Do you have a story to tell?
Life experiences you want to share with children and grandchildren? Are you tired of procrastinating, but you don’t know where or how to begin? Do you lack the discipline to sit down and write everyday on your own?
Start writing your life stories right now! You have my guarentee that I can teach you to write. Want to know more about the class. Sign up to recieve the first five lessons FREE and see if it inspires you to start writing your stories.
Filed under Writing Memoir by Sheila
Question: Do we really have to write a backstory for every character?
Answer: You are the writer, the one in charge, which means you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do. However, there are some major benefits to doing character studies for each of the character’s who might appear in your story. While you’re doing your character sketch you are in the mind of that character long enough to really think about their life. What were that person’s goals, flaws, hates, fears, secrets and dreams? If you take the time to get to know your characters, your memory is refreshed and you begin to tell a more integrated story.
The place I find myself pulling character sketches out most is when I’m stuck in a scene that lacks energy. I look at what I’ve written and then throw a new concept into the scene. I pretend the character’s secret, greatest fear or biggest dream has just walked in the door. Then I have the character’s respond to each other. The scene usually takes off and I know what to write.
You may even want to cross off characteristics from your sketch as you add them to your story. Your character is fully developed by the end and you know you haven’t repeated yourself.
Filed under Backstory by Sheila
Question: Is it fair to guess at other character’s emotional truth? How can you really know what they were feeling if, lets say they are dead and you can’t ask them now?
Answer: The most important thing is to get to your own emotional truth. One mistake you do not want to make is to reveal all the truths about everyone else in your life without being transparent about yourself. The more you reveal your emotional truths, the more your reader can relate. It is in the secrets we keep, what we don’t want others to know about us that draws people in. More on Memoir Writing: Telling the Emotional Truth
Filed under Character Development by Sheila
In class I begin with a discussion of character development and how observation in everyday life can increase your writing ability.
Enjoy the Class Replay!
Questions Asked During Class
1. How do you know when a piece of writing is good enough to call it finished?
2. Is it fair to guess at other character’s emotional truth? How can you really know what they were feeling if, lets say they are dead and you can’t ask them?
3. Do we really have to write backstory for every character?
Filed under Character Development, Teleclass Replay by Sheila
Question: Why is it important to emphasize just one detail in a scene?
Answer: Remember all the bits of insight I give you about writing are just guidelines. You as the writer gets to choose when you use them. There might be a scene where you need to describe the entire room, for example, your apartment is broken into and everything is trashed. You decide whether you emphasize one detail and show the reader the emotional impact of that one detail, or if it is best to give an overview of the setting. More on Setting: Emphasize One Detail
Filed under setting by Sheila
Question: Please go over stretching time to add more interest to a story.
Answer: We’re talking about how you can move through a period of time so the most important parts of the story get stretched. We want to pull our readers into our story and to do so in a way that allows them to be where we want them to be for the longest period of time. Let’s say there’s an emotional revelation, I’m pregnant. What if we don’t stretch it out and we tell it in real time; girl walks into room, parents are eating dinner, she says I’m pregnant, dad screams, mom pulls her hair out and then they start discussing it. More on Climax of Scene: Stretching the Emotional Moment Out
Filed under Climax of Story by Sheila
Question: Can you please talk about how to launch a scene.
Answer: To launch a scene that will pull your readers in you need some sort of action. It doesn’t have to be a chase scene or BIG action. It can be as simple as a vase falling over and breaking into pieces. That vase might be a gift from a husband who has just died, the last gift given of maybe an intruder has walked into the room and knocked it over. We are immediately drawn into why the vase broke, who broke it and what is going to happen next. We’re drawn into the scene to find out what happens next.
You can launch a scene in dialogue as well. But you want to use dialogue that involves. For example, “What are you doing going through my drawers?”
We are immediately in the scene and involved in the conflict that the action of going through someone’s drawers without permission would create.
It’s about telling our stories. Like all great storytellers we have to pull our readers with us by launching our scenes in a way that gets them involved right away.
Filed under Beginning, Middles and Ends, Scene and Summary by Sheila
Question: How do you create tension and excitement in the dialogue when the scene you are writing isn’t exactly high tension?
Answer: What is dialogue? Dialogue is an interaction between human beings and you can always find or create tension between two people. It doesn’t matter if they are the best of friends. Lets say you feel like your dialogue is a little boring, you are revealing things and trying to move the plot along, but there is no real tension created. You want to look at the two characters who are having the dialogue. More on Dialogue: Creating Tension between Characters
Filed under Character Development, Dialogue by Sheila
Question: What do you do when you get stuck and aren’t sure how to go forward with your memoir?
Answer: When you feel stuck ask yourself what do I want to write about today? What scene can I actually see and have some emotional connection with? You do not have to write your story in order. You need to use your intuition as writers, if you feel stuck, skip it and move on to something you do want to write. You may find that you need to put a project aside for a few days or weeks and write small things like a dialogue you overheard, a phone conversation with a sister, a poem or review of a movie you just watched–anything that gets your creative juices flowing. More on Writing: What to do When you are Stuck
Filed under Writers Block by Sheila
The reason dialogue is so important in memoir is because you are writing in the first person. One character has to be in every scene in order to report that scene-and that character is the writer of the memoir-you. So the best way you can give another character’s point of view about and event or experience is to have a dialogue where the character reveals these things in their own voice. You may have ideas of how someone feels or might react and you can even put those ideas into your writing when the person is not in the scene, but having the character actually “talk” is the best way to get into another character’s head while writing in the first person.
Filed under Character Development, Dialogue by Sheila
Enjoy the teleclass replay!
Questions Asked During Class
1.You mentioned a dialogue rule; that you shouldn’t say in dialogue something the character’s already know. Can you clarify that?
2. How can you use dialogue to reveal character?
3. What do you do when you get stuck and aren’t sure how to go forward with your memoir?
4. How do you create tension and excitement in the dialogue when the scene you are writing isn’t exactly high tension?
5. Can you please talk about how to launch a scene.
6. Please go over stretching time to add more interest to a story.
7. Can you talk a little about bridges and how they are different than condensing?
8. Why is it important to emphasize just one detail in a scene?
Filed under Teleclass Replay, Writing Memoir by Sheila
