Writing From Real Life: Finding Your Stories

Writers are observers, continually examining their lives and the lives of others. For memoir writers, and for those who write in other genres, life experiences become the raw material of their creative work. In this six-hour course, we will focus on the key challenges in our lives today and other hurdles we’ve overcome—in other words, difficult circumstances that might become the rich “raw material” for new work. We will discuss strategies for developing this material in a way that avoids the sentimental and general, and we'll look at a number of short examples of how other writers (i.e., Didion, Ehrenreich, Sedaris) use essays as a way of making meaning of difficult circumstances. By the end of the course, you will have worked through a topic and be well on your way to writing about it (and potentially others) in a thoughtful and critical way.