Teaching a group of individuals how to write their life stories can be a fun and rewarding experience. Here are a few tips to get you started.
Research
The first thing you will want to do when you are teaching a memoir writing workshop is to do your research. Go to your bookshelf and take down a few of your most favorite memoirs and do a quick study of each one. What is it that you like about them? What does each author use as a starting and ending point? These are just some of the aspects of this work that you will want to take a look at, and that can gives you ideas to pass on to your students if they feel stuck. You might also want to take a look at one or two of the many books out there that center on the craft of memoir writing. There are many tips and tricks specific to this genre that you will want to familiarize yourself with.
Confidentiality
Because of the extremely personal nature of this type of writing, you never know what your students might want to bring up about their lives during discussions and in their written pieces. In order to help create an atmosphere in which your students feel they can say whatever it is they need to say about their lives, you should draw up a confidentiality agreement, and have each student sign it. The point is to get your students to both agree to open up their lives, and to allow their fellow students to do so safely.
Teaching vs. Guiding
When people start to talk about their own lives, as we said before, you just never know what direction they are going to go in. While that sort of freedom can be a great thing in the right circumstance, it can also lead your class astray unless you start it off with some sort of lesson plan. While you don’t want to ride herd over the creative process, you do want to make sure that you give your students specific guidelines during each lesson and let them take it from there.
Remember that one of your many duties is that of “guide.” When a student starts careening off into a different direction that you had intended the lesson to go, you can do one of two things: either let it go and see where it leads the class, or firmly but gently lead to discussion back to what your lesson plan intended. There is a time and a place for each, and you should be open to both. You should be able to tell by the reaction of the rest of your students which direction your discussion is intended to go.
Make an Anthology
One thing that will make your class truly memorable is to create a hardcover book that contains each of your students’ work. You can either send it away to one of several websites that do this sort of printing, or get your own binding machine. Thermal binding machines (the kind that do hardcover and softcover binding) are inexpensive and incredibly easy to use, so you can even have one on hand and make it a part of the workshop.