THIS IS THE THIRD AND FINAL ARTICLE IN THE READ LIKE WRITER SERIES, in which I discuss Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run. Today, I’m exploring how Springsteen structured his memoir and how that might inform our writing. Warning: this discussion of structure contains spoilers and is intended for those […]
THIS IS THE SECOND OF THREE ARTICLES, in which I discuss Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run. Today, I’m exploring how Springsteen controls pace, voice, and tone in his writing. Voice and Tone: Springsteen describes the characters in his life I think one of the ways Springsteen’s voice and tone […]
THIS IS THE FIRST OF THREE ARTICLES, in which I discuss Bruce Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run. AFTER READING A SERIES OF MEMOIRS WRITTEN BY WOMEN, all filled with wonderfully lyrical and sensory-rich prose, I was struck by the raw, male voice in Springsteen’s memoir, Born to Run. Consider the […]
THIS IS THE SECOND OF THREE ARTICLES, in which I discuss Sue Monk Kidd’s memoir, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine. As I wrote in the First Impressions post, Dance of the Dissident Daughter is a different sort of memoir — […]
THIS IS THE FIRST OF THREE ARTICLES, in which we discuss Sue Monk Kidd’s memoir, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: A Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine. Originally published in 1992, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter, in which Sue Monk Kidd writes about her awakening […]
THIS IS THE THIRD of a 3-part analysis of This Boy’s Life by Tobias Wolff. In this part, we take a look at the narrative structure to better understand how the choice of structure helps or hinders the narrative. Whenever I set out to examine the structure of a piece […]
HOW WORD CHOICE AFFECTS PACE, TONE, AND VOICE – This Boy’s Life This is the second post in which we examine *This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff, from a writer’s point of view. How does Tobias Wolff manage to draw us into his story? How does he keep us turning […]
FIRST IMPRESSIONS – *This Boy’s Life, by Tobias Wolff This Boy’s Life, published in 2007, is already a classic among coming-of-age memoirs. It begins with Toby, age fourteen, and his mother as they run West to hide from an abusive relationship and make their fortune prospecting for uranium. “She was going […]
UNDERSTANDING THE STRUCTURE of a memoir, for me, has always been the most challenging part of analyzing a book — partly because there are so many ways to go about it. Structure can be analyzed by timeline, place, theme, types of events, and so on. In the first lines of West […]
A CLOSE READING of any book helps us to understand how an author’s word choice and sentence structure affect the tone and pace of the work. For this examination of Beryl Markham’s *West With the Night, I decided, (rather arbitrarily) to use excerpts from Chapter V, “He Was a Good […]
FIRST IMPRESSIONS – *West With the Night, by Beryl Markham Though this memoir is considered a classic, I had never heard of it or of Beryl Markham before a Writing Through Life survey respondent suggested it. I was immediately intrigued by the idea of a woman who, raised in Kenya during […]
BACK IN NOVEMBER, I asked if you’d like to see a Reading for Writers series focused on memoir, in which we would analyze one book each quarter together. You responded with a resounding “Yes!” and with many, many excellent title suggestions, ranging from classic to contemporary memoir. In making the […]
