Annotated Bibliography -- first three items

Annotated Bibliography

Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Massachusetts: Shambala Publications, Inc., 1986.

This book is written by a woman who has, and I believe continues, led workshops based around writing and the useful principles that she discovered in her own practice. After some times leading these workshops, she finally decided to place her most important lessons into one elegantly simple book. She approaches writing with almost a spirituality, at one point quoting a zen master who told her, "do not make meditation your practice, make writing your practice." The book consists less of chapters and more of topics, ways in which one can break away from the inner critic and expose the raw details, "the bones," of one's writing.

Although not a book with the specific subject or goal as memoir writing, I still believe it to be very useful. I have accessed this book a thousand times in order to revive my writing, or simply to start writing. The unique thing about this book is that one can go to it with any kind of writing in mind and gain from it. With the idea of a memoir, it has an entirely fresh face.

Roorbach, Bill. Writing Life Stories. Ohio: F&W Publications, Inc., 2008.

This book is about taking abstract memories and putting them on paper for the purpose of creating memoirs. Each chapter focuses on a particular aspect pertaining to memoir writing and includes several exercises for the reader to engage in as an interactive tool. To keep things lively and interesting, and to keep the reader's motivation high, the writer includes stories of his workshops based around each exercise. He also gives examples of his students' responses to the exercise, noting where they made mistakes, noting where they succeeded. This book gives the reader interested in transcribing their memories to the page a roadmap to sharpen those memories, clarifying them enough to start stringing them together in recognizable form. He also helps with the idea of possible publication. I also really enjoyed one of the appendixes, where he cleverly describes "apprenticeship," that is, an extended list of published memoirs to learn from.

Ledoux, Denis. Turning Memories into Memoirs. Maine: Soleil Press, 1993.

This book is very similar in its format to the book by Bill Roorbach described above. It, too, has many exercises and starting points for the would-be memoir writer. When it first caught my eye in the library I thought for sure it was the same book, but with further investigation I realized it wasn't. In this book, the writer approaches memoir writing as the memoir, versus memoirs. There seems to be some emphasis placed on writing life stories for a family legacy, a sort of written family album, as the motivation for a memoir. From what I've read so far, he offers valid advice, mistakes to avoid, and brief examples of what has worked. The writer also suggests interviews and research and devotes an entire section to it. He suggests finding material outside of one's self in the pursuit of greater accuracy of events that our memories may be faulty on.