Worldbuilding in Memoir: Creating Vivid Worlds that Captivate Your Readers

REGISTER NOW    $25 | Nonfiction

“Worldbuilding” calls to mind fictional settings—Hogwarts, Gatsby’s mansion, Alice’s Wonderland—but creating a vivid world on the page is just as essential in creative nonfiction.

Memoirs offer the unique opportunity to inhabit the inner world of the writer, accessing our deepest thoughts, feelings, and truths. Using hyper-specific detail and sensory images, memoirists can pull readers in, keep them engaged until the final sentence, and make them care about our stories and characters.

This webinar will explore why worldbuilding—both exterior and interior—is important in memoir and provide practical tips for creating memorable worlds that captivate your readers. We’ll look at examples from published memoirs to uncover how evocative settings make us care about a writer’s experience.

In this webinar you will…

• EXPLORE why worldbuilding is so important in memoir. 
• LEARN to apply worldbuilding techniques to your own memoir, including the use of “telling details,” specificity, and the five senses.
• ADDRESS the practical challenges of worldbuilding in memoir, including memory gaps, what details to include vs. not include, and more.

This webinar is ideal for…

• Writers in the process of drafting a memoir.
• Writers revising a memoir and feeling their text could be richer.
• Writers who need help enhancing the “world” of their memoir, both physical settings and the spaces of interiority.

Closed captioning is available ✔
All registrants receive the recording ✔

YOUR PRESENTER

Katie Bannon is a writer, editor, and educator whose work has appeared in The Washington Post, The Rumpus, 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 memoirists and essayists on how to write and revise their most vulnerable, taboo stories. She teaches at GrubStreet and lives in Central Massachusetts with her partner and two cats.

Questions? Please email info@craft-talks.com