What John Irving told an interviewer at Boston University about the most important quality in novels surely applies to memoirs too. If you’re going to write novels, you need to establish momentum. The longer the novel, the more that momentum is essential. A novel must be more compelling, more urgent, to the reader on page 400 than it was on page 40. Two elements give you this necessary momentum. You must be able to develop characters; the characters must grow, …
A short story writer, essayist, novelist, memoirist, editor, and writing workshop leader, Paulette Bates Alden has an impressive blog and web site. Her wise essays on writing technique and aspects of memoir are stimulating and useful. Lately I’ve been enjoying her short story archives. “Enormously Valuable” is about Miriam, an adjunct writing teacher in Minneapolis at a middling state school and its branch campuses. A former Stegner Fellow at Stanford (like Alden herself), Miriam has published a well-reviewed short story …
The big fiction advice is “Show, don’t tell,” but this is not what memoirists are embroidering on their pillows and sleeping on. It’s instead “Show and Tell.” It’s the idea that you can’t tell unless you can show, but you don’t just show. You have to talk about it. You have to somehow reflect upon it. You have to track or respond to it, this thing that’s happening. And in the intersection of these two things is the excitement we …
Everyone has a story. And all our voices are important.—Sue William Silverman Melissa Hart on her blog Butt to Chair interviews Sue William Silverman about her latest book, Fearless Confessions: A Writer’s Guide to Memoir. The author of two memoirs, Silverman makes a strong case for a the validity of memoir as a form of confession: We’ve been accused of navel gazing. The word “confessional” is used in a demeaning way, suggesting that we’re whining or complaining, along those lines. …
Last summer, in Italy, I stood gaping before Michelangelo’s David and reflexively took a photo—no flash, but forgetting that all tourists’ photos of him are banned—and got chastised. Supposedly Michelangelo said he made the immortal statue by just chipping away what didn’t look like David. I’ve thought of writing as having to first create a block of marble, then pounding it into a narrative. Which must be an evident metaphor, because Bill Roorbach mentioned it in his blog’s recent advice …
Below is the brief Prologue to my memoir about moving to Appalachia and running a sheep farm, while my day job was in university press book publishing. I wrote the original passage a couple years ago and have moved it around in the first few chapters, lately deciding to use it as a sort of introduction—it captures my vivid first impressions and also is informed by my later appreciation for the region. It must work in relation to the whole …
From Richard Hugo’s The Triggering Town: Lectures and Essays on Poetry and Writing: It doesn’t bother me that the word ‘stone’ appears more than thirty times in my third book, or that ‘wind’ and ‘gray’ appear over and over in my poems to the disdain of some reviewers. If I didn’t use them that often I’d be lying about my feelings, and I consider that unforgivable. In fact, most poets write the same poem over and over again. Wallace Stevens …