What’s Your Story?

Story

Tomorrow, Sunday 7/17/16, I’m part of the WriteTeachers Workshop (with Victoria Zackheim and Anne Perry) at Flintridge Bookstore in La Canada.  My first workshop is ‘Writing Your Life Into Story’ and I decided to make a post out of my notes for it (below).  If any of you haven’t started writing yet, or are stuck, I hope that the notes might encourage you to figure out what your story is and to sit down and write it. (Step One For All Writers: Apply your bottom to the chair and keep it there until you’ve written something.)

Notes for Writing Your Life Into Story:

– What’s your story? Do you know what genre you want to write it in? As memoir? Autobiography? Essay? Fiction? Poem? Or…not sure?

– What readers are looking for: how you survived the tough losses, how you got through things you never imagined you could get through, or ever talk about. Also what brought you joy, what was so beautiful that it made your heart stop? And some laughter along the way is always good. We want a writer to enlarge and deepen our own lives, and to entertain us.

– Good writing is simple and clear, tells a story, doesn’t confuse or try to impress the reader, and is lean on adverbs and adjectives.

– In your story something changes – you and your life. Maybe you won’t recognize the depth of that change until you start writing. Most likely you’ll discover something you didn’t know before you wrote about it.

– There will be times when a voice in your head says: Who cares? Who ever said you could write?  Don’t listen to it. We all have that voice in our heads and writers learn how to ignore it.

– How to start? If you want to outline your life or a period of your life, or an experience you’ve had that’s fine. You can also just jump in and cut to the chase. The night the policeman came to our door and asked if our son was home we…. – or the time I discovered a lump and went to the doctor and she said….or When the chickens all got loose I chased them down the street in my underwear because…

– Maybe you want to publish your story, maybe not. Publishing is like the wild west right now. You have all kinds of ways to publish (to make public) without a formal publisher. But whether you publish or not, writing can change your life.

– Start a journal: to keep track of the details of your own life and also as a way to make writing part of your daily life, a practice.

(And in the workshop tomorrow there will be lots of discussion of what each student’s story is about plus writing exercises and inspiration from published memoirs, essays, poems etc. There’ still space if you’d like to join us. In the afternoon I’ll be doing a workshop for people with work-in-progress who want feedback. Victoria will be doing workshops on the personal essay, and Anne on fiction.)

 

 

once upon a atime

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