1. As a form of Creative Nonfiction
“Good memoirs are a careful act of construction.” —William
Zinsser
• Frey
• * Joyce Maynard
2. “…your story is your story to tell…”
—page 21, Tell It Slant
Based on our reading in Chapter 2, “Writing
the Family” (Tell It Slant), what are some of the
challenges you think you might face in
working on your memoir piece?
3. Real Life
Reflection
Research
Reading
“Riting”
Adapted from Lee Gutkind, editor of Creative
Non-Fiction magazine
4. Immersion into and with actual events,
locations, people
Scenes (showing) versus telling stories from
real life that draw in the reader
Description from real life of people and places
5. What is the meaning behind the real experience
or story the writer is telling?
Is there a message that extends beyond the
author’s own reaction, a larger meaning?
Reflection means asking yourself questions
about your story, whether it’s a personal
experience or a story outside yourself.
6. The mission of nonfiction, in part, is to inform
and educate.
Even a personal story requires research in
order to provide significant details.
The research connects the personal story to a
larger intellectual context.
7. Even people writing about their own lives
often extend outside themselves
To verify
To add context
For example…
8. Expanding your knowledge and ideas by
DEVOURING the works of other writers.
Not just other creative nonfiction writers, but
other artists and fiction writers and scientists
and musicians and on and on. The more you
know, the more context you have for your own
discovery
9. The rough-draft writing of inspiration and
exercises
The revision writing of cleaning up grammar,
sentence structure, word choice and,
sometimes, the complete structural redrafting
of pieces.
10. In Night of the Gun, David Carr writes:
“Memoir is a very personal form of creation
myth.”
In Tell It Slant, the authors write: “Memory itself
could be called its own bit of creative
nonfiction.”
How do you interpret these statements?
11. Narrative means, in the simplest terms, how
we tell the story, or how we “frame” the story.
Is it chronological? Ordered by the importance
of the events? Circular, coming back to the
beginning of the piece? Are there sections that
each begin with a uniform element?
Narrative construction in writing is how we
make transform memories/ ideas into...art
12. “A metaphor is a way of getting at a truth that
exists beyond the literal.”
Metaphor is a common device or “technique”
in poetry. How might it work in creative
nonfiction, based on our reading this week?
13. “Excavation” by Wendy Ortiz
“The Answer to the Riddle is Me” by David Stuart
MacLean
Voice
Description
Scene
Theme
What other writing elements do you note in these
excerpts that correspond to the sensory chapters in
Tell It Slant that we read: smell, taste, hearing,
touch, sight
14. “I think the worst thing that can happen to a
writer is a clear diagnosis. Diagnoses winnow
away possibility and eliminate any data that
doesn’t correspond to the diagnosis. A good
non-fiction writer allows the play between
experience and diagnosed condition. It’s the
data that doesn’t fit the diagnosis that makes
the writer idiosyncratic.”
—David Stuart MacLean
15. Pick one event from your life that was
meaningfully and that raised questions for
you—that has potential for a short memoir.
First, let’s read, p. 57, “First Actors,” (Tell It Slant)
Write the event as a scene, make it as detailed as
you can.
You should try to choose a memory that is at least
several years old.
Just plunge in: 20 minutes
16. Revise or continue working on today’s free-
writing exercise for a 2-4 page first draft, due
next week
Use one of the exercises from Tell It Slant, pages
12-16 and write something new for a 2-4 page
first draft
Or...write something different based on an
idea/ inspiration for a 2-4 page first memoir
draft
Editor's Notes
We could listen to an interview with William Zinsser, well known writing writer, which delves into contemporary memoir. This is a few years old, but it still gives a good history. Listen to Frey stuff, joyce maynard and JD Salinger
In the introduction, the authors of Tell It Slant refer to Lee Gutkind, the editor of the magazine Creative Nonfiction, who devised the five Rs of creative nonfiction
David Carr is the media reporter for The New York Times and he wrote a memoir several years ago about his time as a drug addict, but because he was a drug addict then he wanted to actually go back and report on his own life, not just use his own memories.
Uniform element could mean starting each section with a scene or a quote or an idea. Some of you who have already studied fiction are familiar with the Aristotelian notion of the narrative arc. Freytag triangle. The idea is that every story has a beginning, middle and end, and that we naturally create that structure, that sense of plot, when we consider our own lives.
How would you characterize the voice/ tone of this first piece
Who can tell me the difference between a scene and a summary