Tag: backstory
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Lost Memories: A Daughter’s Memoir about her Demented Mom
Martha Stettinius chronicles their journey in the memoir Inside the Dementia Epidemic. The memoir works on multiple levels. First, is Stettinius’ attempt to make sense of her evolving relationship with her mother. Second, is the story of her growing need to find the best care possible. And third is her desire to share this important…
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Telling a Memoir’s Backstory by Seesawing in Time
How the story falls together in the reader’s mind will depend on these questions of structure. Take your time. It’s your life, and if you want to turn it into a great story, don’t be surprised if you have to work at it with the same creative obsession that you expect from the authors of…
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How a Wrapper Story Helps You Structure Your Memoir
By developing the narrator as a visible presence in the story, you can help the reader gracefully move back and forth between the time frame of the person writing the book and the time frame of the character who lived through the earlier events.
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More Tips about Constructing the Timeline of a Memoir
Every memoir writer has to steer through these decisions, to determine not only how much to include, but also how to do it gracefully. By working out their challenges with time, character development and suspense, they successfully set the reader’s expectation and then fulfilled those expectations. These memoirs and the hundreds of others I have…
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