2.4 KiB
[Challenge Companion] Memoir
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Author: u/alexanderwales Time flies like an arrow*
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URL: https://www.reddit.com/r/rational/comments/8k1f64/challenge_companion_memoir/
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Score: 10
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Created: 2018-05-17T04:28:47
Post:
tl;dr: this is the companion thread to the biweekly challenge, post ideas, recommendations, chit-chat, etc. here
Personally, I'm a fan of stealing from my own life as much as possible, both because of the authenticity that it lends to a work, because it's generally pretty easy (since those things actually happened), and because I generally care about the things that have happened in my life.
Writing to pen pals and making blog posts about what was going on in my life was my primary outlet for prose for a number of years; I had a lot of pen pals, and when I wasn't writing to them, I was writing something close to a memoir, which was essentially an attempt at framing and reframing life events as a way of bringing order and meaning to them. In the same way that we can look at a work through different lenses, I think it can be helpful to look at our own lives through different perspectives, and writing from those perspectives can be helpful as an exercise, or for general fiction writing.
I was going to share some memoir stuff that I wrote in high school, but most of it makes me itch to edit it, or makes me want to slap my past self in the face, or both, so I'm going to skip that. (If you're reading Worth the Candle, which I write under a different name, you're getting occasional adaptations from the mass of memoirish writing I did in high school.)
Comments:
u/None [+1] (4 days later)
We are a few days in, and no entries yet. Is anyone preparing one and just hasn't posted it?
u/None [+2] (4 days later)
Decided I should put my pen where my mouth was and write my own.
u/None [+2] (4 days later)
[deleted]
u/None [+2] (4 days later)
I expect so, yes.
I also suspect a lot of us write fiction to get away from thinking about our own lives.
Plus it can be dangerous to tell people on the internet too much about you.
u/None [+2] (8 days later)
Now I'm of two minds.
"I hope other people post so I can enjoy reading their entries."
"If I'm the only post, I win my first Challenge!"