Thank you, Neill McKee, for honoring our Choices blog with your presence today. Also for writing us a guest post about how important writing about our careers and life stories is. Neill is currently on his Women on Writing book tour. Here'a Neill: The benefits of writing about your career and life story by Neill McKee As is documented in my travel memoir, early in my career, I became a filmmaker and later a multimedia producer. After 45 years of such work, I decided to switch to creative nonfiction. Many people become consultants in their specialized fields in their senior years, but I had little interest in that. I had all these stories in my head about my varied life: growing up in a small industrially-polluted town in Ontario, Canada, and learning how “to escape” its confinements and stinks; my searching years at university, not knowing what I wanted to do with my life; and then a dramatic transition when I became a volunteer teacher in Sabah, Malaysia on Borneo Island. … [Read more...]
Mary Gottschalk asks: Is it memoir or fiction?
The subject matter of Mary Gottschalk's guest post really hits home for me. I turned to memoir based on a traumatic incident in my life after a 30-career in technical writing, and now I've embarked on a novel based in part on factual events. I agree with Mary. I would not have attempted a novel had I not had the memoir writing experience. I hope those of you working on both memoir and fiction will learn as much as I did from Mary's piece. Also, in welcoming Mary to Choices, please join me in congratulating her on just releasing her novel, A Fitting Place, in May of this year and publishing her memoir, Sailing Down the Moonbeam in 2008. Is it a Story or an Idea? By Mary Gottschalk Because the inspiration for my first novel came from an incident in my own life, I'm often asked why I chose to do A Fitting Place as a fiction rather than a memoir. Another frequent question since I have published both a novel and a memoir is which is the better vehicle for a story that has some basis … [Read more...]
Universal memoir themes
As promised a few days ago, I'd like to offer a list of universal memoir themes. Vivian Gornick, author of The Situation and the Story: The Art of the Personal Narrative, says: Every work of literature has both a situation and a story. The situation is the context or circumstance, sometimes the plot; the story is the emotional experience that preoccupies the writer the insight, the wisdom, the thing one has come to say. The story is the work of literature's theme. In my book: Leaving the Hall Light On: A Mother's Memoir of Living with Her Son's Bipolar Disorder and Surviving His Suicide Plot (situation) = the suicide of a gifted bipolar musician brings parents grief, guilt, and anger Theme (story) = 1) limits the mother has in controlling and protecting her son, 2) surviving the son's suicide, and 3) the mother's journey to claim her own creative powers I've listed below some other universal theme ideas for lifestory and memoir writers who are writing … [Read more...]
