How to Write a Memoir – Reveal & Frame

Have you thought of writing a memoir and wondered if readers will be interested in your experiences?

Fiction shows truths about the human condition through invented characters. Memoir reveals the author’s particular truths through his or her character.

In memoir, you frame for your readers particular views of the world, revealed through your experiences. And you frame mirrors for your readers’ own revelations, prompted by yours. Readers of memoir relate to how you select the experiences for them. The elements and techniques of fiction are useful in memoir to structure your story and make it vivid.

Just as a novelist doesn’t include everything about the invented characters, a memoirist doesn’t include every experience of his or her life.

In his memoir, The Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid, Bill Bryson writes, “So this is a book about not very much: about being small and getting larger slowly.” His specific experiences are of growing up in the Midwestern United States in the 1950s. But anyone who has been a kid and has grown into an adult can relate. Being small and getting larger slowly is a universal experience. He makes the everyday minutia of his childhood memoir-worthy by framing it through humor, exaggeration, and a remembered in-the-body sensory awareness.

“I knew pain the way you know it when it is fresh and interesting — the pain, for example, of a toasted marshmallow in your mouth when its interior is roughly the temperature and consistency of magma. I knew exactly how clouds drifted on a July afternoon, what rain tasted like, how ladybugs preened and caterpillars rippled, what it felt like to sit inside a bush.”

His reason for sitting inside a bush may be different from mine, but I can relate to being small enough to hide in one when playing hide and seek with the neighbor kids. Can you?

By valuing your life experience, discovering its universal essence, and magnifying it through vivid writing aided by fiction techniques, you can write a memoir that could make a splash!

Now— Reminisce on your childhood. What comes to mind vividly? What do you remember through all your senses? Write about it to discover your personal framing and its universal appeal.

Prepare yourself for Moments of Mastery!

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How to Write Fiction – Tell Truths

“Truth” is a hot topic these days. Truthiness. Truth isn’t truth. Alternative facts. Fake news. Fiction is an art form based on questioning and finding deeper truths about ourselves and others—about what it is to be human.

In the 1960s, author Flannery O’Connor said, “We live now in an age which doubts both fact and value, which is swept this way and that by momentary convictions. Written a half-century ago, her words speak to us today. “Instead of reflecting a balance from the world around him, the novelist now has to achieve one from a felt balance inside himself.”

For instance, a writer’s story about a town’s divisive politics—one group of people clinging to the past, another group wanting change—could become a polemic if the writer uses the narrative to argue his opinion and refute the other.

But what if this writer, inspired by seeing a small-town Fourth of July parade, creates a fictional character, who clings to the past and is afraid of the new. Let’s call him Ray. He’s a mechanic, a restorer of cars. His daughter marries someone of another race or religion. Then a family that Ray sees as “foreign” moves in next door. He’s angry. He’s used to fixing things, but he can’t fix this. He doesn’t have the tools. His world is disrupted. Now we have the beginnings of a story. Because fiction is about transformation, we know Ray must change, but how and why? What actions will he take?

In what ways will the daughter and neighbors also transform? Will they help Ray through a crisis? Will he help them? The writer avoids a timeworn polemic and explores universal human truths about choosing to love and making things right. Whether humorous, poignant, or tragic, the story becomes timeless. Through writing it, through reading it, we discover our own ability or inability to love deeply and to restore lovingly what’s been damaged.

Wherever fiction is set, past or present, fictional town or real, when it’s grounded in human truths, it will ring true for readers now and into the future. Without human truths, fiction would feel false. By telling truths with imagination, we make fiction readable, believable and memorable.

Go to https://courses.christinewalker.net for a free trial of my online course “Writing Fiction: 9 Ways to Mastery.”

Now – go out into the world or turn on the news. Listen for differing opinions and deeply held beliefs. Listen for anger and hurt. Listen for human truths. Then give one deep belief to one character, the opposite to another.

Write a scene where they argue. What truths are at the depths of their emotions? What does each character have to gain or lose by changing? You, the writer, takes each side in your heart. What can you learn from them?

Prepare yourself for moments of mastery!

Writing Fiction – An Online Course

I created this blog several years ago to accompany the Read to Write Books writing classes I taught at my local bookstores for writers and readers. In the blog, you’ll find lessons of story, craft, and writing intentions that authors give us on the pages of books through their masterful examples of prose.

These past few months, I’ve been creating “Writing Fiction – 9 Ways to Mastery,” a self-paced online course featuring videos and writing activities in pdf. Check it out and enroll in the preview for free at Courses.ChristineWalker.net.

Today I launched a YouTube channel and posted this trailer for the course. It introduces the framework I call “Master Craft Juggling,” which I designed to help writers learn basic and advanced elements of fiction. I will also be posting a “Moments of Mastery” video every Friday to inspire and inform a meaningful, productive, and successful writing practice.

Writers start with a blank page every time and juggle the elements to make the story. I organize the elements into 9 groups to help you gain skill with them individually and in combination. They are: 1. First & Last Sentences and Story Seeds, 2. Voice, Style & Point of View, 3. Whole-bodied Characters, 4. Presence of Place, 5. Tension & Plot, 6. Time & Consciousness, 7. Love & Other Emotions, 8. Image & the Senses, 9. Theme & Gestalt.

Developing ability and agility with the elements of fiction will inform your writing practice, whether you’re starting a story, revising a novel draft, writing a memoir, writing nonfiction, or polishing for publication. The course will help you create fictional characters, plot a novel, shape your short story ideas, overcome writer’s block, develop your writer tools, establish good writing habits, find your writing voice, and much more. And you’ll have fun!

The best books on writing fiction are the novels and short story collections that masterful authors create. They show us by example how to write fiction that is compelling and memorable. The best writing advice is to read closely and well. If you read with a mind to enjoy the story but also to notice craft and intention from a writer’s perspective, you will always find within reach many wonderful and inspiring companions for your writing journeys. In my teaching, I show how to learn from these lessons that accomplished authors give us on the page.

Join me on my YouTube channel and online course in discovering how masterful fiction shows us ways to write our own memorable and publishable stories and books. Learn to write toward your highest aspirations and establish a writing practice to achieve your goals and potential. Preview the course for free at https://courses.christinewalker.net.

With “Writing Fiction – 9 Ways to Mastery,” you can access the video lessons and writing activities from anywhere and tuck in some watching and writing any time of day, wherever you can find a quiet moment to log on! And you can also download the videos and activities to take with you. You’ll be newly inspired every day to fulfill your writing desires and goals!

Get ready for mastery!