Writing Life Stories
Bill Roorbach is a chatty writer: his instruction is informal, colloquial, abounding in parenthetical remarks and droll asides. But Roorbach (Summers with Juliet) seems able to inspire even the most recalcitrant writers to uncover memories and ideas they didn't know they had and turn them into something the rest of us would want to read. An early exercise inWriting Life Storiesinvolves making a map of the earliest neighborhood you can remember: "Where did the weird people live?" Roorbach asks. "Where were the off-limits places?" And then, "Tell us a story from your map." Many of the book's subsequent assignments are equally enticing.Roorbach elaborates on the many elements involved in writing creative nonfiction, including memory, scene setting, ideation, character development, and research. He eschews introductions and conclusions (scaffolding, he says, is for building purposes only) and, "at least in a first draft," embraces truth-telling. "Those places where you catch yourself changing the facts," he warns, "should be alarms, grand signals, signposts saying here's the place to examine most closely for meaning."Though his writing may be casual, Roorbach is a great believer in precision. "Every person you mention," he says, "should get a quick, sharp, devastatingly exact sketch" (for examples, he refers to the minor characters in books by Paul Theroux, Joan Didion, and John McPhee). Ambiguity, he says, is anathema: "Do what it takes to properly name a tree, a piece of hardware, a street, a town, a school, a neighbor." And finally, be wary of polishing--"you can spend days adjusting sentences in a first paragraph that ought to be cut altogether"--but make sure every paragraph in your memoir or essay is as good as, has as much "urgency" as, the first one. "How much can you get into a sentence?" he asks. "How much can you get intoeverysentence?"--Jane Steinberg--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.