Write Your Life into a Story

Barbara Abercrombie blogs weekly advice and inspiration for writers, plus anecdotes from her life as a writer on writingtime.typepad.com. She has taught award winning creative writing courses in the Writers' Program at UCLA Extension for the past twenty years and also conducts private writing retreats.

Her fourteenth book, A Year of Writing Dangerously: 365 Days of Inspiration and Encouragement, will be published by New World Library in 2012. Barbara's most recent books have been Courage & Craft: Writing Your Life Into Story, and an essay anthology, Cherished: 21 Writers on Animals They Have Loved & Lost (featuring Anne Lamott, Jane Smiley, Mark Doty etc.).

Story Writing Articles and Book Excerpts by Barbara Abercrombie

Personal Essays: Short Takes
By Barbara Abercrombie
The trivia of life, the moments of crazed frustration, the small flashes of amazement and understanding are as much the subjects for personal essays as the milestones. Excerpted from Courage and Craft: Writing Your Life into a Story (New World Library, 2007).

Writing: Just Do It
By Barbara Abercrombie
So you’re sitting there reading this, your screen aglow, computer humming, and maybe you’re thinking someday I’ll start writing.

Writing Your Own History
By Barbara Abercrombie
There are lots of ways to write your own history. You can buy a notebook and simply start writing down memories. Or you could exchange regular e-mails with a friend who also wants to write.

Digging Truthfully Into Your Own Life for Personal Non-Fiction
By Barbara Abercrombie
We write personal non-fiction — essays, memoir and autobiography — not to gaze at our belly buttons and muse over how wonderful or awful our lives are, but to put down our own small, individual truth.

Numbers
By Barbara Abercrombie
I realize there’s comfort in numbers for writers. Carolyn See tells writers to write 1,000 words five days a week and one “charming note”. Ray Bradbury says to write 1,000 to 2,000 words everyday for the next twenty years. ... We all have a magic number, a formula for you.

Keeping a Journal to Form a Writing Habit
By Barbara Abercrombie
Most everyone has heard about the emotional and health benefits you get from keeping a journal; writing about feelings and traumatic events is good for you.