Creative Writing Blog: memoir

Showing posts with label memoir. Show all posts

Sunday, September 10, 2023

Memoir as Poetry

I am currently exploring the notion of using poetry as a form of memoir writing. My natural poetic style is the narrative form or flow of consciousness. I make no pretence at rhyme, rhythm or meter, although it is surprising how all those elements can appear in my writing. I have posted two poems on my Poetry Blog - Verse and Words. At the moment I visualise mixing the poetic form with conventional writing.

Thursday, July 20, 2023

Writing a Memoir: How to Craft a Compelling Story

I found this article on The Urban Writers Blog quite interesting. Not only was it a good read but when printed out provided a useful template for composing an outline for a Memoir.

Telling a story isn't like giving an interview. Family experiences, life experiences, and adventures you had require a proper, compelling story structure to set up the reader's attention for the type of emotional truth you're trying to tell, but in a way that makes them understand where your powerful story is coming from.
To do that, you need to first learn how to write a great memoir outline like a true writer who's been story-telling their whole life.
Before your story gets summed up in the outline, understand that writing a great memoir isn't the same as writing an autobiography.

How to Outline a Memoir

Every good book begins with a thorough outline. When writing a memoir, you too should have an outline that tells your story through the lens of a particular theme.

Unlike laying out stories in an autobiography, each scene, character development, and plot in your memoir focuses on sharing a particular experience that goes with your theme and sends the type of message that you want to send.

With that in mind, check out different memoir examples and pay attention to the two following essential elements:

How scenes, story, and character development relate to the main theme.
What message is being sent through those scenes, and how does it correlate with the theme?

Reblogged: Check out The Urban Writers website for the full article

Wednesday, May 31, 2023

Scribblings #6

ChatGPT and AI: Creating Magical Bedtime Stories for Kids — Part 1

A Step-by-Step Guide to Writing, Cover Designing, and Publishing a Children’s Storybook with Artificial Intelligence on Your Side
https://clydedz.medium.com/chatgpt-and-ai-creating-magical-bedtime-stories-for-kids-part-1-7a25566509e1

Writing a Memoir: How to Craft a Compelling Story

This is one of the better articles that I have found on the subject of Memoir.

Writing a memoir is all about learning how to tell a compelling story based on a real-life story structure that took place, but in a way that attracts the reader's attention.

https://theurbanwriters.com/blogs/publishing/writing-a-memoir

StrikeTheWriteTone.Com

This blog contains some of the best advice I have found on Memoir writing. Check out the various posts on the subject.

· A memoir is not the recounting of stuff that happened to you. Stuff happens to everybody. A proper memoir must contain reflection. . . . No meaning, no memoir. No transcendence, no memoir. No takeaway for the reader, no memoir.

https://www.strikethewritetone.com/blog

Blog

Visit my Blogs at – apmablog.blogspot.com and verseandwords.blogspot.com

Wednesday, May 3, 2023

The naked truth: how to write a memoir - A Guardian Article

...Everyone has a book in them, it’s said, but as Martin Amis noted in his memoir Experience (2000), what everyone seems to have in them “is not a novel but a memoir …

Extract

How to write a memoir

1 Grab the reader’s attention from the off You can’t hit us with everything at once. You don’t even need to start with a major episode. But you do have to draw us in, establish a voice and hint at what lies ahead.

2 Put us there Make us see, hear, smell, taste and touch. In general use dialogue rather than reported speech. If the episode is vivid to you, make it vivid to us.

3 Dramatise yourself as the narrator It’s not compulsory to be confessional, but as our guide you should let us get to know you a little. You’re a character too.

4 Be strict about point of view If you’re writing from the vantage point of a child, create a voice that sounds like a child (in tone and perception if not vocabulary).

5 Choose your tense carefully The present tense will create immediacy but can inhibit measured reflection. The past tense is the more obvious choice but can seem too sedate and tidy. You may need both.

6 Remember God is in the detail The stronger our impression of something happening to a particular person at a particular time in a particular place, the greater our sense of recognition.

7 Use the same storytelling devices that novelists use – plot, character, voice, motif and structure There has to be development, a reason to read on. A sense of style, too: just because it’s non-fiction doesn’t mean it can’t be “literary”.

8 Give signposts Find ways to help the reader along, especially if you have a complex plot and a large cast list. You’re our guide and we need to be able to follow you – and to trust you to tell us the truth.

9 Be surprising Work against the material. The reader will bring her own experience to it, so allow for that. Don’t be afraid to find humour round a death-bed, say, or tenderness amid misery and abuse.

10 Pace the story It can’t be all showing and no telling. You may need to spend 30 pages on the events of an hour – then speed through 25 years in two pages. Be bold with chronology. Find ways to keep us interested. We’re in your hands.

An interesting article in the Guardian about Memoir published in 2019 but worth a read…

https://www.theguardian.com/books/2019/dec/14/the-naked-truth-how-to-write-a-memoir

Wednesday, February 1, 2023

Jeff Young - Ghost Town

I have with good fortune just rediscovered Jeff Young, Jeff is a writer for radio, television, stage and screen. He is one of BBC Radio Drama's most acclaimed dramatists, having written over twenty broadcast plays. For television, he has written for Casualty, Doctors, Eastenders, and Holby City. He has worked on many arts projects in Liverpool, including with Bill Drummond. He is also a senior lecturer in Creative Writing at the Screen School of Liverpool John Moores University.

I came across Jeff about 12 months ago whilst researching writing styles through his broadcasts on BBC Radio 3's podcast The Essay My journal entry highlighted the similarity between some of the experiences of Liverpool that Jeff writes about and my own. I was delighted to discover that when I revisited Jeff on the internet in respect of the Creative Writing course that I have just started, mainly because I am proposing to write a memoir, I was delighted to discover that Jeff had not only published a new book Ghost Town but that he was a Costa Award nominee.

I downloaded a sample from Kindle and was immediately blown away by Jeff's writing, both content and style. From his opening words, I felt as though I had just started reading my own Memoir. I downloaded the full book and also the Audible audiobook version. I was not disappointed, whilst the book was magic to read the audio so beautifully narrated by David Mossisy, whose soft scouse tones were made for the task, was a delight to listen to. I binged it.

Jeff's style of writing is like no other I have experienced. it is vividly visual, a perfect example of what My Creative Writing tutor had been trying to convey, "Show not Tell" style of writing. This is the first paragraph from Ghost Town...

My mother liked to trespass—she didn't call it
trespassing, she called it having a nose. We'd
have a look round the Corn Exchange or go up
the back stairs of an insurance building, slip
into the Oriel Chambers and sort of just ...
breathe. We were breathing in Victorian dust
and the pipe smoke of Dickensian ledger
clerks; drinking in shadows and gloom and
beams of light. We'd stand on fire escapes and
gaze across the rooftops. I was short-
trousered and eight years old and I was madly
in love—with a city.

Jeff Young

I was hooked, this is what my Grandma used to do with me, drag me around the numerous magnificent buildings of Liverpool as though she owned them, with no regard for the commissioner on the door or the reception desk, she took me on her own conducted tour, explaining things as we went. Then, Jeff's evocation of moving to the edgelands of north Liverpool again echoed the experience I shared with my best mate Leo when he was moved from Liverpool's Dock Road to the half-built estate of Netherton, our own adventure playground, even more, adventurous than the one he had left behind among the soaring Warehouses and desolate bomb sites of the docklands.