Category: Writing Prompt
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8 Lessons and Prompts from Tim Elhajj’s Recovery Memoir
Dopefiend is about Elhajj’s journey to become a complete man, and his desire to be a good father is an important part of that journey. His own son forces him to grow, giving fresh meaning to Wordsworth’s famous line, “the child is father of the man.”
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Escaping the prison of what might have been
I have met many men and women, who start out pointing in one direction, say towards a profession, or marriage and babies, or the family business. Then they end up somewhere else. Often the change in direction leaves them or their parents feeling confused, as if they have disrupted destiny or lost an important part…
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6 Life Story Writing Prompts Inspired by a Book of Short Stories
What Xujun did in fiction, you could do in reality, developing a series of stories that gradually add up to portraying your life. Review your list of powerful transitions, such as a love gained or lost, an accident, illness, peak accomplishment, or realization that changed. (If you don’t have such a list, start it today.)
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What does Dani Shapiro, or any of us, really want?
Dani Shapiro’s memoir “Slow Motion” is a study in desire. When she enters Sarah Lawrence, one of the top liberal arts schools in the U.S., she is young, beautiful, and rich. Then, a man 20 years older swoops into her life, picks her up in his limousine and showers her with flowers. At first she…
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Self-image changes in step with society
by Jerry Waxler Henry Louis Gates, author of the memoir “Colored People,” grew up in Piedmont, a small town in the northeastern corner of West Virginia. The town was geographically in a hollow, and through the eyes of a child, looked picturesque, even cozy. In those simpler times in the 1950’s and 60’s, people got…
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Good hair in the melting pot
My dark brown hair grew longer, and curled into a tangle that looked vaguely like an Afro. Home from the University of Wisconsin that first summer of 1966, my great-uncle Ben, with whom I had always got along, said “I didn’t know we had anything like that in the family.” We never spoke civilly to…
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Follow that car! How drama reveals the inner story
One Saturday, we drove south on 17th Street, made a left on to Ontario, and started east towards Broad Street, when a large man ran out between two cars and flagged down the car. He knocked on the window, yelling at us to open up, gesturing down the street towards some unseen quarry. It was…
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Keep your memoir in touch with changing gender roles
As I make the journey from being a reader of books to a writer, this line of thinking offers me additional insights. I was already looking at my audience as a collection of cultures, and generations. Now I add genders to the mix. To learn more, I turn toward the memoirs I am reading.
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Rediscovering why I read books throughout my lifetime
Books have always played an important role in my life, influencing, informing, and entertaining. Now I want to pass forward to others the benefits I have received. One of the steps of offering my thoughts to “the world” is to visualize who might be on the receiving end. Communication does, after all, require a speaker…
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Celebrity interviewer turns the camera on herself
Jancee Dunn was an ordinary girl from the suburbs of north New Jersey who dropped out of college, became a cub reporter for Rolling Stone magazine, and stayed there for 18 years. At her zenith she told the world about celebrities on MTV and Good Morning America. In the memoir “Enough About Me, How a…
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