FOLLOWING THROUGH

The webinar last night was very informative. It looked at the structure of Elizabeth Gilbert's memoir "Eat, Pray, Love" and offered advice and suggestions on how we can structure our own memoirs to make them more cohesive and marketable. The webinar was offered through Write Your Memoir in Six Months and was presented by Linda Joy Myers and Brooke Warner--two awesome and accessible teachers.

I've put off writing this memoir for a long time despite knowing it's something I need to do. Putting my emotional truth and my past in writing for the world is a scary thing to do but I have to do it. I've written some short essays about events during that time frame and even written a very fictionalized version of my story. After viewing the webinar last night I became motivated to sit down and get this done. Here's what I'm doing in order to reach that goal.

1-- I signed up for Write Nonfiction in November. It's a group like NaNoWriMo but for nonfiction. Taking Brooke Warner's advice to write 500 words five days a week I will make a big effort to establish a steady writing practice. In 30 days I could write at least 15,000 words and get a head start on a first draft.

2-- I enrolled in a one month course from Write Your Memoir in Six Months that begins on November 5. This is a 4 week course that uses "Eat Pray Love" as a vehicle to teach important techniques for memoir writing.

3-- I also enrolled in the actual Write Your Memoir in Six Months course that begins in January. It was a bit costly and I felt a little guilty but the satisfaction of writing with two wonderful teachers and mentors is priceless. After writing my poetry collection with my mentor Lorraine Mejia, I know how valuable and rewarding that experience is.

I'm confident that 2014 will be a year of writing success.

Wishing you many moments of writing your emotional truth.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Story Behind Every Face

Writers are frequently asked where they get their ideas for stories or poems and the answers seem endless. Sources range from dreams, to news stories, to the ephemeral muse, to strange voices in the night. I never know the original source of my story ideas but I don't go looking for them, they seem to seek me out instead. They find me, grab me, reside in me, until I finally agree to write the story. I have notebooks filled with ideas for stories, poems, essays and art pages and if I had 24 hours a day, every day I'd never have enough time to write them all. Ideas are everywhere, at least for me. There are stories behind every face I see. Faces of family and friends. Faces of strangers in coffee shops and colleagues at work. No one is storyless. As the stories around me reveal themselves I see that this world is filled with stories. You never know what dramas--triumphs and defeats, joys and sorrows-- live behind the faces you see each day. Sometimes the stories come out of hid...
Read more

WRITING AT 30,000 FEET

I discovered a writing secret on my recent trip to LA. In the 757 aircraft the pressure equalizes, the lights dim, and the white noise of the engines is so loud it feels like it's coming from deep inside my own body. I've heard the safety instructions, eaten my take on board lunch, since sandwiches on the plane are too costly, and I've drunk enough water to keep me from getting a dehydration headache. I have also read several chapters in the novel I brought along on vacation and listened to Adele's album on my i-pod. There are several hours left of this cross country flight. I take out the spiral notebook I am using to write first draft chapters of my novel and here is where the secret reveals itself. Stuck in the plane at 35,000 feet about mountains and streams, nestled into the narrow, even for me, seat of the plane, strapped to my seat with few distractions, the story comes to me like a film on a 3-D screen. My characters' voices speak in my head, the movements...
Read more

CHALLENGE FAILED

No one likes to admit she failed, but in failure there always sleeps a lesson waiting to be aroused. I set out to post every day for the month of June based on one writing prompt or another. I wanted to write twenty minutes a day--a story, poem, or essay--and post it here. But as John Lennon said so well--life is what happens while you're making other plans. What lesson was asleep in this recent failed challenge of mine? Of course, the lesson is when you commit to something you need to follow through, but we all know that. And it is significant to the writer because you can't publish if you don't write. But there is another lesson that perhaps slept a little more deeply. The lesson, or question, of finding time to write so I can follow through on my commitments. I did find twenty minutes a day to write--exactly where I'd left them each morning. I've been a writer of "morning pages" a la Julia Cameron's suggestion in her book "The Artist's ...
Read more