Memoir Writing I is a 10-week intensive workshop combining lectures, hands-on writing exercises, and comprehensive feedback on your completed work. The course is designed for beginners or anyone who wishes to refresh their fundamental memoir writing skills. Every life contains compelling stories worth telling. Whether your life has been unconventional and dramatic or relatively quiet and ordinary, there are fascinating stories within your experiences. Contemporary memoir has become increasingly popular precisely because it allows everyday people to tell their own stories with craft and authenticity.
A memoir captures a focused aspect of a life, whether a brief piece about a single meaningful moment, such as a bicycle ride with a friend, or a full book-length work spanning your entire childhood or another significant period. To engage readers in your story, your memoir must be written with the narrative finesse of fiction. This course teaches you professional techniques for focusing and shaping your life stories, the craft elements that make memoir compelling, and practical strategies for marketing your work to potential publishers, magazines, and agents. Whether you envision writing essay-length pieces or a complete book, you will learn how to tell the stories from your life in a way that resonates with readers.
Important Distinction: While memoir and personal essay both draw from the writer's life, they differ in focus. A personal essay emphasizes the writer's perspective and philosophy, while a memoir emphasizes the narrative and the unfolding of events. Gotham also offers dedicated courses in Essay and Opinion Writing and an intensive seminar on Personal Essay Writing if you wish to explore those related forms.
Course Components:
- Detailed lectures on memoir craft and structure
- Regular writing exercises building toward longer works
- Workshopping and peer feedback on student projects (each student presents twice during the 10 weeks)
Weekly Syllabus Overview:
- Week 1: Introduction to Memoir - Definition of contemporary memoir, short versus long memoir forms, identifying the "who cares" factor in your story, focusing on specific life aspects, and exploring memoir subgenres including coming of age, adversity, relationships, career, and travel narratives
- Week 2: Mining Your Memory - Exploring how true memoir must be, researching your past, balancing the roles of "actor" and "observer," avoiding therapeutic writing, and confronting difficult truths
- Week 3: Character - Treating real people as literary characters, building dimensional characters through desire and contrasts, creating character profiles, showing versus telling, and applying specific techniques for vivid character portrayal
- Week 4: Plot - Identifying a major dramatic question, structuring beginning, middle, and end, distinguishing between short and long narrative structures, and weighing the benefits and drawbacks of outlining
- Week 5: Description - Using sensory detail effectively, achieving specificity in writing, applying creative description techniques, choosing precise language, and merging description with narrative point of view
- Week 6: Dialogue - The importance of scene, transforming real conversations into fictional dialogue, using quotation marks and dialogue tags, stage directions, summarized dialogue, characterization through speech patterns, and subtext
- Week 7: Point of View and Voice - Defining point of view, exploring first person and alternative memoir perspectives, defining voice, examining different voice styles, and developing strategies for discovering your authentic authorial voice
- Week 8: Setting and Pacing - Creating vivid settings through time, place, and weather elements, describing settings that enhance mood and emotion, and manipulating time through pacing techniques including flashbacks
- Week 9: Theme and Revision - Understanding theme and different thematic approaches, weaving theme throughout your narrative, and exploring the multiple stages of revision from early drafts through final polish
- Week 10: The Business of Publishing - Proper manuscript formatting, targeting appropriate publishing houses, literary magazines, and agents, submission strategies, and crafting effective query letters
Note: Content may vary slightly among individual class sections.
About Online Learning at Gotham:
- These online classes bring together students from around the globe to study with Gotham, New York City's most respected writing school, creating an international community of writers.
- Online classes operate asynchronously, meaning classes are not held in real-time. You can participate in course materials, discussions, and assignments whenever it suits your schedule, day or night. However, classes advance on a weekly basis, and certain work should be completed within each week-long session to maintain progress and receive timely feedback.
- You can take an online writing class from anywhere with internet access. While the majority of our online students are based in the United States, we also welcome participants from nearly every country worldwide.
- Dedicated tech support is available to help with any platform or technical questions throughout the course.
- Aside from the flexibility of time and location, you maintain a permanent record of all course materials, lectures, feedback, and peer discussion for your future reference. You can print these materials and keep them for ongoing study and inspiration. Note that course materials are delivered in text and image format, not as video.
