Top Highlights

• Your goal in referring to your memories is not writing your autobiography, but rather mining your past for characters and events you can use as part of your fiction, especially those elements that carry an emotional weight and can inject your projects with their energy.
• One way to be more aware of the elements of your life you could use for inspiration is to take a piece of paper, turn it sideways, and draw one column for each decade so far. Now jot down the most important events in each. The first decade would start with your birth and might include your first day at school, the birth of a brother or sister, and ...