In 2022, my memoir Dare to Dance was finally published after a 7-year writing journey.
When I moved to Northern NSW in 2023, after 15 years in Sydney, I started journaling on my journey and gathering content for another memoir. For a long time, I didn't know where it would lead me and I just kept journaling. But then, in 2024, another writer mentioned casually to look into memoirs in essays. I was intrigued and started looking into it more closely. I read You Could Make This Place Beautiful, Late Migrations and These Precious Days.
Memoir in Essays
At the end of last year, I attended a two-week workshop with Margo Steines, author of Brutalities, which helped me clarify the timeline of my memoir narrative and related themes for essays.
Finishing the first draft of 'Waltzing Through Midlife'–my working title–is one of my projects for 2025. To keep momentum, I signed up for a 6-week memoir writing workshop starting at the end of January.
Revisiting all that I have learned in the past ten years about memoir writing shows that nothing is wasted.
The Benefits of Writers' Festivals
In 2015, the year I started creative writing, I visited the Sydney Writers’ Festival, a great opportunity to improve your writing skills mingle with authors, journalists, and readers at one of the diverse panel discussions.
I attended the workshop Starting From Place, which looked at how setting, or place, influences the main character’s identity and behaviour. Places shape people – a saying that I tried to explore more in my writing: How did the places I lived, or visited, shape me as a child, teenager, and adult? A question, I admit, I had not investigated in detail before. One of the course outcomes that struck me most was that a place can become a character in itself.
Use Wide-Angle Shots
Originally, my intention was to attend the workshop and then write about some of the countries I had visited on holidays. Back home in front of my computer, I realised that there were many places in my life – starting with my family home – that influenced who I am today. So no need to travel far and wide.
With my workshop materials next to me I started re-reading pieces that I had written – and realised how much more specific I can describe ordinary places. Specificity and writing less were the two most important outcomes of this workshop for me. I started working more on my relationships to certain places analysing conflict and harmony.
‘Like film directors, good writers know how to zoom in and out of a scene. Summaries – or wide-angle shots – can be useful to describe a transition in your life. I used this technique to lead into 1998 and 2008 – the two years I had identified as major turning points in my life.
Apart from this hands-on workshop I spent the final day at Walsh Bay to listen to a few panel discussions with authors. Although marked as ’Sold out’ on the website, I went to the box office on site and asked for tickets to a couple of panel discussions that appealed to me. “You are lucky,” the lady in the box office said, ”I have a few tickets left.” An hour later, I was sitting in the front row of the Richard Wherrett Studio in the Roslyn Packer Theatre to listen to Looking Inwards. Writing Out, a panel discussion about memoir writing with Patti Miller, Kate Howarth and Alan Sampson, the winner of the Finch Memoir Prize 2015. I especially liked Patti Miller's explanation that her memoirs are not about her, but rather a reflection of her sense of self, identity, and belonging. An exploration of how she perceives the world.
Become an Observer
This made me think about how important the places and settings are that influenced my life. And that I need to explore my relationship with these places more deeply, to describe them more specifically. The most interesting thing I realised when researching my past is that I stepped away from being the main character of my life and rather became an observer – looking at my life from a bird’s perspective. This is a very powerful and healing process, as it helped me to understand how events from the past relate to what I do now.
What is your life writing journey?
