREAMED of writing a memoir […]
ONE OF THE CHALLENGES of writing memoir is pulling partial memories into full and clear focus, and remembering the concrete details surrounding those memories. You might want to write about your first day of school, the first time you met your stepmother, or your relationship with your father. But when you […]
Memorial Day is a day set aside to remember and honor the fallen men and women who died in the course of war and in service to our country. It is a day to remember who they were in their daily lives, a day to remember their stories, and to […]
AS ANYONE WHO HAS WRITTEN ABOUT MEMOIR KNOWS, memoirs are much more than memories put to paper. And they are more than journalistically written true stories. Memoirs are comprised of two important elements: scene (narrative) and reflection. Without reflection, you do not have a memoir — you have a vignette or […]
Memoir isn’t the summary of a life; it’s a window into a life, very much like a photograph in its selective composition. It may look like a casual and even random calling up of bygone events. It’s not; it’s a deliberate construction. ~ William Zinsser, On Writing Well (30th Anniversary Edition) I am often […]
Dialogue does the heavy-lifting work – carrying details, setting the scene and moving the plot forward. ~ J.H. Mae Perhaps more than any other writing device, dialogue brings your readers into the immediacy of scene. It provides a method for showing, not just telling about, a person’s character and personality, as […]
What could be simpler to understand than the act of people writing about what they know best, their own lives? But this apparently simple act is anything but simple, for the writer becomes, in the act of writing, both the observing subject and the object of investigation, remembrance, and contemplation. […]
In Memories to Memoirs, Part 6, I wrote about the importance and impact of fresh metaphor to the life of our stories. Not only does metaphor engage the imagination of our readers, it is key to our own writing voice. Because metaphor is the frame through which we understand concepts, it reveals […]
In the previous installment of this series, we examined the strong verb and its importance to our story’s tone and pace. In this post, we’ll look at figurative language — metaphor. What exactly is metaphor? Metaphor compares abstract concepts to familiar objects and is the mechanism by which we understand those […]
This is the fourth in a series on turning memories into memoirs (and memoir-related essays). Click here to read Memories to Memoirs, Part 1, Memories to Memoirs, Part 2, and Memories to Memoirs, Part 3. In Part 3 I wrote about the importance of including vivid details in your writing and gave you […]
