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 […]
You have been working on ways to remember and write your life story vividly, with concrete and sensory details that draw your reader into the world of your story. Now, consider how the verbs you choose effect tone and pace. In the midst of a story, when you describe a static object, you are in […]
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 […]
This is the third in a series on moving from memories to memoirs. Click here to read Memories to Memoirs, Part 1 and Memories to Memoirs, Part 2. In part two, we used map drawing to trigger memories about place and time in our lives. In this article I present another technique to release sensory […]
This is the second in a series on moving from memories to memoirs. Click here to read Memories to Memoirs, Part 1. One of the great challenges (and satisfactions) of writing memoir is dealing with fragmented memories. We may remember only a snippet of an event; we may be haunted […]
Our greatest desire, greater even than the desire for happiness, Is that our lives mean something. This desire for meaning is the originating impulse of story. ~Daniel Taylor I believe that everyone’s lives, however “ordinary,” are filled with experiences that speak to universal human experience and are therefore interesting to […]
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 […]
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 […]
