Writing Life Stories
How to Make Memories into Memoirs, Ideas into Essays and Life into Literature
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Narrated by:
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John McLain
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By:
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Bill Roorbach
About this listen
From drawing a map of a remembered neighborhood to signing a form releasing yourself to take risks in your work, Roorbach offers innovative techniques that will trigger ideas for all writers.
Writing Life Stories is a classic text that appears on countless creative nonfiction and composition syllabi the world over. This updated 10th anniversary edition gives you the same friendly instruction and stimulating exercises along with updated information on current memoir writing trends, ethics, internet research, and even marketing ideas. You'll discover how to turn your untold life stories into vivid personal essays and riveting memoirs by learning to open up memory, access emotions, shape scenes from experience, develop characters, and research supporting details.
This guide will teach you to see your life more clearly and show you why real stories are often the best ones.
©2008 Bill Roorbach (P)2020 TantorListeners also enjoyed...
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This first audio edition of Poetry in Person: 25 Years of Conversation with America’s Poets (Knopf, 2010), invites listeners into an intimate classroom with eight acclaimed poets. Full of compelling, in-depth conversation about manuscripts and drafts by the poets themselves, plus readings of the finished poems, these historic recordings offer one of the most detailed portraits ever produced of how poems are actually made.
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Fascinating
- By d on 08-28-16
By: Lucille Clifton, and others
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My Life with Bob
- Flawed Heroine Keeps Book of Books, Plot Ensues
- By: Pamela Paul
- Narrated by: Eileen Stevens, Pamela Paul
- Length: 6 hrs and 55 mins
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Pamela Paul has kept a single book by her side for 28 years - carried throughout high school and college, hauled from Paris to London to Thailand, from job to job, safely packed away and then carefully removed from apartment to house to its current perch on a shelf over her desk - reliable if frayed, anonymous-looking yet deeply personal. This book has a name: Bob. Bob is Paul's Book of Books, a journal that records every book she's ever read.
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An uncanny mirror and a celebration of book love
- By Cherilyn Parsons on 07-28-19
By: Pamela Paul
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Salinger
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- Narrated by: Peter Friedman, January LaVoy, Robert Petkoff, and others
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Shields and Salerno illuminate most brightly the last 56 years of Salinger’s life: a period that, until now, had remained completely dark to biographers. Provided unprecedented access to diaries, letters, legal records, and secret documents, listeners will feel they have, for the first time, gotten beyond Salinger’s meticulously built-up wall. The result is the definitive portrait of one of the most fascinating figures of the 20th century.
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Ingenious novel or biography? Hard to tell....
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By: David Shields, and others
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Dear Fahrenheit 451
- Love and Heartbreak in the Stacks
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Librarians spend their lives weeding - not weeds, but books - books that have reached the end of their shelf life both literally and figuratively. They remove books that patrons no longer check out, and they put back books they treasure. Annie Spence, who has a decade of experience as a Midwestern librarian, does this not only at her Michigan library but also at home, for her neighbors, at cocktail parties - everywhere. In Dear Fahrenheit 451, she addresses those books directly.
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Totally captivating
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By: Annie Spence
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Becoming Duchess Goldblatt
- By: anonymous
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Becoming Duchess Goldblatt is two stories: that of the reclusive real-life writer who created a fictional character out of loneliness and thin air, and that of the magical Duchess Goldblatt herself, a bright light in the darkness of social media. Fans around the world are drawn to Her Grace's voice, her wit, her life-affirming love for all humanity, and the fun and friendship of the community that's sprung up around her.
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Oh Dear Duchess!
- By Rebecca Lindroos on 07-20-20
By: anonymous
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The Enchanted Hour
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A Wall Street Journal writer’s conversation-changing look at how reading aloud makes adults and children smarter, happier, healthier, more successful, and more closely attached, even as technology pulls in the other direction.
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advice to take to heart
- By Brian on 04-30-20
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Philip Roth
- The Biography
- By: Blake Bailey
- Narrated by: George Guidall
- Length: 31 hrs and 46 mins
- Unabridged
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"I don't want you to rehabilitate me," Philip Roth said to his only authorized biographer, Blake Bailey. "Just make me interesting." Granted complete independence and access, Bailey spent almost 10 years poring over Roth's personal archive, interviewing his friends, lovers, and colleagues, and listening to Roth's own breathtakingly candid confessions. Tracing Roth's path from realism to farce to metafiction to the tragic masterpieces of the American Trilogy, Bailey explores Roth's engagement with nearly every aspect of postwar American culture.
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moved
- By Michael on 08-18-21
By: Blake Bailey
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Bookworm
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- By: Lucy Mangan
- Narrated by: Lucy Mangan
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When Lucy Mangan was little, stories were everything. They opened up new worlds and cast light on all the complexities she encountered in this one. She was whisked away to Narnia and Kirrin Island and Wonderland. She ventured down rabbit holes and womble burrows into midnight gardens and chocolate factories. She wandered the countryside with Milly-Molly-Mandy and played by the tracks with the Railway Children.
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The author’s sarcasm
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The Last Love Song
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Joan Didion lived a life in the public and private eye with her late husband, writer John Gregory Dunne, whom she met while the two were working in New York City, when Didion was at Vogue and Dunne was writing for Time. They became wildly successful writing partners when they moved to Los Angeles and cowrote screenplays and adaptations together. Didion is well known for her literary journalistic style in both fiction and nonfiction.
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Riveted for 1591 miles
- By Kaysi12 on 04-11-16
By: Tracy Daugherty
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Some Good Ideas
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No one comes out of a movie talking about structure. What audiences love and remember about a movie are great scenes. Marlon Brando in the back seat in On the Waterfront giving his "I could'a been a contender" speech. Meg Ryan's fake orgasm in Katz's Deli in When Harry Met Sally with the climactic punch line: "I'll have what she's having." In Superbad, Jonah Hill professing "I love you" to his friend Michael Cera by touching his nose with a "boop".
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Abridged and censored- not the full book!
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Draft No. 4 is an elucidation of the writer's craft by a master practitioner. In a series of playful but expertly wrought essays, John McPhee shares insights he's gathered over his career and refined during his long-running course at Princeton University, where he has launched some of the most esteemed writers of several generations. McPhee offers a definitive guide to the crucial decisions regarding structure, diction, and tone that shape nonfiction pieces and presents extracts from some of his best-loved work, subjecting them to wry scrutiny.
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McPhee is the Craft
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What listeners say about Writing Life Stories
Average customer ratingsReviews - Please select the tabs below to change the source of reviews.
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- Nicholas T.
- 10-12-24
One of the best books on writing nonfiction
I was not expecting to learn quite so much from this book. It’s already improved my writing, and I will keep going through it again and again.
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- LauraVeronique
- 12-08-23
Why oh why didn’t I find this book 50 years ago?
Bill Roorbach is the writing teacher that I have been looking for since 1970, when Sr. Marie Consolata poisoned my dream of being a writer by accusing me of plagiarism on my Research paper on Macbeth in my junior year in Honors English at Immaculata Preparatory School. She accused me of plagiarism again on my research paper on Hamlet during my senior year at Immaculata Prep. This time, she had also accused the president of the Junior Class of plagiarism on her Macbeth paper. Since I was in a state of shock, all I remember Sister Marie Consolata saying is, “This happens with good students because they retain all that they read.” She dismissed us coldly. Perhaps that was her way of “consoling” us? Too little too late! The damage was done, for that is all she ever said to me about the accusations of plagiarism. After two years in Honors English with Sister Marie Consolata, I left her class traumatized, terrified of writing a single word for fear of being falsely accused of plagiarism again, for I did not understand , never knew what I had written that she thought I had plagiarized. She never explained, and I was too paralyzed with shame and horror to ask her, for English had been my favorite subject since I was five years old, when I learned to read.
Now, 50 years later, after reading Bill Roorbach’s brilliant book, Life Stories: How to Turn Memory into Memoir, Ideas into Essays and Life into Literature, I understand that Sister Marie Consolata never taught me anything about writing, much less how to write research papers on Macbeth and Hamlet. She was not a writing teacher. Bill Roorbach is a writing teacher, a genius of a writing teacher. After listening to his book, I know I can begin to write again, for that has been my dream since I read Little Women, Lord of the Rings and Tess of the D’Urbervilles, when I was in 8th grade at St. Thomas Apostle grade school. Reading saved me, was my escape from a violent, alcoholic stepfather, a broken, complicit immigrant mother, living in isolation and poverty. Books were my sanctuary. I had begun to write poems, short stories, essays- until Sister Marie Consolata punched me in the stomach with her plagiarism accusations, and I stopped breathing, and writing. I had revered her so, yet she betrayed me, and caused so much damage in my life.
Bill Roorbach’s lessons, assignments, advice, encouragement - his writing, has been so healing, the therapy I’ve been searching for all my life, a salve for my wounded soul. If you want to write, or write better, do yourself a favor - buy this book!
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- umaybeme
- 06-29-23
Great!
Covered all aspects of what I wanted, needed, and had no clue. Highly recommend to any person serious about writing… life or otherwise.
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2 people found this helpful