This document provides guidance on writing an autobiographical memoir. It emphasizes showing rather than telling through the use of sensory details, figurative language, emotions, characters, and scenes. It stresses focusing narrowly on a slice of one's life rather than an overview, and using meaningful details and connections. It discusses using plot development to provide depth and meaning to the story. It outlines elements to explore such as transformation, paradigm shifts, and conflicts that create value changes. It provides guidance on developing characters, problems, struggles, and resolutions in the story. It discusses using descriptive details to set the atmosphere and mood.

1. Autobiographical narrative

2. Open-form: Write it slant!
Sensory details
Figurative language
Emotions
Characters
Scenes

3. NOT just facts and
description of your
world/experience
MEANING is also VERY
important!

4. Although your memoir looks at many
different aspects of your life, be sure
to keep your focus narrow. It is just a
small slice of your life not a whole
overview.

5. The more specificity of detailed description
and meaningful connections , the better.
Truth is in
the details.
Show me
and I’ll
believe. Tell
me and I
won’t
imagine.

6. Use plot development
to give the patchwork
quilt of your life’s
story more meaning
and depth

7. Old vs. new SELF
Transformation/breakthrough
Intervention?

8. Old vs. new VIEW
Paradigm
shift

9. Old vs. new VALUES
Crisis that creates conflict in values, with or
without resolution

10. In-Class Activity
Write about/Discuss an event or
person that changed you.

11. Four Elements of Memoir

12. Turning
points/lessons
The story What’s at
is about stake?
CHANGE

13. The
story is
about
YOU

14. There are other
real people –
family and
friends -- in the
story

15. Show them
realistically
How?

16. Don’t let fear
of what your
family and
friends might
think do THIS
to you!

17. The story should not be blurted
out but instead, organized and
structured.

18. LINGER IN DETAIL

19. LIMIT SUMMARY
This happened, and then this happened.
Then there was the weird thing – a total
fluke. After that, something else
happened before we all gave up and
nothing happened any more.

20. Consider organization and
development
Flashback
Scenes
Chronological
Using creative elements to organize

21. Thesis = Theme

22. CONFLICT CREATES PLOT
Description + conflict = meaning

23. Conflict occurs between…
two characters
a person and a place
a character and a feeling

24. Conflict can be explored but not solved

25. Crisis vs. Conflict
Both cause shift
How are they
or change.
different?

26. Conflict Creates
Tension
Surface tension
Underlying tension

27. Structural
Elements of
Memoir

28. Character
Develop on all
levels, internal and
external

29. Problem
Your
autobiography
is an
opportunity
for you to show
your audience
something
about how you
became who
you are.

30. Struggle: What you go
through to get where
you are now

31. Vertical (internal)
PLOT STYLES
Horizontal (external)

32. Epiphany

33. Resolution
SHOW!
Reinforce what is being said about
character’s growth by showing it in scene,
description, dialogue…

34. Observational
Writing and
Sensory
Description

35. S a
H l
O w
W a
y
D s
O
N T
’ E
Telling = facts or reflection
T L
Showing = meaning, L
description, development

36. How do you “show” your audience an
essay?

37. Remember
your five
senses?

38. ACTIVE, VIBRANT word choice
E
n
e
r
g
i
z
e
d

39. Figurative language
Similes…
“…Like a patient etherized upon a table.”
Metaphor…
Sylvia Plath uses a cut on her finger to
represent soldiers going to war.

40. Using Sensory Language to Create
Positive & Negative Images/Feelings

41. In-Class Activity
Create a POSITIVE start to Keith’s day. First, he
eats breakfast. Then, he goes to the store,
where he runs into a woman he knows; they
talk and then he returns home
Flesh out the details of Keith’s
adventure/misadventure using sensory detail,
description

42. In-Class Activity…again…
Take Keith’s good day and ruin it, using
description that evokes negative feelings or
images.

43. Description creates
mood, or atmosphere, in
an essay

44. How do you expand the atmosphere of your essay?

45. Examples of atmosphere
From The Haunting of Hill House, by Shirley Jackson
No live organism can continue for long to exist
sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even
larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to
dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself
against its hills, holding darkness within; it had
stood so for eighty years and might stand for
eighty more. Within, walls continued upright,
bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors
were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the
wood and stone of Hill House, and what ever
waked there, walked alone.

46. In-Class Activity
Your main character arrives at a party, but
finds the atmosphere in the room so
horrendous that he/she decides to leave.
What is said? Why is he/she uncomfortable?
What is going on in the room? Create the
atmosphere for this party.

47. DIALOGUE

48. Dialogue MUST…
Move plot along
Develop characters
Set atmosphere or mood
Be concise and efficient

49. Dialogue
breaks
rules.
Sentence fragments
Colloquialisms
Choppy

50. Strong dialogue must have
tension
Every word should count and have meaning

51. In-class Activity
Write dialogue between you and the person
who taught you to drive during your first
driving lesson behind the wheel.

52. Subtext
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W4fvYCFaa9
I (Jurassic Park example)

53. In-Class Activity
Write dialogue between a couple who is
fighting over one of the partner’s never doing
the dishes. The subtext is one partner
suspects the other of cheating.

54. Writing Reflection
Writing about
what you are
writing, about
the story

55. Reflection acts as a narrative
voice to guide your audience…
…an interpreter that tells not only what
happened, but why it happened and what it
means.

56. Reflections answers the question,
Why?
Something
the narrator
can often
not answer
in the heat
of action

57. Metaphors as reflection
“not the sharpest knife in the block…”
Others?

58. What might
this onion be
a metaphor
for?

59. In-Class Activity
Think of three episodes in your life. What
recurs in those three stages? It could be a hair
style, a song, a person, a piece of jewelry, a
car anything. Write just a few sentences about
why this item was present in your life during
those three stages and what role it played.
This is how metaphors are found.