LifeWriting: Drawing from Personal Experience to Create Features You Can Publish

by Fred D White

Overview

Life writing is people-centered nonfiction writing. Not just autobiographical or biographical, life writing encompasses a broad range of personal-experience narratives. Life writing can be serious or humorous or both. It can include any kind of subject matter because people are always at the heart of any endeavor. Fred D. White, Ph.D., author of four textbooks on writing, walks the reader through the life writing process from research to composition to revision to marketing.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781884956331
Publisher:	Linden Publishing
Publication date:	04/01/2004
Pages:	223
Product dimensions:	6.16(w) x 9.02(h) x 0.70(d)

Table of Contents

	Introduction	ix
	How To Use This Book	1
Part 1	Building the Foundation
Chapter 1	Getting Started on Your Lifewriting Adventure	5
Chapter 2	Using a Daybook to Hoard Your Treasure Trove of Memories and Reflections	19
Chapter 3	Digging for Information	35
Chapter 4	Transforming Raw Data into Lifewriting: Key Techniques to Master	45
Chapter 5	Organizing Techniques I: Working Up an Outline	57
Chapter 6	Organizing Techniques II: Writing the Treatment	65
Part 2	Ready, Get Set, Start Drafting!
Chapter 7	Drafting I: Wielding Opening Magic	73
Chapter 8	Drafting II: Bodybuilding	83
Chapter 9	Drafting III: Calling It a Wrap: Writing Effective Conclusions	99
Chapter 10	Revision: The Fine Art of Reseeing Your First Draft	109
Part 3	Lifewriting Projects
Chapter 11	Writing a Personal-Experience Feature	119
Chapter 12	Writing Portraits and Self-Portraits	129
Part 4	Developing Your Style
Chapter 13	Copyediting for Style I: Strengthening Your Sentences	139
Chapter 14	Copyediting for Style II: Choosing Words Wisely	149
Part 5	Shepherding Your Lifewriting Essays into Print or Cyberspace
Chapter 15	Selling Your Lifewriting to Newspapers, Literary Journals, and Magazines	165
Chapter 16	"I Could Write a Book": Here's How	179
Chapter 17	Anatomy of an Essay: Joan Didion's "Marrying Absurd"	195
	Recommended Reading for Lifewriters	203
	Index	213
	About the Author	225