Last week, I led a workshop on memoir writing at a local senior center. Amazing stories came out, funny, sad, and precious. Here’s a variant of an exercise we did that I think would be useful for writers, and just people living in families with people who are not exactly, precisely like ourselves.
HOW DID S/HE GET THAT WAY?
Think of family member (living or dead) with a strong characteristic, positive or negative: generous or stingy; faithful or faithless; hard-working or lazy; honest or sneaky, etc. People say: “Well, X has always been that way.” Answer the following questions, inventing what you don’t know.
- As an example of the characteristic , , ,
- Impact of that characteristic on the family and/or the person’s life:
- Name or invent an incident or a time in the character’s life which may have shaped or created that characteristic.
- S/he was __________ years old and felt . . .
- S/he so wanted . . . .
- At that time, the best course was to . . .
- Later, the characteristic really helped, like when . . .
- But sometimes, there were/are problems, like . . . .
- Something changed when . . .