In "Lifting the Veil", Gates offers some advice to memoir writers: "be prepared for the revelation of things you don't even dream are going to come up" (148).
1. Can you comment on this advice in relation to your own writing? If so, when you have "lifted the veil", what revelations, insights, truths, epiphanies.....have you discovered? Elaborate.
Sunday, September 30, 2007
Inventing the Truth - Q1
"The best memoirs, I think, forge their own forms. The writer of any work, and particularly any nonfiction work, must decide two crucial points: what to put in and what to leave out" (41).
According to Annie Dillard in "To Fashion a Text", she decided what to put in -her parents, Pittsburgh's history - and what would not find its way in - her summer in Wyoming, previous gentlemen callers. She was able to divorce her nostalgia with her childhood in order to create a piece of literary nonfiction.
1. Thinking of memoirs you've read or are currently reading - do you notice the authors deliberately piecing together a life or including every memory for memory's sake? In other words, have they been willing to "cannibalize their own lives for parts"?
2. [follow up] Are you willing to cannibalize your life for parts? If so, did you attempt that in your first piece or in a draft of your second piece? How hard is that?
According to Annie Dillard in "To Fashion a Text", she decided what to put in -her parents, Pittsburgh's history - and what would not find its way in - her summer in Wyoming, previous gentlemen callers. She was able to divorce her nostalgia with her childhood in order to create a piece of literary nonfiction.
1. Thinking of memoirs you've read or are currently reading - do you notice the authors deliberately piecing together a life or including every memory for memory's sake? In other words, have they been willing to "cannibalize their own lives for parts"?
2. [follow up] Are you willing to cannibalize your life for parts? If so, did you attempt that in your first piece or in a draft of your second piece? How hard is that?
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