Bantry
Co. Cork
Ireland
There has been a renaissance in the genre of memoir writing, but what is a memoir?
Is it simply writing about one’s own past, one’s own daily life, rather like a series of diary entries strung together, or is it actually a well-crafted story? I believe it is a well-crafted story, but does everyone have a ‘book in them’?
Writing non-fiction, particularly memoir, can be very liberating and rewarding, but it requires discipline and skills similar to those required for writing fiction. Graham Greene once commented that within every fiction there is non-fiction and within every non-fiction is mixed in a little fiction …
During this workshop we will identify the story you want to tell and why you want to tell it. We will consider what makes your story riveting, and how you can capture and hold the reader’s attention. The greatest challenge of this genre of writing is taking away the mask of fiction and leaving the writer face-to-face with the truth, so we will address the nature of honesty and discuss how much information is ‘too much information’. In this age of misery memoirs, sex scandals and intimate journals, when is there too much personal information?
Non-fiction and memoirs offer the author the opportunity to establish the most intimate of relationships with their readers. It is exciting and challenging, and who knows – you might even have a bestseller on your hands …
