What are You Really Writing About?

What is Your Memoir Really About? With memoir, it can take some digging to get to the heart of what we’re really writing about. There’s the story of what happened, and then there’s the meaning we’ve attached to it. In memoir, it’s not enough to tell us what happened—we need to know what that event meant to you. To help with that clarity, here’s an exercise I did with a recent class at Lighthouse Writers Workshop. “Truth in a memoir is achieved not through a recital of actual events; it is achieved when the reader comes to believe that the writer is working hard to engage with the experience at hand. What happened to the writer is not what matters; what matters is the larger sense that the writer is able to make of what happened.” Vivian Gornick, The Situation and the Story […]

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How I Resuscitated My Memoir

How I Resuscitated My Memoir In the midst of the end-of-the-school-year chaos, I realized it was time to resuscitate my current memoir. How did I know? My book kept popping into my consciousness, giving me little nudges that it wanted my attention. For a long time, this memoir’s been on life support. It’s been a big year for me with joining the Lighthouse Writers faculty and growing my business, so the book needed to take back seat for a while. I continued taking notes about the book and chipping away at it here and there, but that’s about it. That changed over the past couple of weeks. One morning, I woke up with the realization that it was time to redo my wall chart (a.k.a. my road map/organizational system). So I penciled in some time to get started. For me, getting back into […]

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