Martha Alderson
Drawing From Your Life to Create Fiction
March 25, 2022
11 AM PST | 12 PM MST | 1 PM CST | 2 PM EST
From my experience writing fiction and helping writers with plot, I’ve found that memoir writers aren’t the only ones who draw from life to create their stories. All writers do. Write what you know to capture the exact right details, riveting drama, and insightful emotion. At first, that is. Overtime, the more stories we write the less the need to explore and rely on what we know. At some point, imaginations and innate wisdom take over.
Parallel Lives A 60’s Love Story illuminates the ways against all odds two people are destined for each other. I wanted to explore the idea that we encounter the person we love years before actually being introduced, and not just once, but several times. The challenge of plotting two main characters crossing paths during major political events in the San Francisco Bay Area in the 1960s fit me as the Plot Whisperer. Little did I know when I started how personal the novel would become and how much trepidation I felt sharing the novel even with my truth buried in fiction.
Join us as I discuss about what happens when you choose to write fiction drawing from your life – both the impact to you emotionally and to the story structurally.
- Fiction or Memoir
- Buried Secrets
- You Can Hide in Fiction
- Cathartic Release
- Weaving Real Life into a Fiction Plot
- Plotting Character Emotional Development
Bio
MARTHA ALDERSON, MA is the author of the best-selling The Plot Whisperer. She writes novels for readers, plot books for writers, and most recently Boundless Creativity: A Spiritual Workbook for Overcoming Self-Doubt, Emotional Traps, and Other Creative Blocks for anyone looking to enrich their lives with more creativity and inspiration. Her other books are Writing Blockbuster Plots and Writing Deep Scenes, The Plot Whisperer Workbook, The Plot Whisperer Book of Writing Prompts, her novel Parallel Lives: A 60’s Love Story, along with several on-line video programs. She lives and writes in Santa Cruz. Learn more about Alderson on her website, and connect with her on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, and Youtube.
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NAMW
I have been with Martha Alderson for years. She makes writing sound so easy.
When she emailed me about this event for tomorrow, I jumped at the chance to find out more about NAMW. I signed up for the newsletter.
Thanks for the opportunity to work with writer of memoir.
I found reading The Plot Whisper helpful in planning my novel.
I live in Munich, Germany and actually have seen Martha’s bold used by German writers. You are world famous Martha!
Looking forward to the talk