1. Flashbacks: Recall an anecdote to capture your audience’s attention. -Frey recreated what it was like to wake up on the airplane, battered and unsure of where he was. -Kittredge told of a particularly unsettling scene from his childhood Thanksgiving table and the perspective he gained in retrospect.

2. What is conflict, and what purpose might it serve in storytelling? Why tell an extreme story? Many of you on Friday said it’s more interesting than the alternative. Why did James Frey start A Million Little Pieces the way he did? Why lie to the reader? One of you wrote, “Everyone wants to believe there is hope – even a down-and-out drug addict can come out okay. We can all survive.” If this was indeed the message – did he succeed, and are there other effective ways for an author get the reader there?

3. Are Memoirs Like Diaries? The comedian Sarah Silverman, in her memoir, The Bedwetter, shared entries from her diary kept as a 14 year old: Today was fine. I think I’m starting to become friends with Tara Atta. She’s really nice. Julie is downright cruel. Uhhg! She makes me so frustrated … And Today was fine. It seems kind of weird, I’ve been having not boring really, but very ordinary days lately …

4. The only way anyone would want to read such entries, she says, is if she was famous, which she just happens to be. Do diaries have beginnings, middles, or ends? Do diaries have a message? What about conflict …

5. Can a story told in chronological order be interesting? Sometimes … but it helps if you creatively organize and edit. Consider Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life

6. Amy Kraus Rosenthal organizes her life alphabetically, beginning with A for Amy. Her foreword offers this hook: I was not abused, abandoned, or locked up as a child. My parents were not alcoholics, nor were they ever divorced or dead. We did not live in poverty, or in misery, or in an exotic country. I am not a misunderstood genius, a former child celebrity, or the child of a celebrity. I am not a drug addict, sex addict, food addict, or recovered anything. If I indeed had a past life, I have no recollection of who I was. I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.

7. Metaphor is another common way to grab your reader. Here are the first lines of Tuesdays with Morrie by Mitch Albom: The last class of my old professor’s life took place once a week in his house, by a window in the study where he could watch a small hibiscus plant shed its pink leaves. The class met on Tuesdays. It began after breakfast. The subject was the Meaning of Life. It was taught from experience.

8. Metaphors help us make sense of ideas that are abstract or new to us. What was it like to spend every Tuesday with a dying friend?

9. So how do these stories end? Resolution … what does that mean?

10. You can use any of these examples are models for your own mini memoirs. Doing an abbreviated encyclopedia is completely acceptable – just be sure to write a foreword. Questions?

11. Workshop in East Lab I have your folders if you want to use your memorable moments You can turn in your mini memoirs if you’re done today. Just print and leave them in your folder. The grading rubric is on the back of your assignment!