Writing about Your Life: A Journey Into the Past
| Author | : | |
| Rating | : | 4.99 (608 Votes) |
| Asin | : | 1569244685 |
| Format Type | : | paperback |
| Number of Pages | : | 272 Pages |
| Publish Date | : | 0000-00-00 |
| Language | : | English |
DESCRIPTION:
They are the same decisions you’ll have to make as you write about your own life: matters of selection, condensation, focus, attitude, voice and tone. It’s a journey full of surprising turns. William Zinsser recalls his school days and influential teachers, his army days in North Africa and Italy, his newspaper days with the legendary the New York Herald Tribune, his teaching days at Yale, his role in a Woody Allen movie, his years as a baseball addict and his late-in-life career playing jazz piano. Written with elegance, warmth and humor, Writing About Your Life gives you the tools to organize and recover your past and the confidence to believe in your life narrative. His method is to take you on a memoir of his own: 13 chapters in which he recalls dramatic, amusing and often inspiring moments in his long and unusually varied life as a writer, editor, teacher and traveler. He also recalls a lifetime of exotic travels through Africa, Asia and the South Seas, evoking a gallery of memorable people—a dance teacher in Bali, a French explorer in Tahiti, a Vietnamese poet in Hanoi—whose stories moved him with their power. Along the way in these memoirs William Zinsser pauses to explain the technical decisions he made as he wrote them. It also gives you permission—through the example
"One of the Best Books on Memoir writing: That's the TRUTH!" according to Gerard Coulombe. I have read many books about how to write memoir, or how to write about yourself. The answer is given in this highly readable book.Read this book, and if what you have in mind is to write about your life, the answer is simple, Write about what you know about your life. Don't write any old thing or about it all from the time you were born until the time you think you have figured out how it will all probably end. Write instead about those ever memorable events in your lifetime to date that taught you a valuable lesson or made you mor. Edward A. Joseph said Master Teacher. In Writing About Your Life: A Journey into the Past, William Zinsser uses the main technique of the master teacher: he demonstrates what he is trying to teach. In the first of a series of mini-memoirs from his own life Zinsser tells the story of a phone message left on his answering machine from a woman who has a question about a paint primer that Zinsser's father had manufactured years before. In referring to an article he wrote about the message and the phone call that followed, the author shows how the work dealt with a number of. Three Stars Interesting
While his frank, affirmative and encouraging style will help anyone embarking on writing their own life story, his book will be especially useful to those of his own generation. Next he details his 13-year career at the New York Herald Tribune, where he wrote drama and movie features. He begins with impressionistic sketches of his WWII experiences as a young army private in North Africa and Italy. Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. To follow one's heart is Zinsser's most enduring piece of advice. All rights reserved. From Publishers Weekly Zinsser, author of a classic guide for nonfiction authors, On Writing Well, looks back on his own years of professional writing, glossing selections from his past articles with advice for would-be memoirists. Finally Zinsser brings us up-to-date with his recent rebirth as a public pianist. In writing he recommends dwelling on "small, self-contained incidents" and making use of anecdo
He has long taught writing at the New School, in New York, where he lives with his wife, Caroline Zinsser. His musical revue about a summer community, What’s the Point?, was produced off Broadway in 2003. During the 1970s he taught writing at Yale, where he was master of Branford College. WILLIAM ZINSSER is a writer, editor, teacher and musician. He began his career with the New York Herald Tribune and