You can also focus on a specific experience, time in your life or place when you write. If you feel that your memory is failing you when writing down key events, try listing the items and events and dialogue and smells that you remember to anchor the story.įor example you can write: Trip to Paris in 2006: Walking down the Champs-Élysées, the smell of baguettes, kissing Jake by the Eiffel Tower, A perfect honeymoon, attaching “love locks” to the Pont des Arts bridge, our first fight, watching the perfect moonlit night reflected on the Seine River. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” I would refer them to the oft-quoted phrase by Ann Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life “You own everything that happened to you. Some people worry about offending people they may reference in their memoirs. Keep writing those scenes, until you have an arc to your memoir. Then start figuring out the catalyzing events, the challenging moments you rose to, or fell down on. She was a survivor of “ethnic cleansing” in Bosnia and taught me about the value of family, and the importance of staying true to yourself. While some kept to themselves, one woman became my de facto parent, while my parents went to work. When I was twelve years old, my parents had borders stay in our home, because my dad lost his job, and we had to make the mortgage payment.
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