July  26 Member Teleseminar

11 AM PDT   12 PM MDT   1 PM CDT   2 PM EDT

The common denominator in both fiction and memoir is writing “essential truth”: constructing your story’s plot and emotional current so readers experience the essential emotional truth of the story.

This one-hour teleseminar will address the ethics and some of the writing techniques of using actual events, people, and places as part of your fiction writing and altering real-life circumstances, people, or events in memoir writing.

In this teleseminar we’ll explore the following topics:

• Avoiding the big memoir no-no: Using fictional writing techniques as differentiated from “fictionalizing.”
• Is there a difference between “fact” and “truth” in memoir? When does using fictional elements go too far? When is alteration appropriate and ethical?
• Do you want—or need—to stand behind the “fictional wall” with your memoir story?  (Really, it’s okay if you do.)  
• Becoming the best kind of thief: Robbing your real life experiences to inform or inspire your fiction.
• Avoiding the Oprah Confessional as well as law suits:  Learning from the errors of others.

• ·         What am I writing here?  Examining your goals for writing your story as memoir or fiction. 

Betsy’s website:  www.betsygrazianifasbinder.com

Betsy’s Bio: 

In both her works of memoir and fiction, Betsy Graziani Fasbinder explores the unending complications of people living, working, and loving one another.  As a practicing therapist for more than twenty years, she has been witness to the heartbreak, healing, and heroism of people from all walks of life. She strives to create stories that bring the emotional truths she’s experienced and observed to the pages in all of her writing. She’ll be addressing the issues of truth and fiction as a breakout speaker at the San Miguel de Allende, Mexico Writers Conference in February 2014.

Betsy’s debut novel, Fire & Water, was released by She Writes Press in March of 2013. Betsy is the co-producer of the highly successful Women’s Writing Salon in Nevada County a quarterly event that has for more than five years celebrated the too-often-unheard voices of women writers. She’s currently designing a writing Salon for Marin County, California called “Words Off Paper” which will launch in fall of 2013.

Betsy is currently working on a collection of personal essays titled Filling Her Shoes: My Love Story of Inherited Motherhood. Crush is Betsy’s novel in progress and its California’s wine country setting is making for some delightful research.