Sharing writing, any writing, can be vulnerable. Even if your story is not a difficult one to tell, writing is always difficult (of course, only writers know this—everyone else thinks it’s easy, which is why the author Thomas Mann said, “A writer is a person for whom writing is more difficult than it is for other people”). I

You can also just type into a search engine “words associated with x” or visit a website like relatedwords.org. Another good resource is reversedictionary.org, where you can type in a definition and it will give you words. I typed in “I was so angry” and one phrase it gave me was “hopping mad,” which is sure to light up the brain more than “I was

Applying this sense to writing, the editor and critic Leon Wieseltier asserted that “the range of a writer’s metaphor is a measure of the range of his cognition,” which brings us back to Aristotle’s idea that the genius writer is the writer of metaphor. Metaphors are not only artsy, but they’re brainy. If intuition is our sixth sense, our sixth way

Caldwell wants to tell us what grief is like, grief over losing her best friend, she opens the first page of her memoir Let’s Take the Long Way Home by telling us: “My life had made so much sense alongside hers: For years we had played the easy, daily game that intimate connection implies. One ball, two gloves, equal joy in the throw and the

Writing Firebird and sojourning in the land of memory helped Mark Doty to see that “the past is not static, or ever truly complete; as we age we see from new positions, shifting angles.” Memoirist Sue William Silverman agrees, writing, “Memory is not the history of what happened; memory is the history of our story of what happened.” The stories we

Judith Barrington gives us permission to play in the intersection of memory and imagination. “It is up to you to decide how imaginatively you transform the known facts—exactly how far you allow yourself to go to fill in the memory gaps. While imagination certainly plays a role in both kinds of writing, the application of it in memoir is

This word “truth” is one I never employ. I never think about it and I never use it. My idea of what a memoirist owes a reader is honesty, however that is constructed. The reader must feel that the narrator, the memoirist, is trying to get to the bottom of the experience that one is writing about, whatever that experience is. The truth seeker—that's

In other words, remembering is a process our brains go through—memories are not a product stored in our brain.

Even some dictionaries don’t make such a distinction. In Wikipedia’s definition, “a theme is a central topic, subject.” Another online dictionary definition of theme is “the subject of a talk, a piece of writing, a person’s thoughts: a topic.” But that definition just confuses me. The subject or topic of a piece of writing is not synonymous with a