Six Ways of Looking at Memoir: A Potpourri of Techniques for Memoir Writers

In this series of six free-standing workshops, we’ll look at writing the memoir from six different perspectives. Our inquiries will explore uncovering theme and sculpting a structure; we’ll look at different techniques to access and write memories, teasing out why they are important and which matter to your story. In another session we’ll practice capturing and expanding small moments that carry deep meaning; and in another, delve into how to transit time through flashback, memory, and scene. Our explorations will review the effective use of voice moving from then to now and back again, and finally, we’ll consider various techniques of fiction writing that can bring our story alive.

Participants can sign up for the entire series, select several workshops, or take any single course. Workshops include the following:

1. Theme and Structure in Memoir

Monday, July 17

Memoir, like any story, needs a structure upon which to build and from which to expand. It needs a construction with its own logic that holds the story together. Memoir isn’t autobiography. Memoir is a “slice of life” that has a beginning, middle, and ending, but these aren’t birth and death and everything that happened in-between. In this workshop, we’ll look at some of the many ways a writer can structure their memoir—linear, framed, single-focus issue, collage, braided, circular, plus a few other surprising scaffolds. We’ll explore examples of the various structures and discuss why they work and how a writer can determine the most effective structure for the story that wants to be told.

2. Speak, Memory

Monday, July 24

Memory is a forward/backward thing. A shape-shifting time-traveler made up of images and associations. The moment an event or experience or an image is observed and clicked into place in memory, it is already fiction. It has taken a different form in that moment, and it will take a different form again when it is retrieved, or when, as if by the striking of some sensory gong, it surfaces unbidden. As writers we may often ask ourselves, “Did this really happen, or did I make it up?” In this workshop, we’ll explore how memory influences our stories, or how, in writing our stories, we influence our memories.

3. From Moments to Memoir

Monday, July 31

Our lives are filled with moments, large and small, from which we emerge a different person. In this workshop, we’ll embark on expeditions to discover, uncover, recover those moments of change in our lives. Our next step will be to explore those moments, looking for connections and links that, when woven into a memoir, tell a story both personal and universal.

4. I Then, I Now – Voices in Memoir

Monday, August 7

In memoir, you are both the narrator telling the story and the character who experiences the events in the story. Two different voices, both speaking in first-person. Navigating between these voices can be a challenge for the writer. In this hands-on workshop, we’ll learn the function of each voice and how it serves the memoir. We’ll read examples of how various memoirists have traversed this tricky terrain and work toward developing and strengthening our own through a variety of in-workshop exercises.

5. Time in Memoir – A Chronology of Its Own

Monday, August 14

Not every memoir is told in chronological order. In fact, most memoirs move both forward and backward in time, slip-sliding from past to present and back again. The most successful memoirs aren’t simply a recounting of events, but the memoirist’s discovery of the connections among events that were not necessarily sequential and weaving those events into a narrative that reveals a meaning deeper than a mere telling of this happened and then that. Flash back; flash forward; time leaps; “I, then and I, now;” child voice/adult voice; past tense/present tense; reflection/projection; time is fluid in the memoir. In this workshop, we’ll look at the ways a writer controls time to reveal patterns and meaning in telling their story.

6. Fiction Techniques in Memoir

Monday, August 21

When we say, “tell me a story,” what we really mean is transport me to another place and time where something interesting—maybe even captivating—is happening. We want something exciting or moving to occur, and we want to experience it right along with the characters. We want to get to know the characters, see what they look like and hear their voices. We want to learn about them through their actions and behavior. We want to be grounded in a place, at a particular time. It isn’t just in novels and short stories, we want all this—readers these days expect these story-telling qualities in our memoirs as well. In this workshop, we’ll discuss the various techniques good fiction writers use to shape their story and reveal their characters and learn how to apply them in our memoirs.

For more information visit: writeyourstorynow.org