Writing Life Stories
by Bill Roorbach

Every life is full of engaging, untold stories. Roorbach explains how to turn these events into vivid personal essays and riveting memoirs. His friendly instruction and stimulating exercises teach writers how to:

• Open up memory, access emotion and discover compelling material
• Shape scenes from experience, as life events become plot lines
• Populate stories with the fascinating, silly and maddening "characters" that surround them: their family members and friends.

Much more than teaching the rudiments of creating an autobiography, this book will help writers see their own lives more clearly, while learning that real stories are often the best kind.

224 pp., paperback, 1998, ISBN 1-8849-1036-X