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"Writing Life Stories: How to Make
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Wendy Phillips
Mar 13, 1999, 3:00:00 AM3/13/99
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"Writing Life Stories: How to Make Memories into Memoirs,
Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature"
by Bill Roorbach
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/188491036X/wendysmall
Bill Roorbach is a chummy writer: his instruction is chatty,
colloquial, abounding in parenthetical remarks and jokey
asides. But Roorbach ("Summers with Juliet") seems able to
inspire even the most recalcitrant writers to uncover
memories and ideas they didn't know they had and turn them
into something the rest of us would want to read. An early
exercise in "Writing Life Stories" involves making a map of
the earliest neighborhood you can remember: "Where did the
weird people live?" Roorbach asks. "Where were the off-
limits places?" And then, "Tell us a story from your map."
Many of the book's subsequent assignments are equally
enticing.
Ideas into Essays, and Life into Literature"
by Bill Roorbach
http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/188491036X/wendysmall
Bill Roorbach is a chummy writer: his instruction is chatty,
colloquial, abounding in parenthetical remarks and jokey
asides. But Roorbach ("Summers with Juliet") seems able to
inspire even the most recalcitrant writers to uncover
memories and ideas they didn't know they had and turn them
into something the rest of us would want to read. An early
exercise in "Writing Life Stories" involves making a map of
the earliest neighborhood you can remember: "Where did the
weird people live?" Roorbach asks. "Where were the off-
limits places?" And then, "Tell us a story from your map."
Many of the book's subsequent assignments are equally
enticing.
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