MEMOIRAs a form of Creative Nonfiction“Good memoirs are a careful act

of construction.” —William Zinsser

The Five Rs

Real Life Reflection Research Reading “Riting”

Adapted from Lee Gutkind, editor of Creative Non-Fiction magazine

Real Life

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

Reflection

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.

Research

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.

Research in Memoir

Even people writing about their own lives often extend outside themselves

To verify To add context For example…

Reading

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

(W) riting

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.

Narrative

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 is how we make sense of events, ideas, the world etc!

Today’s Excerpts

Excavation by Wendy Ortiz The Answer to the Riddle is Me

Voice Scene Theme What other writing elements do you note

in these excerpts?

Questions

“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

Questions

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?

Exercise

Pick one event from your life that was meaningfully and that raised questions for you—that has potential for a short memoir.

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

Moving Forward

Consider placing this event in a larger historical context (Tell It Slant, p. 62, exercise #2 and #3

Talk to people who might have a shared memory to fill out your memoir

Or...just keep going

Or write something different