Three Questions to Ask Before Writing a Memoir~ A Story

Posted by Kathleen Pooler/@kathypooler “Rather than simply telling a story from her life, the memoirist both tells the story and muses upon it, trying to unravel what it means in the light of her current knowledge. The contemporary memoir includes retrospection as an essential part of the story. Your reader has to be willing to be both entertained by the story itself and interested in how you now, looking back on it, understand it. ~ Judith Barrington, Writing the Memoir. As I prepare for the next stage in my memoir writing journey- pulling together three years worth of vignettes into a story- I find myself reflecting back on where it all started. Today, I’d like to share three questions that I had to ask myself before I decided to take on the challenge...

Posted by on Jun 4, 2012 in Lifewriting Craft, memoir-writing, Pitching a Memoir to an Agent, The Art and Craft of Writing, The Writing Life | 13 comments

The Puzzle of Memoir Memories

“ HE WHO BELIEVES THAT THE PAST CANNOT BE CHANGED HAS NOT YET WRITTEN HIS MEMOIRS.”  Torvald Gahlin For those of us who are tackling the challenging task of writing our memoir, it seems our primary purpose is to to dig deep into our past to find our truths and  then make some sense of  them so as to provide a source of entertainment and inspiration to the reader.   Creative writing teacher and author Maureen Murdoch in her book Unreliable Truth claims that “the job of writing memoir is to find one’s truths (page 12) ,citing that”the importance of memoir is the meaning we make of our lives, which is subjective” (page 16). She likens our memories to pieces of a jigsaw puzzle that need to be reassembled. I have been...

Posted by on Aug 7, 2010 in Lifewriting Craft, memoir-writing, Truth in Memoir | 12 comments