Write Your Life’s Stories

Memoir is a unique and approachable form that invites you to transform your life experiences into art—with creative freedom, emotional depth, and narrative drive. In this course, I’ll teach the things I wish I’d learned in a graduate MFA program—techniques and insights drawn from my years as a memoir ghostwriter and book reviewer. Whether you’re writing a full-length memoir or a series of personal essays, you’ll gain practical tools to shape your stories with clarity, structure, and meaning.

Each session will include a short reading, a discussion of form and style, and a guided writing prompt designed to help you generate and refine material for your memoir. We’ll explore how to select which stories to tell, how to shape them for the page, and how to balance honesty, craft, and reflection. You’ll leave with new pages, fresh insights into your own story, and the confidence to keep shaping your personal narrative.

Like any good novel, a well-written memoir has a clear story structure and connectivity between scenes, memorable characters, and a narrator who changes in some way by the end. We’ll look at the work of both memoirists and fiction writers, such as Mary Karr, Anne Patchett, Frank McCourt, Leslie Jamison, Michelle Zauner, David Sedaris, Jacques Pépin, and others. By closely examining how they use structure, scene, and voice, you’ll learn how to bring similar narrative momentum and cohesion to your own work—crafting stories that feel alive, connected, and emotionally resonant.

This course is open to beginning and intermediate writers alike. You’ll explore which stories you want to tell—and how best to tell them—while building confidence, deepening your practice, and writing in community with others in a supportive, generative space.

Who this class is for

You’ve got so many interesting stories to tell — but where to start? How should you assemble these stories? In what format? This beginning-to-mid level class is for anyone who’s ever been told, “You should write your life story.” Perhaps you’ve got a few stories written, an incomplete outline, a chunk of a draft, and you’re ready to start getting things into a more cohesive shape.

Learning Goals

In this course, you will: 

• Learn new tools for getting started on one or more of your life’s stories.
• Understand “the point” of each scene or story you’re telling.
• Better understand the meaning behind your words.
• Develop or strengthen your regular writing practice.

Writing Goals

• Write and edit at least one scene or story
• Draft an online
• Write character sketches for each main character in your stories — including you!
• Have community with other writers of all levels in a safe writing space!

Zoom Schedule

Each week, we will meet on Zoom on Wednesdays from 3-5PM Eastern. 

Weekly Syllabus

Week 1 – Intro to Memoir

We’ll look at plot, aboutness and three examples of compelling back of the book summaries to use as guides. We’ll end this session with a short writing activity to help express what your life stories are about.

Assignment: Write your “back of the book” summary.

Week 2 – A closer look at aboutness in memoir.

We’ll read the opening of two different memoirs and talk about how the writer brings us in right away with some kind of curiosity.

In-class writing prompt about your one of your stories.

Assignment: Write your reverse engineered outline and read an essay by Samantha Kirby.

Week 3 – Stakes in story!

Every good story has at least a little something at stake. Together we’ll examine the stakes from a Samantha Kirby essay and reflect on how the story was structured, then talk about one of your stories.

Assignment: Refine your story with new insights.

Week 4 – Dialogue and perspective in memoir and personal essay!

Today we’ll look at how dialogue can function in creative nonfiction and how we can create richer characters by showing (not telling) who they are.

Assignment: Add and/or edit the dialogue in one of your scenes. Also, read an essay from Ann Patchett.

Week 5 – Unique format and using “other” media in storytelling.

We’ll look at an example of how to incorporate other characters’ voices and quotes in your stories, and do an overview of character sketches in personal stories.

Assignment: Write at least two character sketches for the main “characters” in your story, starting with yourself.

Week 6 – Character Sketches and Editing Techniques

Today we’ll talk character sketches and revisit how to write a stronger “about.” We’ll also talk about some of my favorite editing techniques to use along the way and after your first (and second, and third) drafts. We’ll end by setting up optional accountability partners to keep the momentum going beyond the class!

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$445.00 Original price was: $445.00.$380.00Current price is: $380.00.Enroll Now