"Vig! I’ve been on the plane finishing your book for the last 3 hours. Couldn’t put it down. I have a huge lump in my throat and I’ve been blinking back the tears as I read the last quarter of the book. I loved it!" _ Bonnie x
From our sofa in Athens, Ruby and I watched Grandad’s funeral mass, live-streamed from the near-empty Cathedral of the Assumption in Thurles. Grandad was well known and much loved, hundreds would have come… only 10 were allowed.
The fundamental elements for creating great scenes in memoir. Think of the first paragraph of your memoir as the opening scene of a movie or TV series. Every story, every movie, every book starts with a scene and after the first scene follows another, and another. Scene after scene after scene makes a chapter.
Meet, Laura Davis, author of the remarkable memoir; ❝The Burning Light of Two Stars.❞
It’s re-write time and from the muddy pool of shitty drafts, a small jewel appears – at least I think it’s a jewel. I rinse it, I dry it and polished it down to the bone.
What’s left is a mere smidgen of a vignette, but it gives me hope. – A different kind of hope from what I had back then, – I hope. . .
He woke me in the middle of the night. “You have to help me now Vigdis,” I remember his stuttered whisper. His silhouette looked pitiful in the arched opening he’d cut – between my two basement rooms – years earlier. His figure crooked and unstable against the light falling in behind him.
(more…)