Life Writing [Paperback]

Life Writing offers the novice writer engaging and creative activities, making use of insightful, relevant readings from well-known authors to illustrate the techniques presented. This volume makes use of new versions of key chapters from the recent Routledge/Open University textbook, Creative Writing: A Workbook with Readingsfor writers who are specializing in life writing.

Using their experience and expertise as teachers as well as authors, Derek Neale and Sara Haslam guide aspiring writers through such key writing skills as:

• writing what you know
• investigating biography and autobiography
• using prefaces
• finding a form
• using memory
• developing characters
• using novelistic, poetic and dramatic techniques.

The volume is further updated to include never-before published interviews and conversations with successful life writers such as Jenny Diski, Robert Fraser, Richard Holmes, Michael Holroyd, Jackie Kay, Hanif Kureishi and Blake Morrison. Concise and practical, Life Writingoffers an inspirational guide to the methods and techniques of authorship and is a must-read for aspiring writers.

Introduction  1. Stimulating Creativity: What Really Works  2. Keeping a Writer's Notebook  3. Character Creation  4. Setting  5. Point of View: Trying on Voices  6. Point of View: Degrees of Knowing  7. Showing and Telling  8. Structure  9. The Story and The Reader

Sara Haslamis Lecturer in Literature at the Open University. She is the author of Fragmenting Modernism: Ford Madox Ford, the Novel and the Great War (2002), and editor of Fords England and the English (2003) as well as Ford Madox Ford and the Cil²