Tag: memoir
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Stories Help this Author Grow
In my experience, most memoir writers are responding to a similar desire, to find themselves by creatively shaping their lives into stories. What advice could you offer us, based on your mid-life quest to reclaim your soul through creativity?
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Interview: How to turn memories into a memoir
I invested, practiced and took copious notes on our course lectures. I read what works well and what doesn’t in terms of memoirs. I kept trying to figure out the purpose of each scene. Some chapters went through 20 revisions until I finally got it. There’s no shortcut to figuring out structure because it’s individual…
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Best Ever “Launching” Memoir Review
Figuring out which group one belongs to is often a crucial step in the process of growing up and has figured prominently in some of my favorite memoirs.
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Is your memoir Boomer Lit?
Whatever your experience was in the sixties, whether a soldier, a hippie, a housewife, a mother, a resident of a commune, cult, or clan, you had a personal, unique experience that is trapped in your mind until you give it voice. And memoirs give you that voice.
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Why memoirs teach more than literature Pt 3
Gruwell completed the circle that joins literature to life by inviting her students to write about their own experiences. Their diaries created connections across gang boundaries, and beyond neighborhoods all the way out to the rest of the world.
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Why Memoirs are Better Than Literature Part 2
Even though memoirs are crafted to maximize dramatic intensity, their greatness does not result from metaphor and hyperbole, to be picked apart in search of the finest phrase. The genius of this genre arises from its ability to immerse the reader in a slice of the author’s actual experience.
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Why Memoirs Should be Taught as Literature Part 1
As an intellectual young man, I desperately sought lessons about life. Unfortunately, I was born at a time when the message embedded in almost every book taught that there’s really no point to grow up at all. It’s true that great literature contained an internal elegance and brilliance, but the underlying message was awful.
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A Cat Memoir Reveals Life’s High Stakes
Every writer searches for a voice that will linger in the reader’s mind, inviting imagination back to the story the way a good song plays out in memory long after the physical recording stops. Ann Kaier’s voice provokes thought, and it lingers. What is it about this voice?
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Launching into Adulthood – Search for Beliefs
when I began teaching memoir writing, I met many aspiring writers who want to make sense of their own journey to find a viable set of beliefs. All the evidence added up to the observation that sorting out one’s belief system can be a crucial task of growing up.
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Launching into Adulthood – Find a Job
Steve Martin, early in his career, was hired to perform at a restaurant. Even though the place was empty, the owner told him to perform anyway, because it would attract customers. Steve Martin’s performance to an empty room is not much different from the daily task of writing any memoir. At first, we all “perform”…
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