Wendy Dale - Don't Describe Your Life in Your Memoir

This is reminiscent of David Lynch's advice on how to make a movie. Collect ideas, and when you have enough of them, that's a movie! 

See https://www.geniusmemoirwriting.com/.

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So here are some short pieces I wrote at the first Turn Up And Write workshop I went to. We had ten to fifteen minutes to write something.

1. Fishing Alone on the beach

Cold sand on the beach. Early morning and the smell of Feynbos. I'm going fishing. The sound of the waves crashing onto the beach behind the dunes. The cold. So cold. So cold my bare feet ached. It must've been the South-Easter blowing all night. It's refrigerated the sand! I have never felt cold that made me ache before. Is this normal? It must be. To ache, I mean; I know the cold wind isn't normal. The wind blows grains of sand in rivulets over the ripples the receding tide has left in the hard dry sand of the Indian Ocean. The sand! Where has it all come from? So much sand. So much wind. So cold. ...

2. A birthday

The stench of fresh blood. It's all over the place. Blood smells like rust, only it has an edge: rust with a tiny squeeze of lemon. The surgeon reaches down with both of his blue-gloved hands. He reaches down into the pool of bright light and he pulls a baby's head up out of the blood. Just the baby's head, because the rest doesn't want to come out. He pulls harder and the baby's neck is stretched-out, but there's still no body. Then suddenly the little body appears, then the legs. A nurse clips the umbilical cord with a pair of metal clips and ...

3. An arrival

They arrive in the village  at around tea-time. There is the smell of wood-smoke and some children playing on the grass outside one of the houses. People mill around and exchange news with the arrivals. They are all speaking Quechua. He decides to go for a walk. "That's the way to the river" someone says, pointing in the general direction of a road that seems to lead down a hill. "It's quite safe but don't be too long". He walks down past the little pond they call "the lake". The road quickly turns into a forest track that doubles back and forth on itself as it takes him down through the trees to the river. After twenty minutes or so, he can hear the sound of the river. It's several minutes more before he can see the glint of evening sunlight on the eddies made as the water passes over the pebbles of a shady, gently sloping beach. He hasn't seen or heard anyone since leaving the village, but now he can hear movement in the bushes across the river. Movement he can hear, but nothing he can see except the reeds that carpet the far side of the river before they give way to the forest behind. ...

4. A departure

12 December 2096

My dad said that the first asteroid has arrived. I asked him "What is an asteroid?" and he said that it is like a planet, but much much smaller and it doesn't have anything living on it.

I wonder where they're going to put it. My dad said that it was too big to land here. He said it's going to stay in Space. I think that's a bit silly. What's the point of having as asteroid and leaving it in Space?

See the excerpt from Irving Goffman's book Forms of Talk in Toby on The Most Controversial Photograph in Biology and the video introduction Goffman's The Presentation of Self In Everyday Life on Wisteria.