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    Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir
    Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir
    Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir
    Ebook80 pages1 hour

    Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir

    By Jane Hertenstein

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    About this ebook

    Many of us are looking to write memories—either in the form of literary memoir or simply to record family history. This how-to book looks at memoir in small, bite-size pieces, helping the writer to isolate or freeze-frame a moment and then distill it onto paper.

    Jane Hertenstein is the author of close to 70 published stories, a combination of fiction, creative non-fiction, and blurred genre both micro and macro. In addition she has published a YA novel, Beyond Paradise and a non-fiction project, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady, which garnered national reviews. Jane is a 2-time recipient of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. She also is in demand as a seminar teacher for Flash Memoir. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Hunger Mountain, Rosebud, Word Riot, Flashquake, Fiction Fix, Frostwriting, and several themed anthologies. Jane can be found at http//memoirouswrite.blogspot.com.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherJane Hertenstein
    Release dateOct 27, 2015
    ISBN9781310026003
    Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir
    Author

    Jane Hertenstein

    Jane Hertenstein is the author of over 70 published stories, a combination of fiction, creative non-fiction, and blurred genre both micro and macro. In addition she has published a YA novel, Beyond Paradise, and a non-fiction project, Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady, which garnered national reviews. She is a 2-time recipient of a grant from the Illinois Arts Council. She also is in demand as a seminar teacher for Flash Memoir. Her work has appeared or is forthcoming in: Hunger Mountain, Rosebud, Word Riot, Flashquake, Fiction Fix, Frostwriting, and several themed anthologies. She can be found at http://memoirouswrite.blogspot.com/. Her latest eBook are Freeze Frame: How To Write Flash Memoir and 365 Affirmations for the Writer.

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      Book preview

      Freeze Frame - Jane Hertenstein

      FREEZE FRAME: How to Write Flash Memoir

      Jane Hertenstein

      Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir

      ©2013, Jane Hertenstein

      Smashwords Edition

      This ebook is licensed for your personal enjoyment only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favorite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

      All excerpts used with permission.

      Acknowledgements:

      February 13, 1975 and "June 30, 1974 From Selected Poems by James Schuyler. Copyright © 1988 by James Schuyler. Reprinted by permission of Farrar, Straus and Giroux, LLC.

      How to Write Flash Memoir

      I. Introduction

      In which:

      Memoir is defined

      Memoir is hard to define

      Flash is defined

      Flash is hard to define

      Length varies, depending upon submission guidelines

      II. Memoir-ish

      In which:

      Memory is a long and winding road, so too the memoir

      As proven by the Challenger Study

      What is reality? What is real?

      III. False Memoirs

      In which:

      Poetic License Vs. Outright Lie

      Intentional Deceit

      IV. Literary Devices

      In which:

      Dialogue

      Setting

      Arc

      Voice are discussed

      Also, Get in, Get out, With a Take-Away

      V. Triggers

      In which:

      Sound

      Touch

      Taste

      Visual

      Smell

      VI. Paying Attention: The New York School of Poetry, et al

      In which:

      Kenneth Koch

      Frank O’Hara

      James Schuyler

      Walt Whitman and William Carlos Williams

      Ernest Hemingway

      VII. Publishing Flash

      In which:

      Tips for submission

      What to submit

      Places to submit

      Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir

      Many of us are looking to write memories—either in the form of literary memoir or simply to record family history, in order to pass down stories to children or grandchildren. Writing about the past can be therapeutic, helping us to make sense of the here-and-now. For some, myself included, writing can be the cause of anxiety. I love being in the zone, but hate how overwhelming it is to get organized or to face the blank page.

      In Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir I look at memoir in small, bite-size pieces. When writing memoir I try to isolate or seize a moment and then distill it onto paper or the computer screen.

      More than ever in this digital age readers are getting their material from hand-held devices. Authors need to be aware of how to write for the Web and package their story in order to be read quickly. At the same time we want our stories to stay with a reader long after they’ve powered down.

      Publishers of literary journals are eager for Flash. When I first started submitting to journals, both on-line and print, a short story might take a year of rejections before finding a home. Now, whether flash fiction or flash memoir, the acceptance period has whittled down to as short as one to two months. In one instance—or perhaps the right word would be instant—I submitted and five minutes later received an e-mail reply saying it was just what they were looking for. Tips for submitting flash will also be discussed in this book.

      Keep in mind: Freeze Frame: How to Write Flash Memoir is just one writer’s approach. What I’ve tried to do is de-construct the process I use to stir up memories, write about them, and then go about submitting to journals and anthologies. In one 12-month period I had over 20 flashes accepted. In this how-to book, I will try to take my readers through a number of exercises that I have designed and/or proven helpful in workshops I lead.

      Even if you think you have lived a boring life, all of us have anecdotal moments, snapshots that if freeze-framed and cropped can offer entertainment/education/refuge for fellow readers.

      I. Introduction

      One of your earliest memories is creeping down the stairs with your two brothers and your sister Nancy to see if Santa Claus has come. The corner of the living room is filled with a Christmas tree, under which is a bounty of wrapped packages. You along with your siblings run to the colorful pile and begin the sorting. Mom goads Dad to take pictures, as if the moment is a car careening off a cliff. Quick! Do something! The Brownie camera has a large umbrella appendage that flashes. Poof! You squint, seeing a fairy ring of dancing fireflies. Dad pops the bulb out and tosses it like a hot potato and for some sadistic reason the boys fight to catch it, hands reaching. Steve drops it and Tom picks it up, the flash and heat fading quickly. Fifty years later the toys are gone. Also the house, the parents. So too the photograph. All that is left is the memory. That bright, blinding flash.

      Flash memoir is:

      *A snapshot

      *A sizzling hot bulb

      *Incomplete, totally unreliable

      Memories and fireflies flit about on our retinas like afterglow. By freeze-framing we pick a moment and begin to unravel a story like a loose thread, just enough to let us and our reader know that things are not always what they seem.

      What is Memoir?

      Memoir:

      Mark Twain: When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not . . .

      Anne Sexton: It doesn’t matter who my father was; it matters who I remember he was.

      Will Rogers: When you put down the good things you ought to have done, and leave out the bad ones you did do—that’s a memoir.

      In The Art of Time in Memoir, the critic and essayist Sven Birkerts tells us, Memoir begins not with event but with the intuition of meaning — with the mysterious fact that life can sometimes step free from the chaos of contingency and become story.

      Memoir can be defined as autobiography that uses novelesque or literary devices. Perhaps it is better to say that memoir is autobiography that relies less on chronology

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