Life writing defintions

Clarity is the foundation of success in any project. If you don’t know what you’re setting out to do, how do you judge whether you achieved your aim.

Life writing instructor, Patti Miller in The Memoir Book gives the following definitions of the different forms of life writing (which she defines as “non-fiction writing on subjects of personal experience and observation; it includes autobiography, biography, memoir, memoirs, personal essay, and travel and sojourn writing”:

• Autobiography: “an account of a whole life – from one’s origins to the present.”
• Biography: “seems clearly enough an account of someone else’s life, although it too can spread out at its edges to include elements of memoir.”
• Memoir: “an aspect of a life shaped by any number of parameters, including time, place, topic, or theme.”
• Memoirs: “about an aspect of a life… but memoirs have come to mean the reminiscences of the famous in relation to their public achievements.”
• Personal essay: “closely related to memoir in that it often includes the writer’s personal memories, but it is quite distinct in that memories are not included for their own sake, but at the service of an idea.”

Miller goes on to say that the skills used to write memoirs can be applied to any of these forms of creative nonfiction.