From drawing a map of a remembered neighborhood to signing a form releasing yourself to take risks in your work, Roorbach offers innovative techniques that will trigger ideas for all writers.
Writing Life Stories is a classic text that appears on countless creative nonfiction and composition syllabi the world over. This updated 10th anniversary edition gives you the same friendly instruction and stimulating exercises along with updated information on current memoir writing trends, ethics, internet research, and even marketing ideas. You'll discover how to turn your untold life stories into vivid personal essays and riveting memoirs by learning to open up memory, access emotions, shape scenes from experience, develop characters, and research supporting details.
This guide will teach you to see your life more clearly and show you why real stories are often the best ones.
In The Girl of the Lake, Bill Roorbach conjures vivid, complex characters whose layered interior worlds feel at once familiar and extraordinary. Among the unforgettable characters Roorbach creates are an adventurous boy who learns what courage really is when an aging nobleman recounts history to him; a couple hiking through the mountains whose vacation and relationship ends catastrophically; a teenager being pursued by three sisters all at once; a tech genius who exacts revenge on his wife and best friend over a stolen kiss from years past; and many more. These stories are as rich in scope, emotional, and unforgettable as Bill Roorbach's novels.
They're calling it the "Storm of the Century," so Eric stops at the market for provisions on his way home from work. But when the unkempt and seemingly unstable young woman in front of him in line comes up short on cash, charity takes hold of his heart-twenty bucks and a ride home is the least he can do under the circumstances.
The trouble is, Danielle doesn't really have a home. She's squatting in a cabin deep in the woods with no electricity, no heat, and nothing but the nearby river to sustain her. Eric tries to walk away, but she's his problem now-what if something happens to her? Would it be on his conscience? She'll need food, water, firewood, and that's just to get her through the storm-there's a whole Maine winter ahead. She clearly doesn't realize the trouble she's in. But neither does Eric; the snow is coming down with historic speed and violence.
After Eric gets Danielle set up, he trudges back to the road to retrieve his car, only to find it has been towed ahead of the expected plows-with his cell phone inside. He has no choice but to return to the cabin. As the snow keeps mounting and drifting, they're forced to ride out the storm together, for better and for worse.
Intensely moving and frequently funny, The Remedy for Love is a harrowing story about the truths we reveal when there is no time or space for artifice.
At seventeen, David "Lizard" Hochmeyer is nearly seven feet tall, a star quarterback, and Princeton-bound. His future seems all but assured until his parents are mysteriously murdered, leaving Lizard and his older sister, Kate, adrift and alone. In a mansion across the pond from their Connecticut home lives the world's greatest ballerina, Sylphide, and her rock star husband, whose own disasters intersect with Lizard's, and Kate's, in the most intimate and surprising ways.
Over the years that follow, Lizard and Kate are obsessed with piecing together the motives behind their parents' deaths, returning time and again to their father's missing briefcase, his shady business dealings and shaky finances, and to Sylphide, who has threaded her way into Lizard's and Kate's lives, much more deeply than either had ever realized. From the football fields of Princeton to a stint with the NFL, from the elaborate dances at the mansion to the gourmet restaurant he opens, it only takes Lizard a lifetime to set things right again.
