Monday, June 24, 2013

Would your life make a fantastic book? Read this one before you start writing.

For the last decade, I have been sending my readers (who now number more than 2,500) strategies and tactics to help them improve their writing. With this EWA, I inaugurate a new series (appearing every other month) in which I review a book on the subject of writing. Craft, inspirational and writer memoir books will all be grist for this every-other-month mill.

The book I'm reviewing this month:

Writing Life Stories: How to Make memories into MEMOIRS, ideas into ESSAYS, and life into LITERATURE, (fully revised second edition) by Bill Roorbach with Kristen Keckler, PhD. Writer's Digest Books, Cincinnati, O, 2008. 296 pps.

Many people believe their life would make a fantastic book if only they had the skills to write it. They have no problem visualizing the end result: A memoir filled with wisdom; one that is taut with tension, a real page-turner.

They can see it so clearly as a finished work when they daydream about it, but the moment they sit down to write, problems pop up, and they soon conclude that writing life stories is not nearly as easy as they imagined.

If you have ever thought your writing might benefit from a how-to book written by an excellent writing teacher as well as an excellent memoirist, essayist and fiction writer, Writing Life Stories is the perfect book for you.

Here are nine things I love about Writing Life Stories:

1. The voice. The voice is that of Bill Roorbach himself: friendly, forgiving, compassionate and at times playful and cajoling, never ponderous. Roorbach taught creative nonfiction courses for many years, and he has a stage presence that commands a room; yet he never takes himself too seriously. For decades he has been helping beginning writers as well as those of us who have just enough knowledge of writing to be dangerous. What I love about Roorbach's voice is its wisdom and intelligence, coupled with its informality and lightness that invites readers into the subject matter. By the way, chapter six of Roorbach's book is entitled "Stage Presence." It is devoted to defining what a writing voice is and instructing readers on how to create their own authentic voices.

2. The writing. Roorbach's book is designed to be read by non-writers and beginning writers. It is simple to understand; its precepts are easy to apply. Roorbach's achievement: As you advance from chapter to chapter, the concepts become more advanced yet the language describing the concepts remains simple, clear and understandable, even to a beginner. Yet I learned a lot from the book, and I am not a beginning writer.

3. The examples. Roorbach is tremendously well read in the area of literary nonfiction. By just reading his book you get to sample the writing of so many masters of essay and memoir: Montaigne, Philip Roth, Tobias Wolff, and Truman Capote, along with many other greats that he quotes. That is part of the fun of Writing Life Stories. In the back of the book there is a 21-page appendix entitled Suggested Readings in Creative Nonfiction.

4. The exercises. They begin with simple projects like setting aside a special place to write and drawing up time-lines to help in organizing key events of your life. Roorbach has obviously put a lot of time and effort into developing these exercises. They make the book more valuable as a how-to because the exercises give you the opportunity to apply what you learn and explore on your own. The exercises are only another reminder that when you pick up this book you are putting yourself in the hands of a gifted writer and teacher.

One of the most creative and effective exercises asks you to draw a map of your neighborhood when you were a child. Put an X where you lived and mark and label where relatives and friends lived, where the vacant lot was, where your school was, where the department store was and where the convenience store was—all the locations that were important to you as a child.

Then, a separate exercise asks you to jot down in shortened form all the stories that occurred to you both as you drew the map and now as you think about the relationships between the locations on the map. I found that both these exercises yielded some interesting childhood stories I had not thought of in a long time.

One of the most provocative activities asks you to box up and either throw out or put in long-term storage everything you have written to date. It invites you to think of yourself as now moving on to a new stage in your writing career. The exercise is meant to free yourself of identifying with your earlier writing. Instead, it invites you to wipe the slate clean and start over fresh. I love the intention behind that exercise.

5. The Apprenticeship Concept. Roorbach encourages writers to think of themselves as apprentices, as people who are learning to write by reading and getting instruction from masters in the craft of writing. Why is that a good thing? If we embrace our apprentice status with pride and enthusiasm, we have freedom to try new things and even fail at them. We can fail without feeling like a failure. We get to have fun and find joy in trying to write something even if in the end we cannot quite pull it off. We get to improve just by trying new things.

6. The clarity. Roorbach writes very clearly. For example, the way he defines what a scene is and differentiates it from exposition: A scene takes place in a specific time and place, records events, actions, talk, stuff happening… Exposition is the most abstract and seeks to explains things, to convey information, to offer analysis, to put forth ideas.

After giving his readers plenty of examples, he nails it home in two short sentences: So scene is showing. Exposition is telling.

7. Student characters. Roorbach develops student characters—my favorite is one he names Gow—that create the classroom as a recurring scene throughout the book where students' struggles with their writing play out. We get to imagine we are in a class and Bill Roorbach is our teacher. As you can when you are taking any course, you learn from the student characters in Roorbach's book.

8. The subjects. This book covers all aspects of literary nonfiction writing including scene, structure, character, description, voice, research and more. In addition Roorbach describes many kinds of writing: nature writing, travel writing and many categories.

9. Treating memory with the respect it deserves. I have often struggled with memoir, asking myself, how can an adult writer recall what was said when she was a child? No one has a tape-recorder memory. Finding a way around the technical meaning of memoir, and trusting the writer to put forth his best recollection of what happened in a scene gave me a sense of freedom to write essay and memoir I did not have before reading Roorbach's book.

10. The second edition. Make certain you purchase the second edition of Writing Life Stories. According to Bill, the second edition includes new exercises, expanded chapters, especially in the case of the chapter on Internet research, a kind of research that barely existed when the first edition came out. In addition, the new edition includes many fresh, new excerpts from accomplished writers, and showcases the talent and intelligence of the "brilliant" Kristen Keckler, who helped Bill revise the book.

WHO EXACTLY IS BILL ROORBACH?

HTTP://www.billroorbach.com/