What's Important in Your Memoir? 20 Questions
Nan Barnes
I ran across an interesting tip I want to pass on for people working on memoirs. One concern most memoirists have is with deciding what to include and what to leave out. Sometimes the best way to make the choice is to get a little help from your family and friends to see what is important.
The author of the Quirky Pickings Blog suggested this technique (the decisions about capitalization are hers):
several years ago, i took a creative writing nonfiction course at the university of texas at san antonio. for our final project, we had to write a memoir. not knowing what to write about myself, i invited twenty people -- friends and family -- to each pose a question to me. something that didn't require a yes or no answer. something they didn't already know about me.
The questions are ways to jog your thinking. It’s certainly not necessary to treat your memoir as a Q & A. Not all of the questions may prove valuable to you. But the ones that do may help you set priorities as to what’s important in your story. What’s more important, the questions may trigger lines of thinking that had not previously occurred to you.
If you have given some serious thought to the audience for your memoir, surveying some representatives of that audience can only help you improve your ability to connect with them. Think of it as market research for your memoir.
To read the post at Quirky Pickings click here
The author of the Quirky Pickings Blog suggested this technique (the decisions about capitalization are hers):
several years ago, i took a creative writing nonfiction course at the university of texas at san antonio. for our final project, we had to write a memoir. not knowing what to write about myself, i invited twenty people -- friends and family -- to each pose a question to me. something that didn't require a yes or no answer. something they didn't already know about me.
The questions are ways to jog your thinking. It’s certainly not necessary to treat your memoir as a Q & A. Not all of the questions may prove valuable to you. But the ones that do may help you set priorities as to what’s important in your story. What’s more important, the questions may trigger lines of thinking that had not previously occurred to you.
If you have given some serious thought to the audience for your memoir, surveying some representatives of that audience can only help you improve your ability to connect with them. Think of it as market research for your memoir.
To read the post at Quirky Pickings click here