Autobiography narrative topics for teens

Some memoirists send drafts of their work to loved ones, or even not-so-loved ones, and where there’s a response alter their writing as a result.

Others see no need for consultation.

Autobiography narrative topics for teens

Either way, when writing about your own life, it’s important to get the monkeys off your shoulder – to be uninhibited by the possible fallout of your words. You can worry about other people later, when you’re editing. In mid-flow, you need the illusion of privacy, not to be anticipating people’s reactions (which are in any case unpredictable).

Most self-censorship is cowardly. In Elizabeth’s Strout’s My Name Is Lucy Barton, the writing tutor Sarah says: “If you find yourself protecting anyone as you write … remember this: you’re not doing it right.”

Everyone has a book in them, it’s said, but as Martin Amis noted in his memoir Experience(2000), what everyone seems to have in them “is not a novel but a memoir … We are all writing it or at any rate talking it