Category: Writing Workshop
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Revealing Death and Other Courageous Acts of Life
Then it was my job to turn the audience’s attention back to their own goals. I realized there wasn’t enough time to conduct a real workshop, but in the small amount of time available, I wanted to convince everyone that the problems of writing a memoir are solvable. “When you look back through your memories,…
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An agent teaches writers to face their hopes and fears
However, occasionally I look up to the cathedral in the sky, where happy published writers hang out at tea parties, and I wonder if I will ever gain admission. To learn how to storm those gates, I recently attended an all day workshop on the subject. The event was hosted at one of the region’s…
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Making memories, remembering memories, writing memories
This eight hour workshop immersed us in each other’s stories.
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Reading error teaches a writing lesson – or – A good character is hard to define
Part of relating to a good story is to feel a personal connection with its characters. Now I need to develop the knack of portraying the people in my life onto the pages in my memoir. I have attended workshops, and read how-to books about this skill, but it has been eluding me until recently…
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My Day at a Writer’s Conference – or – The Benefits of Showing Up
The keynote speech turned out to be invigorating and freeing. Beth Kephart, whose work I did not know, started as a memoir writer, who, as her career proceeded, extended her writing to other forms, most recently winning awards as a young adult novelist. As her writing skills and interests develop, Beth follows her creative compulsion…
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Lessons memoir writers can learn from Zombies
My goal is remarkably similar to Jonathan Maberry’s. We both want to tell a good story. So I keep listening to this thriller writer and keep learning lessons about the relationship between life and story. For example, in a previous discussion he told me that flaws in real people prepare him to write deeper characterization…
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Writing Conference: Tip for Memoirists – Use myth to find story
Journalists are supposed to just write what they see. Right? But Lule started noticing some news caught fire, and some didn’t. He began looking for the reason for this difference, and he realized that when a story just conveys information, it does not generate energy. The stories that have the most energy are organized as…
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Writing Conference: Tip for Memoirists, memoir as literary non-fiction
Since Fincke will be publishing his memoir early next year, I asked him what are the differences between memoir and journalism. He said one key difference is that in memoir, you want to return to the state of mind that you were in when you originally experienced it. That strikes me as being a significant…
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