Tag: technique
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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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Cast of Characters in His Chosen Clan
I used to think that heroes tended to be lonely but after I read Joseph Campbell’s “The Hero with a Thousand Faces,” I realized they are not so lonely after all. It’s true they must leave home to go off to their adventures, which at first makes them seem isolated. But they soon collect allies.…
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Memoir writing lessons from the heart
by Jerry Waxler, author of Memoir Revolution: Write Your Story, Change the World Perry Foster was an ordinary business man until he found himself on the wrong end of a cardiology exam. Now he bears a scar on his torso that looks like it was zipped shut, which makes him a member of the zipper…
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