What did you do this morning? Answering that question, your story of it will likely move from A to B — chronologically. This linear type of storytelling is the usual way we speak conversationally. In memoir, there are several other good options for how a story can be told. These...
Perspective, or point of view (POV), is different through the eyes of a child, and that perspective can be the one we’re using in writing a portion of a memoir. Let’s look at writing about an experience of shock. News comes, delivered by a phone call, a knock on the...
There were many standout messages in a webinar I attended this week by bestselling author Janet Fitch, hosted by Memoir Nation (www.memoirnation.com/about-memoir-nation). This is one of my favorites. Fitch spoke about stimulating memory to recreate time and place. How to do that? A clue: Stimulating memory stimulates something inside you...
This is the cover of the new book by Dr. Roseanne Chambers, who hired me to help her plan the content and structure of a book she wanted to write about geology’s influence on ancient Andean cultures. Within the next two years we created her outline and I reviewed her...
Truth can be a sticky wicket in memoir. It is essential to the craft but it can be hard to write. On June 21 I presented on this topic for the Redwood Writer’s Club in Santa Rosa. I looked at truth from several angles and showed new ways of handling...
American films tend to follow a three-act story story structure with a key turning point at the end of the first and second acts. Memoir has no single formula like that for its structure, though it’s not a free-for-all. There are options to choose from. When I started writing a...
I’m inspired today by a story about a man who ran a popular typewriter repair shop in New York City. Reading about the great developments he saw in writing machines from the 1960s through the 1990s I realized I was here for each one of those changes. As a writer,...
As a child, learning to whistle thrilled me. I could make music with my mouth! (Getting sent out of the classroom because I had shown kids in class, however, was less thrilling.) But something else I learned, and something I never could have expected to interest me at all, happened...
