1/9/2023 0 Comments I write like by memoiresThe closest I have come to writing my own memoir, Writing for the Soul, uses selected anecdotes about famous and interesting people I’ve met to illustrate points I make about writing. So your theme must be reader-oriented, offering universal truth, transferable principles that will help them become a better person or get them through whatever crisis they might be facing. They care about themselves and how your personal story might somehow benefit them. I know hardly anyone who doesn’t have a story.īut unless you’re a celebrity, sorry but most people beyond your family and close friends aren’t likely to care. Too many authors write a memoir because they believe their lives are so interesting that even strangers would enjoy a detailed account.ĭon’t misunderstand - maybe you are interesting.Īll of us are, to some degree. Memoir: What’s the Difference?Īn autobiography is your life story from birth to the present.Ī memoir is theme-oriented with anecdotes from your life that buttress a specific theme. Show how your experiences, challenges, and lessons learned made you feel, how you coped, and the impact they had on your personal or spiritual growth. Most importantly, convey your emotional truth. Accessibility.Īnd how will it manifest itself? By triggering the theater of the readers’ minds so they can feel the story, imagine themselves in it, experience it with you. So what can Creative Nonfiction bring to your memoir? Resonance. Yes, it’s your story, based on your experience, but unless readers see a bit of themselves in it, what’s the point? You will have written a book that is merely about something, rather than for the purpose of something. That’s why, ironic as it may sound, a memoir should be as much about the reader as the writer. Memoirs (from the French and Latin for “memory” or “remembrance”) by definition focus on your personal experience, intimacy with the reader, and reflecting both transferable principles and universal emotional truth. Why not build a narrative that helps readers best relate to the content and become immersed in it? Some nonfiction is designed primarily to educate and inform (think textbooks, how-to books, or self-help books), but would argue that even these can benefit from Creative Nonfiction techniques. Your story remains absolutely true, but such tools enhance the reading experience. Such elements aren’t in themselves fictional. It allows you to tell a true story in a most compelling way by employing narrative elements like foreshadowing, backstory, dialog, conflict, tension, description, and more. In many ways, Creative Nonfiction reads like fiction while sticking to the facts. Actually, it should be characteristic of almost any form of nonfiction. The term can seem confusing, but it’s all about telling a compelling true story while using the same kinds of elements found in good fiction to make it sing.Ĭreative Nonfiction is a term that can be applied to a wide array of genres, including memoir, autobiography, biography, travel writing, personal essays, interviews, blogs, and more. You may have heard both of these genres associated with creative nonfiction. Your memoir will be autobiographical, of course, but it can’t be about you. I say that from the start, because I so often hear the terms incorrectly interchanged. Memoir is not just a fancy literary term for an autobiography.
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