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How to Write about What You Don’t Know in Personal Nonfiction
Writing personal nonfiction—memoir or the personal essay—generally requires us to approach our subjects from a first-person point of view. Since we are telling our own stories, we naturally refer to ourselves as “I” and speak as ourselves. We write as factual human beings about our actual lived experiences. By writing in first-person, though, we limit ourselves Read more
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Tomatoes
I’m taking a class on food writing. This is my first attempt at a writing assignment. I used to grow bushels of tomatoes every summer. Early Girls, Better Boys, red cherries and yellow plums, sometimes Romas. Once I grew San Marzanos. Every year my plants were healthy, their leaves the warm tone of summer grass Read more
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The Two “I”s of Memoir
Poetry is the spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings:it takes its origin from emotion recollected in tranquility. William Wordsworth During the British literary Romantic Period (1780s-1830s), William Wordsworth offered a definition of lyric poetry that places memory at the center of the creative process. He suggests that the stuff of poems arises from a poet’s contemplation Read more
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What? There’s a Problem with Memoirs?
A few weeks ago, I posted “Let’s Legitimize Personal Nonfiction.” In this post, I recounted my own experience of negative attitudes toward people who write about their difficult personal experiences and called for a firm recognition that personal nonfiction can be literary, and therefore legitimate, writing. Since then, I’ve been researching to discover some of Read more
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Guest Blog Alert
What do chef Anne Burrell and journalist Dan Charnas have in common? They are both mentioned in my guest blog “What a Chef Can Teach Us about Writing” at The Heart of the Matter. Please check it out! Read more
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Writing about Place in Personal Nonfiction
All of our experiences are located; they happen in a physical space. All of our most profound thoughts and deepest wishes, all of our doubts and our convictions, our heartbreaks and triumphs have been influenced by the place in which they occurred. Fiction writers know that creating a palpable setting for their stories is essential Read more
Do you write about yourself and your experiences? Do you write about traumatic events in your life? Or, do you struggle to find time and motivation to write?
If so, this blog is for you.
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