Writing Life Stories

This is one of the best books on writing that I have collected. Roorbach includes information along with exercises the reader can perform to learn and later improve his/her own stories. I bought several copies of his book to give to member of a writing group that I belonged to. Good job, Bill. A-12

Bill Roorbach is a chatty writer: his instruction is informal, colloquial, abounding in parenthetical remarks and droll asides. But Roorbach (Summers with Juliet) seems able to inspire even the most recalcitrant writers to uncover memories and ideas they didn't know they had and turn them into something the rest of us would want to read. An early exercise in Writing Life Stories involves making a map of the earliest neighborhood you can remember: "Where did the weird people live?" Roorbach asks. "Where were the off-limits places?" And then, "Tell us a story from your map." Many of the book's subsequent assignments are equally enticing.

Roorbach elaborates on the many elements involved in writing creative nonfiction, including memory, scene setting, ideation, character development, and research. He eschews introductions and conclusions (scaffolding, he says, is for building purposes only) and, "at least in a first draft," embraces truth-telling. "Those places where you catch yourself changing the facts," he warns, "should be alarms, grand signals, signposts saying here's the place to examine most closely for meaning."

Though his writing may be casual, Roorbach is a great believer in precision. "Every person you mention," he says, "should get a quick, sharp, devastatingly exact sketch" (for examples, he refers to the minor characters in books by Paul Theroux, Joan Didion, and John McPhee). Ambiguity, he says, is anathema: "Do what it takes to properly name a tree, a piece of hardware, a street, a town, a school, a neighbor." And finally, be wary of polishing--"you can spend days adjusting sentences in a first paragraph that ought to be cut altogether"--but make sure every paragraph in your memoir or essay is as good as, has as much "urgency" as, the first one. "How much can you get into a sentence?" he asks. "How much can you get into every sentence?" --Jane Steinberg