The Art of Writing Memoir

Some pithy statements to jog your memoir:

• We live our life forward but remember it backwards, said the sage (full quote below).

• Writing about our lives has a quantum effect: observing alters the outcome. How can that be? The outcome has already occurred. You think so, do you?

• Does the observer (writer) really alter the outcome? Or does the outcome retroactively alter the observer (writer)?

• In the Self-fulfilling-Prophecy dynamic what comes first? The Self or the Prophecy. Or is there a third option, as in Buddhist thought: dependent co-arising (or co-dependent arising)?

• As in life, a developed Sense of Time is all-important to writing memoir. Once you tap the archetypal current (time eternal) of your story, you know how/when to dilate or contract Time.

More in the workshop series.

“It is perfectly true, as philosophers say, that life must be understood backwards. But they forget the other proposition, that it must be lived forwards. And if one thinks over that proposition it becomes more and more evident that life can never really understood in time simply because at no particular moment can I find the necessary resting place from which to understand it—backwards.”
~ Søren Kierkegaard