WEBINAR | The Art of Reflection in Memoir: When to Step In and How to Step Out
December 16 @ 3:00 pm – 4:15 pm America/NewYork
Reflection is one of the most powerful techniques in memoir but also one of the most misused. Learn how to craft your insights to deepen the narrative rather than interrupting.
For Memoir
Included in the Season Pass
In a memoir, you’re writing from the future, looking back. That’s the gift of memoir: perspective that your past self didn’t have. But knowing when to use that insight and how much is one of the craft challenges writers struggle with most. Step in too quickly and you flatten the tension. Interpret too much and you rob the reader of the experience. Yet stay too firmly in the past and you’ll lose the meaning the whole story builds toward.
In this webinar, we’ll look closely at what reflection actually does in memoir: how reflective and retrospective narration connects to themes, reveals character growth, and illuminates what couldn’t be known in the moment—and how it can just as easily disrupt a scene, signal a lack of trust in the reader, or become a crutch for scenes that need more work. We’ll read examples from published memoirs to see how skilled writers deploy reflection at exactly the right moment and why it lands.
You’ll leave with a clear framework for evaluating the reflection in your own manuscript: where to cut, where to deepen, and where to let the scene do the work without commentary.
In this webinar, you will:
- EXAMINE the difference between the narrative, reflective, and retrospective voices—and when to use each one.
- LEARN five tools for using reflection effectively, using examples from published memoirs.
- IDENTIFY (and learn to avoid) the most common pitfalls of reflection.
- DISCOVER targeted writing exercises for folding reflection into your narratives.
- DEVELOP an editorial eye to distinguish between reflection that amplifies a scene and reflection that is intrusive or diffuses the tension.
This webinar is ideal for writers
- with a complete or in-progress memoir and are looking to revise
- who’ve been told their manuscript “over-explains” or that readers feel “told rather than shown”
- struggling to know when to let a scene breathe versus when to step in with the narrator’s adult understanding
- whose early drafts are full of meaning-making they know needs to be cut—but aren’t sure what to keep
Closed captioning is available. ✔
All registrants receive the recording. ✔
ABOUT YOUR PRESENTER
Katie Bannon’s teaching is encouraging and practical, with step-by-step guidance and concrete tools. Writers who want to access deep creativity with a solid framework will love her classes!
Katie Bannon is a writer, editor, and educator whose work has appeared in The Rumpus, ELLE Magazine, NPR, Newsweek, Narratively, and more. Her memoir manuscript, which charts her journey as a compulsive hair puller, was a finalist for the Permafrost Nonfiction Book Prize. A graduate of GrubStreet’s Memoir Incubator, she holds an MFA in Creative Nonfiction from Emerson College. She is a developmental editor who loves working with nonfiction writers to find the “story” behind the “situation” of their memoirs and essays. She lives in the Boston area with her husband and two cats. Find Katie at www.katiebannon.com
REFUNDS (less a $10 processing fee) ARE AVAILABLE before the replay is sent out. For a refund, EMAIL us at info@WritingCraft.com. Canceling your Zoom invite will not initiate this process.
There are no refunds after the replay is sent.
Questions? Please email Info@writingcraft.com
