Memoir Writing Notes and Suggestions

HOMEWORK: Write a 1-page story (1,5 or 2 spaced, 11-12 point font) about your childhood. The goal to is to show the reader how you see or saw the world, to let us see the world through your eyes and with your thoughts and ways of thinking SHOWN to us through your ACTIONS and THOUGHTS during an event or experience SUMMARY Identify an Idea about yourself and/or your life sometime in the past and then write about an experience or event that shows us this over-all idea about you and/or your life. -- Identify an Over-all Idea: what you want to show about your life, your experience, who you are/were -- Write about a single Experience/Event that will demonstrate (through action and experience) how the big over-all idea worked in your life at this time (use "I" - first-person) -- Write clear and fine Details: what you thought, what you saw, what you believed was or should happen, who you imagined you were like (see "simile" and "metaphor" below) GUIDELINES: 1) Identify an "Over-all Idea" about yourself. How did you think as a young person? How did you see the world as a young person? How did you imagine yourself as a young person (a space explorer, the chancellor, etc)? How did you act as a young person? What was it like living inside your brain as a young person? What did you see around you as a young person?

2) Find an event or experience from your life that will SHOW us (through your actions) how you were as a young person at this time. Pick a specific event or experience you had and include the details that will show us: NOTE: -- DO TELL US your thoughts, your imagination, your fantasies, what you believed you saw, your thought process, what odd things you noticed that were unrelated to the Experience / Event, or during the Experience / Event -- DO NOT TELL us facts: FACTS are for newspaper articles, not for a memoir / autobiographical story how you thought about yourself and the world around you how you believed things worked who you thought you were then or one day might be put us inside your head, show us what you saw through your eyes

Robert C Thomas - Robert@RobertCThomas.com

Use metaphors and similes. Metaphor: Something is or was something that is symbolic A metaphor is a literary figure of speech that describes a subject by describing it as another otherwise unrelated object. Metaphor is a type of analogy. One of the most prominent examples of a metaphor in English literature is Shakespeare's All the world's a stage monologue from As You Like It: All the worlds a stage, And all the men and women merely players; They have their exits and their entrances; William Shakespeare, As You Like It =========================================== Simile: Something is like something else A simile is a figure of speech that directly compares two different things, usually by employing the words "like" or "as". It is different from a metaphor, which compares two unlike things by saying that the one thing is the other thing, unlike the simile that uses word like or as (also "if" and "than", although these are not common). Her eyes twinkled like stars. He fights like a lion. He runs like a cheetah. She is cute like a rose. Gwen is like a lion when she gets angry.

Robert C Thomas - Robert@RobertCThomas.com