The New Diary is about a completely modern concept of journal writing. It has little to do with the rigid daily calendar diary you may have kept as a child or the factual travelogue you wrote to recall the Grand Canyon. Instead, it is a tool for tapping the full power of your inner resources.
The New Diary is as much for those who already keep a journal as it is for those who have never kept one. It does not tell you the "right" way to keep a diary; rather, it offers numerous possibilities for using the diary to achieve your own purposes. It is a place for you to clarify goals, visualize the future, and focus your engergies; a means of freeing your intuition and imagination; a workbook for exploring your dreams, your past, and your present life.
It is for everyone seeking concrete methods for dealing with personal problems. It is for women and men interested in achieving self-reliance and inner liberation, for artists and writers seeking new techniques for overcoming blocks to creativity.
Continue reading "The New Diary - Tristine Rainer" »
Be yourself, speak freely, and think small
By William Zinsser
One of the saddest sentences I know is “I wish I had asked my mother about that.” Or my father. Or my grandmother. Or my grandfather. As every parent knows, our children are not as fascinated by our fascinating lives as we are. Only when they have children of their own—and feel the first twinges of their own advancing age—do they suddenly want to know more about their family heritage and all its accretions of anecdote and lore. “What exactly were those stories my dad used to tell about coming to America?” “Where exactly was that farm in the Midwest where my mother grew up?”
Writers are the custodians of memory, and that’s what you must become if you want to leave some kind of record of your life and of the family you were born into. That record can take many shapes. It can be a formal memoir—a careful act of literary construction. Or it can be an informal family history, written to tell your children and your grandchildren about the family they were born into. It can be the oral history that you extract by tape recorder from a parent or a grandparent too old or too sick to do any writing. Or it can be anything else you want it to be: some hybrid mixture of history and reminiscence. Whatever it is, it’s an important kind of writing. Too often memories die with their owner, and too often time surprises us by running out.
Continue reading "How to Write a Memoir - William Zinsser" »
Aboriginal Story Telling
Assignment: If you had 15 minutes to write down the 7 most important events of your life, what would they be? Then, choose one and write a short short story about what happened, and how this affected you. When did this happen? Who was involved? How old were you? Where did this take place? How long did this experience last? What blessings came from it? If it was a difficult experience, have you forgiven those involved? Write Now! GO!
Welcome! We believe that hardly anything is as exciting as living history - especially if it's your family story as told by your own parents or grandparents.
So many of our questions we would like to ask our parents go forever unanswered: Where and how did you meet mum?... What were the challenges you have had in your life?... What was your childhood really like?...
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Writing Assignment: From the life-history questions below, choose one and write a short vignette focused on this subject. Over time, using these questions, you can create a collection which can grow into a full memoir. Or, you may wish to just create stand-alone life stories in your journal. Write Now! GO!
Consider: Choose events to write about from your life as it is happening right now - small life stories which can eventually become part of a memoir.
The questions below are from Write My Memoirs, a site dedicated to supporting writers who wish to create an autobiography.
Read more at: http://www.writemymemoirs.com/index/about_us.html
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How many people lived in your family home when you were a child? Did your extended family – grandparents, aunts, uncles and cousins -- live under the same roof, or very near by?
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