Description
You know you have a story to tell, but you’re not sure how to tell it. Where does it start? What’s its climax? How does it end? How can you make it exciting to read? A memoir is about one piece of your life; the challenge is how to turn that chunk into a complete narrative that’s told in the most exciting way possible. Thinking about this can be paralyzing. In this workshop, you’ll break out of that paralysis. Instead of working from the outside — with the concept of shaping a narrative arc — we’ll work from the inside, with what feels important to you. Through a dynamic writing process with prompts, you’ll find, shape and express your story by getting inside its key events — starting with your keystone event, the central event or moment that inspires you to tell your story. Writing from the inside makes personal writing pop: putting yourself into the moment puts your reader there, too. Through freewriting, you’ll find and recapture the immediacy of your key events, shaping your story with rich, juicy prose that will make your memoir pop.
Signe Hammer’s memoir, By Her Own Hand: Memoirs of a Suicide’s Daughter, was a New York Times Book Review Notable Book. Her other books include Daughters and Mothers: Mothers and Daughters — a Literary Guild and Book-of-the-Month Club Alternate Selection and a German best-seller — Passionate Attachments: Fathers and Daughters in America Today, and Women: Body and Culture: Essays on the Sexuality of Women in a Changing Society.
