Description
Popular memoir teacher and award-winning author Jennifer Leigh Selig shares eight essential craft elements that make memoir pages come alive: sensory detail, dialogue, cultural references, interior monologue, tense and personal pronoun choices, metaphor, and the power of repetition. These trade techniques are a great way to make our voices as writers more distinctive, more lyrical, and more literary. Selig will illustrate each element with rich examples from popular memoirs. She’ll generously share all the materials she uses when she teaches her memoir classes on these elements, so we’ll leave with a toolkit of trade techniques to craft our memoirs-in-progress or polish each paragraph and page of our writing to make it shine even brighter, to sing even more remarkably.
As serial memoirist Mary Karr notes, “Each great memoir lives or dies based 100 percent on voice.” She continues, “It certainly helps if the stories are riveting, but a great voice renders the dullest event remarkable.”
And with the glut of memoir manuscripts in the marketplace, at a time when it’s increasingly difficult to find a publisher and an audience, we need all the help we can get to make our writing rise above the rest.
