Posts tagged memoir,
Posts tagged memoir,
Your life as Story, by Tristine Rainer, is the best book I’ve read on writing memoir. Hands down.
Rainer addresses one of the most difficult aspects of the genre: finding your story arc. She offers practical tips about how to turn your life into a compelling story, then guides the reader through doing just that.
The book helped me when I read it as a beginner a year ago, and it was even more beneficial when I re-read it during my writer’s residency, looking for guidance on solidifying my story arc.
Rainer writes: “An autobiographic story is not just an account of events; it is the charting of your emotional, moral and psychological course, which gives meaning to those events.”
She suggests “reading your life as if it were a dream, asking, “What hidden significance do these characters and these events have for me?”
If you’re writing memoir, this is a must-read.
Not sure if this should really count as one of my reads, since I more skimmed it than read it. But if you’re writing a memoir, this book by Sven Birkerts is worth picking up. He focuses on how to create a story and find a narrative rather than describing a sequence of events. (I’ll blog about this in more detail at The Traveling Writer at some point.)
“In memoir the story all but requires the dramatic ordering that hindsight affords,” he writes.
A memoir by Haruki Murakami. That’s what I’m reading. I’m thinking about making this entire Tumblr dedicated to What I’m Reading. Yeah, I think I’m gonna do that.
