欧宝娱乐

I realized that I'd been missing the necessary other half of the writing process: the pleased reader. It was as if I'd been trying to tell myself I was a good cook, but without ever asking anyone to dinner.

Jung's idea that, ironically, the more intensely individual a person's thoughts are, the more uniquely applicable to him or her, the more they will have meaning for other people. 鈥淭hat which is most personal is most common,鈥� he said.

Short as it may be, an essay can be large in the implications of the truth it tells.

a question often lurks at the heart of a personal essay.

Narrative essays show us experiences that have in some way changed you.

Many upsetting events fall under the heading of, excuse me, Shit Happens. You can lose a lot of time trying to write about them.

anecdote鈥攁 short recounting of an interesting or humorous incident. Anecdotes have a strong role to play, but they don't always add up to an essay, no matter how much time you spend on them.

If there's no catharsis, no growth, no change involved, then you're left with an anecdote鈥攁 part of some larger whole鈥攔ather than a self-contained essay or story.

The narrative essay has these major story elements: character, problem, struggle, epiphany, resolution. In between these elements, of course, we get image and detail, tone, fantasy, memory, style and language, and the other elements that draw us into any pleasurable reading experience.

A story is a series of events recorded in the order they happened, but a plot is that same story rearranged for maximum effectiveness.

John L'Heureux said, 鈥淎 story is about a single moment in a character's life when a definitive choice is made, after which nothing is the same.鈥�

(It's a good idea, in fact, to avoid the 鈥渨e鈥� sort of epiphany altogether, as it tends to make the reader growl, 鈥淪peak for yourself, buddy.鈥�)

a remark Robert Kaplan, a psychologist practicing in Oakland, made: the amount of our furniture we bring with us represents how much of our past we're willing to give up on, share, or ignore.

As a writer, as much as 75 percent of your energy in revision will be devoted to getting the tone right.

Personal writing works best when it has a rueful aspect鈥攊llusions shed, mistakes made.

When you write about how you've messed up, we like you, since we've messed up, too.

To guard against portraying yourself as the victim of the story or unconsciously seeking sympathy or using your pen as an instrument of revenge, flip the script. Make yourself the one who is getting something wrong.

Tone is also created by the images and details you choose. What you notice and bring to the reader's attention is part of the attitude you create.

Writing is turning your thoughts, abstractions, generalizations, and opinions back into the experiences you got them from.

Smell might be the most important sense of all in autobiographical writing. It unlocks the past. In fact it's great at taking you from present to past:

I can use that flashback in writing as the first of a series of connected memories, intensely reexperienced more than remembered.

If images let your reader experience what you experienced, then details prove it happened. If you say you are late because you hit traffic, the boss may compress his lips, but if you say some bozo in a MINI Cooper tried to drive along the margin of the road and hit a gravel truck, you have a shot at being believed.

Don't give us a box of cereal, but a box of Wheaties. Not a tree, but an aspen. A car didn't pull into your space: a green MINI Cooper did. A certain ex-president's affectionate intern wore not just lipstick but Club Monaco Glaze lipstick and Club Monaco Bare lip liner. 鈥淎dopted a tabby from outside a darkened Walmart storefront,鈥� is better than 鈥渂rought home a stray cat.鈥�

Here's the rule: If there is no emotion in the narrator, there will be none in the reader.

Writing every day will give you a stack of material. But that's not all it will do. It will also give you license to dream. If

Having all the time in the world to write can be paralyzing.

Forget trying to produce good writing. Think it stinks? Make it worse on purpose. Another way in: Pretend no one will read it.

Being stuck does not always mean that you are out of ideas. It can mean that you're getting to the heart of things, which is scary, so you stop.

It seems like a crazy time to worry about doing my daily writing, but in my experience this is when it matters most to keep it up: when life gets crazy.

A critique is good when after you read it your fragile little seed of excitement blooms rather than withers.

Professional writers revise more, not less, than less experienced ones. As Thomas Mann said, 鈥淎 writer is person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people.鈥�

We need a lot less backstory than you might think.

If you start too far back, you risk boring your readers with background information they don't yet care about and thus won't remember anyway.

Look back at your first paragraph and grab an image or idea from it to repeat at the end. This will give the reader the comforting feeling of having come full circle.

Any sentence, paragraph, scene, or chapter, no matter how powerful, that serves no story purpose is just so many wasted words.

It's surprising how many writers will neglect to tell us where we are, when it is, and who is talking to us, thus plunging us into a tale that takes place nowhere in particular, at no time in particular, and happens to no one in particular.

If your story is about a loss, let us see what things were like before it happened.

Present tense adds immediacy, past tense a sense of depth.

In any first-person narrative, it's obvious that what's being noticed is being noticed by the narrator, so cut phrases like 鈥淚 noticed,鈥� 鈥淚 observed,鈥� and so on.

the phrases 鈥淭here is鈥� and 鈥淭here was鈥� can usually be replaced with a more active verb. For instance, 鈥淭here was a fire鈥� can be 鈥淎 fire broke out.鈥�

You know you're finished when you catch yourself changing stuff and then putting it back to the way you had it before. Or when the piece gets worse, not better, the more you fiddle with it. Or when you can't find anything in the piece to fix.

A good memoir is not about the painful blow that life unfairly dealt you. It's about what happened next. It's about how human beings change under pressure, not about the bad things that can happen to people. That we can get from the evening news.

Like an essay, a memoir should show how the tale changed the teller.

Ask yourself, 鈥淲hy would someone want to read this book? Why would I want to read it?鈥� Don't confuse an obsession (with a boyfriend, say, or a disappointing mother) with a compelling subject.

As memoirist Patricia Hampl said, 鈥淐onsciousness, not experience, is the galvanizing core of a personal story.鈥�

The reflective voice employs phrases such as these: If this hadn't happened, I would never have 鈥� It's the first time I really 鈥� Before then I had felt 鈥� Later I imagined 鈥� Then I thought 鈥� Now I realize 鈥�

The point of your book should not be to show how the events you're describing affected you psychologically. Psychological explanations rob your characters of free will.

The writer Nora Johnson believes that we are profoundly affected by the places we have lived in, that every place changes us. The memories we carry of each place are not so much of the place itself as of ourselves when we were there.

(Keep in mind that we learn about ourselves from what we don't get as well as from what we do get.)

The arc maps the inner changes you undergo as you progress toward your goal. These are not just the events that happen in the book. They are descriptions of the events combined with what emotions you were feeling at that point.

It's not the job of writing to mirror life in all its complexity: that leaves the reader confused and overwhelmed, and he already has his own life to do that. The job of writing is to render the world and other human creatures understandable, and to show how the experiences of others can give us insights into our own behavior.

A good general rule: Don't pull the reader out of the narrative to tell what happened in the past unless it's for a good reason. Flashbacks must add to the emotional complexity of what's going on in the present.

If a flashback can come out without hurting the story, then it has to come out.

Most autobiographical writers know that the emotional truth (how it felt to you) is more important to the story you're telling than the literal truth (what day it was, exactly what your brother said, whether or not it really was raining that day). What happens is fact. Truth is how we react to what happens. You are, after all, not just remembering: you are updating the past, sifting through it, even giving us several ways to view one event.

Storytelling reveals meaning without committing the error of defining it. 鈥擧ANNAH ARENDT

If the narration is the string, the scenes are the pearls. Something significant happens in every scene, something that has not happened before in the story and will not happen again.

Whenever you start to enjoy the writing, stop and ask yourself, Am I blathering on?

We respond to characters when we know what they feel intensely about.

Avoid great blocks of dialogue. We're not allowed to say much before we're interrupted by others or by something else going on.

If there's a book you really want to read, but it hasn't been written yet, then you must write it. 鈥擳ONI MORRISON

there are no truly fresh ideas, only fresh spins on old ones.

Any story of what happened is always a version of what happened.

Whether you can really draw or not, whether you can really act or not, or write or not, just trying to do it always gives you a different relationship to meaning. 鈥擜NNA DEAVERE SMITH IN LETTERS TO A YOUNG ARTIST

You begin to get distance from an event the moment you write it down. At some point, even the most intimate and horrendous details of your life become transformed into material. When you pin your misfortune to the page, you rob it of its power.