702 Time Travel: How to Handle Chronology in Memoir (ENGLISH)

A good memoir typically covers a discreet period of time in your life, for example the year you spent grieving for a loved one, the five years you devoted to caring for a parent with Alzheimer’s, or the decade you dedicated to the search for a birth parent. But so much that’s important to your story happens before, and sometimes after, that discreet period. So how do you incorporate that material without interrupting your narrative flow? In this workshop, we’ll look at all the ways writers can work with time in their memoirs, including the proper (and improper) use of flashback and backstory, when and how to employ the technique of ‘looking back,’ working with multiple timelines, and deciding whether chronological is the best choice for the story you want to tell.We will also look at examples from published memoirs, since it’s always easier to learn by example. Memoirs we will look at include CRYING IN HMART, WAVE, and BETWEEN TWO KINGDOMS, as well as the instructor’s memoir, THE RUSSIAN WORD FOR SNOW.

Instructor

Janis Cooke Newman