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From Memory to Story: Writing Your Life

with Richard Goodman

author of The Soul of Creative Writing

and the cult favorite

French Dirt: The Story of a Garden in the South of France

In this one-day writing workshop, Richard Goodman will take participants through a series of writing exercises geared toward making use of fictional techniques in creative nonfiction. If you have ever wanted to write essays, memoir, or tell your life story in words, this workshop will provide an excellent start.

We all have a story we want to tell. The real challenge is: how do we turn our own personal drama into something that will captivate complete strangers?

This workshop will turn to fiction for answers. It will teach some of the techniques of fine fiction, such as character development, dialogue, sentence structure, setting the scene, word choice, and the use of time. These are the bulwarks of great fiction and what keeps the reader turning the pages. The good news is that they can be learned.

It’s all about story, ultimately.

From that first moment when we heard, "Once upon a time," we were hooked on story, and that is what we, as nonfiction writers, do: tell stories. That our stories happen to be true is important. But what’s really important is that the stories be dramatic, taut, and compelling. We want our stories to have energy, light, and depth. That happens not so much as a result of what we are writing about as how. Some of the best creative nonfiction is, in fact, about our day-to-day lives, not about incest, or abuse, or alcoholism, etc. Pulitzer Prize-winner, Beautiful Swimmers, for example, by William Warner, is about crabbing on the Chesapeake Bay. Ice: The Nature, the History, and the Uses of an Astonishing Substance, by Mariana Gosnell, is about, well, ice. The reviews have been laudatory. In fact, if a creative nonfiction writer is writing about incest, abuse or alcoholism, it’s even more incumbent on him or her to write well, because people have heard these stories many times by now.

This workshop will be proactive. We will use examples from fiction to illustrate each technique. And we will follow up each example with writing exercises, as well. Bring paper and pencil!

Sunday, November 1, 2009 * 10:00 AM - 5:00 PM

Praise for Richard Goodman’s new book about writing:

Richard Goodman’s marvelous book, The Soul of Creative Writing, will instruct, delight, edify, challenge, reassure, and guide any student of writing to a personal best. The Soul of Creative Writing is a wonderbook of meditative instruction. Goodman’s sympathy for the writer’s dilemma, the warmth of his urging, the brightness of his enthusiasms all remind us that courage lies inside encouragement. We can find courage to write here, and support from all Goodman’s tips and insights. Like the best teaching from the most inspired teachers, it’s simply invaluable. —Molly Peacock, author of Cornucopia: New & Selected Poems, and a memoir, Paradise, Piece by Piece

Any writer should read all these delicate, dear essays who wants to write anything better than she or he has done before, be it fiction, essay, poem or merely sentence. Who would guess that ideas about language and literature could be expressed so gracefully? Richard Goodman's essays do not blanket the subject of writing; rather they offer us peep holes through which we glimpse sunny mysteries. Blink and look again. —Sena Jeter Naslund, author of Abundance, a Novel of Marie Antoinette and Ahab’s Wife