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Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told - and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.)
Over a decade ago, when Writing Down the Bones first appeared, Natalie Goldberg started a revolution in the way we practice writing. Now, for the first time, Goldberg reads her classic work, while offering new commentary about the creative, spiritual, and practical dimensions of writing. This collector's edition also includes an exclusive interview with the author.
“Writing is a craft you can learn,” says Roy Peter Clark. “You need tools, not rules.” In this essential guide, Clark distills decades of experience into fifty tools that writers of all kinds can use every day. You may be crafting a newspaper story or an admissions essay for college. You may be writing a technical report or drafting your first novel. You may be a student or a teacher, a poet or a critic, a columnist or a blogger. You may be preparing a PowerPoint presentation or penning a love letter.
Your most potent writer's tool is your own mind, Natalie Goldberg says. From there springs the detail and truth that give your written words power and authenticity. Now this best-selling author introduces you to the pleasure of creating vivid memoirs of your own with Old Friend from Far Away.
Bringing together the imaginative strategies of fiction storytelling and new ways of narrating true, real-life events, creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing part of the creative writing world. It's a cutting-edge genre that's reshaping how we write (and read) everything from biographies and memoirs to blogs and public speaking scripts to personal essays and magazine articles.
The Power of Memoir is a pioneering how-to book that provides a new step-by-step program to use memoir writing as a therapeutic process. By going through these steps you'll learn how to choose the significant milestones and turning points that make up a coherent story leading to a life-changing epiphany. Using many examples from her students and clients, the author shows how creative, well-planned, and carefully researched memoir writing can offer a process for sorting out the truth from lies and family myths.
Anchored by excerpts from her favorite memoirs and anecdotes from fellow writers' experience, The Art of Memoir lays bare Karr's own process. (Plus all those inside stories about how she dealt with family and friends get told - and the dark spaces in her own skull probed in depth.)
Over a decade ago, when Writing Down the Bones first appeared, Natalie Goldberg started a revolution in the way we practice writing. Now, for the first time, Goldberg reads her classic work, while offering new commentary about the creative, spiritual, and practical dimensions of writing. This collector's edition also includes an exclusive interview with the author.
“Writing is a craft you can learn,” says Roy Peter Clark. “You need tools, not rules.” In this essential guide, Clark distills decades of experience into fifty tools that writers of all kinds can use every day. You may be crafting a newspaper story or an admissions essay for college. You may be writing a technical report or drafting your first novel. You may be a student or a teacher, a poet or a critic, a columnist or a blogger. You may be preparing a PowerPoint presentation or penning a love letter.
Your most potent writer's tool is your own mind, Natalie Goldberg says. From there springs the detail and truth that give your written words power and authenticity. Now this best-selling author introduces you to the pleasure of creating vivid memoirs of your own with Old Friend from Far Away.
Bringing together the imaginative strategies of fiction storytelling and new ways of narrating true, real-life events, creative nonfiction is the fastest-growing part of the creative writing world. It's a cutting-edge genre that's reshaping how we write (and read) everything from biographies and memoirs to blogs and public speaking scripts to personal essays and magazine articles.
The Power of Memoir is a pioneering how-to book that provides a new step-by-step program to use memoir writing as a therapeutic process. By going through these steps you'll learn how to choose the significant milestones and turning points that make up a coherent story leading to a life-changing epiphany. Using many examples from her students and clients, the author shows how creative, well-planned, and carefully researched memoir writing can offer a process for sorting out the truth from lies and family myths.
Lit follows Mary Karr's descent into the inferno of alcoholism and madness - and her astonishing resurrection. Karr's longing for a solid family seems secure when her marriage to a handsome, Shakespeare-quoting poet produces a son they adore. But she can't outrun her apocalyptic past. She drinks herself into the same numbness that nearly devoured her charismatic but troubled mother, reaching the brink of suicide. A hair-raising stint in "The Mental Marriott" awakens her to the possibility of joy, and leads her to an unlikely faith.
This expanded audio collection presents William Zinsser's On Writing Well, the classic teaching book that has sold more than 1 million copies, together with a new 90-minute section that tells you how to write a memoir.
The prolific, perennially best selling author recounts his early life and writing struggles, gives advice on the crucial aspects of the writing art, and talks about his much-publicized, near-fatal accident.
The Elements of Style has long been a valued and beloved resource for all writers. Hailed for its directness and clever insight, this unorthodox textbook was born from a professor's love for the written word and perfected years later by one of his students: famed author E. B. White. Ever since its first publication in 1959, writers have turned to this book for its wise and accessible advice.
Distinguished author Phillip Lopate, editor of the celebrated anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, is universally acclaimed as “one of our best personal essayists” ( Dallas Morning News). Here, combining more than 40 years of lessons from his storied career as a writer and professor, he brings us this highly anticipated nuts-and-bolts guide to writing literary nonfiction. A phenomenal master class shaped by Lopate’s informative, accessible tone, and immense gift for storytelling.
If you want to put your life story down in words, where do you start? Exactly what story are you hoping to tell? How are you going to fill hundreds of pages? How do you plan it out? Memoirist, blogger, and writing teacher Kim Brittingham shares her insight into getting started with your writing and crafting your memoir. Starting with the basic questions every writer should ask themselves, such as why do you want to write a memoir; what story do you want to tell; what form should your story take; who is the audience; and most importantly, why does anyone care?
In September 2011, I left my corporate job to become a full-time author and creative entrepreneur and since then I've grown my business year by year, all based on my writing. More importantly, I'm finally living the happy life I always wanted. I'm not a Kindle or blogging millionaire and this is not a get rich quick scheme. But I will share with you how I make a multi-six-figure income from writing books, blogging and marketing in an ethical manner.
"Life changes fast....You sit down to dinner and life as you know it ends." These were among the first words Joan Didion wrote in January 2004. Her daughter was lying unconscious in an intensive care unit, a victim of pneumonia and septic shock. Her husband, John Gregory Dunne, was dead. The night before New Year's Eve, while they were sitting down to dinner, he suffered a massive and fatal coronary. The two had lived and worked side by side for nearly 40 years.
Have you written a story with an exciting concept and interesting characters - but it just isn't grabbing the attention of readers or agents? It's time to look deeper into the story beats that create realistic and compelling character arcs. Internationally published, award-winning novelist K.M. Weiland shares her acclaimed method for achieving memorable and moving character arcs in every book you write.
The Secrets of Story is a revolutionary and comprehensive writing guide for the 21st century, focused on clever ways to get an audience to fully identify with an all-too-human hero. Authors will learn to how to cut through pop culture noise and win over a jaded modern audience by rediscovering the heart of writing: shaping stories that ring true to our shared understanding of human nature.
A New York Times best-selling author of both fiction and nonfiction, Anne Lamott was also the recipient of a Guggenheim Fellowship. As much a guide to writing as an exploration of the emotional challenges of being a writer, Bird by Bird offers a candid and often humorous look at how to tackle these varied obstacles.
A powerful reference tool to crafting realistic conversations in fiction! This manual is specifically for fiction writers who want to learn how to create riveting and compelling dialogue that propels the storyline and reveals character personality. Writers will also learn how to weave emotion, description, and action into their dialogue-heavy scenes. With a special section on how to instantly improve characterization through gripping conversations, all of these helpful writing tools will make your dialogue sparkle!
Every person has a story to tell, but few beginners know how to uncover their story's narrative potential. And despite a growing interest among students and creative writers, few guides to the genre of memoirs and creative nonfiction highlight compelling storytelling strategies. Addressing this gap, authors Lynn C. Miller and Lisa Lenard-Cook provide a compact, accessible guide to memoir writing that shows how an aspiring memoir writer can use storytelling tools and tactics borrowed from fiction to weave personal experiences into the shape of a story.
Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir offers an overview of the building blocks of memoir writing. Individual chapters focus on key issues and challenges, such as the balance between the remembering narrator and the experiencing narrator, the capacity to honor the subjective voice, the occasion of telling (why does this narrator tell this story now?), creating an organically functional structure for a particular story, and taking the next steps with a written memoir. Drawing on their combined years of experience teaching memoir writing, authoring works of fiction and nonfiction, and working in autobiographical performance, Miller and Lenard-Cook provide a practical guide whose core philosophy is motivated by a key word: story.
If you're writing your memoir, or summoning the courage to begin, hurry to get this book. And that's what this excellent book does for anyone interested in writing about their own experience. The writing is clear and entertaining, a joy to read. But better still, it provides a path with guideposts for thinking about memoir writing, with pauses for practice in shaded boxes and with shining examples of published memoirs woven throughout: Didion, Doty, Sexton, Dillard, Oates, Goldberg, Walls, and others.
"Find Your Story, Write Your Memoir" will ease your struggle with questions such as Should I write about my life? or How can I organize the chaotic jumble of my experience? or What should I include or leave out? or How will others react to my revelations? or How can I make my writing interesting? Drawing on the tools of fiction and creative nonfiction, it will help you identify and apply techniques for building a successful memoir: the "occasion of the telling," your unique narrator voice, the creation of scene, the necessary details. Although I am an experienced writer, this book has given me valuable new insights and has emboldened me to continue my own memoir writing along the path these authors have so intelligently and elegantly laid out before me. Particularly for a first time memoirist, this book has a lot of good advice. For me, the best part was the structure of building a scene - from catalyst to climax and denoument. And the laying out of 5 or 6 different ways to structure a memoir. Although I' ve read a number of writing books, both of these were new to me, and immediately useful. The book also has a great bibliography (actually two) of memoirs and books about memoir - that's worth the price of admission. Less satisfying for me were the other chapters on craft, much of it seemed like watered down advice from many other writing books. Overall, well done, well worth the time and money.
The information provided in this book--at least in all that I could stand to listen to--is great. However, the narration is TERRIBLE! It's worse than listening to a default phone recording over and over. With the right narrator, this would be an excellent resource for memoir writing, but it makes me have nightmares. Perhaps I'll place it under my pillow and let it play all night while I pretend I'm in a 'brave new world." My advice? Purchase the ebook edition.
I've read several books on "how to write your memoire", and most were fluffy and superficial. This book however has DEPTH! It makes you think about the WHY or the "Occasion for the Telling" and the HOW, your two main characters - your "experiencing self" (in the past) and your "remembering self" (your current you). I think I am listening to this book for the 4th time now and still getting lots of ideas and angles out of it. Thanks to the two authors for pouring your decades of in-depth experience into it!