I’m pulling this post from July’12 back to the top of the blog because it’s such useful and inspiring information, and it was mentioned in today’s Nat’l Assoc of Memoir Writer’s telesummit. If you missed that, you’ll be able to download an audio file soon from http://tinyurl.com/k4fwf84. —————————————– Guest post by Kathleen Pooler As I […]
Memories, moments, scenes, nothing longer than a few pages, some only a line or two. These bits and pieces kept flying out of me, and I kept writing them down. ~Abigail Thomas, author of Thinking About Memoir With most projects, I find that breaking them down into small specific pieces makes for greater success, and […]
Delve into your story guest post by Lynette Benton As we sit around two rectangular conference tables we’ve pushed together, I eye my memoir-writing students and say, “When you write about your life, make sure it’s a story, not a report. Even your nearest and dearest will recoil from the prospect of reading fifty pages […]
I asked my friend Cathy to write-up this exercise she introduced me to because it produces such surprising results. We use it often in class, and I also frequently modify it by simply cutting paragraphs and sentences apart to a) find a more compelling start for a story and/or b) to show that story structure […]
I recently wrote a guest post for YourStoryCoach.com that gathers together a few of my favorite writing prompts, which coincidentally all contain the word “always.” I hope you’ll take them for a test drive and share your thoughts and/or results. For extra credit, here’s another great writing prompt: Write about the person who has always […]
“What a character!”: How to write about loved ones in your life stories Guest post by Tami Koenig I find the most powerful personal stories are about emotionally compelling relationships. When writing the stories from our lives, we naturally focus on our primary relationships—those with our mother, father, brothers, sisters, lovers, partners, children and friends. […]
I recently wrote a guest post for Mary McCarthy’s Personal Growth Journaling Blog that discusses the value of your journal to provide raw material for your flash stories. The in-the-moment account of your thoughts, feelings, and experiences are the key to the richness of your personal stories. The post also outlines my favorite exercise for […]
Guest post by Jane Hertenstein Much of what I love about flash is about living in the moment. Capturing and seizing a point in time. Freeze framing it—much like a Polaroid snapshot. I like to treat the page like a friend, like a sounding board, or what the poet Frank O’Hara described as unmade phone […]
Guest post by with Cheryl Stahle Describe your perfect life; your goals, hopes, and dreams. When exactly do you plan to invent this perfect life or at least create a timeline for launching the new you, version 2.0? When you think in this fashion, you use a technique called prospective memoir writing. Prospective memoir writing […]
Guest post by Guy Hogan The best flash writing is performance art. It is performance art because the writer must partner with the reader to complete the creative process. That’s because the flash story is really two stories in one. There is the surface story and the implied story. The implied story takes place in […]
FlashMemoirs 