Writing Personal Essays and Memoir: Plagiarizing From Real Life

It was Mary McCarthy who said, “I can’t help plagiarizing from real life.” In this workshop, you’ll learn how to transform your experiences and memories into a narrative others are interested in. For those of you who want to begin but don’t know the way in, we’ll discuss how to embark — what to put in, what to leave out, how to shape the story. For those of you already immersed in the writing, you’ll be pushed all the way to the end. We’ll discuss how to read your pages analytically and diagnostically, how to fix problems so the writing is as good as you can make it. Class will include specific instruction, as well as exercises to help you discover your most engaging material.