Breathe Life into Your Life Story: How to Write a Story People Will Want to Read (Paperback)

~ (Author), Morris Thurston (Author)

Editorial Reviews

Product Description

Breathe Life into Your Life Story is an essential read for anyone who aspires to write a life story--but not just any story, one your family and others will actually WANT to read.

Written for both novices and experienced writers, this book presents techniques used by novelists to immerse readers in their fictional world--techniques like "showing" rather than just "telling"; creating interesting, believable characters and settings; writing at the gut level; alternating scene and narrative; beginning with a bang; generating tension, and more.

Excerpts from memoirs written by such pros as Maya Angelou, Frank McCourt, Russell Baker, and many others illustrate how best-selling authors have used these methods to hook their readers. Dozens of "Learn by Doing" exercises help readers practice and acquire the skills necessary to breathe life into their own stories

About the Author

Dawn Thurston, a graduate of UCLA, teaches writing at Santiago Canyon College in Orange, California, and has helped hundreds of students write their personal histories. She has published a history of her own Scottish grandparents, and her articles have appeared in various publications. With her husband, Morris, she has developed a popular workshop on writing family histories. Morris Thurston, a graduate of BYU and Harvard Law School, is a retired senior partner in the law firm of Latham & Watkins. He is currently a volume editor for the Joseph Smith Papers Project and an adjunct professor at BYU Law School. His biography of a great-great-grandfather, Tora Thurston: The History of a Norwegian Pioneer, won the Dallas Genealogical Society's biography award.

Product Details

• Paperback: 213 pages
• Publisher: Signature Books (July 1, 2007)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1560850949
• ISBN-13: 978-1560850946
• Product Dimensions: 8.9 x 7 x 0.8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 14.4 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.9 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (9 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #653,692 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Really Excellent Book!, August 6, 2007

By	B. Copeland "B.C." (California) - See all my reviews (REAL NAME)

Where will your memories go when you're gone? If you follow the suggestions in this book, you'll pass them on in a lively form that people will want to read! Moreover, those readers will have a strong sense of your life: what happened to you, how you felt about it, and what you stood for.

This book is fast-paced and fun. Easy-to-follow discussions, examples and learn-by-doing exercises help you organize and write your story. Large margins livened by quotations, titles, and drawings make it easy to refer back after you've finished reading a section - a real plus for seniors!

Breathe Life into Your Life Story will show you how to use fiction-writer techniques to capture and keep reader interest. You'll bring your characters to life by letting them speak for themselves. It'll teach you to write so your readers visualize people and places exactly the way you see them in your mind's eye. Best of all, it will help you write in your own personal voice, and the honesty of that voice will touch your reader's heart.

6 of 6 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars How to Write a Story People Will Want to Read, August 7, 2007

By	drtg (Arizona United States) - See all my reviews

The Thurstons have written a clever and lively how-to book with the tasty subtitle "How to Write a Story People Will Want to Read." This is harder than you may imagine. Even the most interesting life can be written in a dull, lifeless way. The Thurstons want all of us to know that there are techniques that can be learned, and practiced, in pursuit of a lively, readable story.

Much as an exercise instructor teaches his student to breathe and bend, to twist and turn, the authors transform the awesome task of writing into a series of rhetorical exercises. Step by step, they lead the prospective writer through the steps of building a proficiency in telling the story. They detail the pitfalls many writers face, and explain how to move from envisioning your project to bringing it to completion.

Each lesson has a "Learn by Doing" exercise, designed to hone the skills taught and to give the writer the confidence to move on to the next step in the writing. In the margins are quick inspirations and, at times, hilarious observations by writers we know and respect. ...

Finally, ... the authors take a holistic approach to writing. They insist, and I agree, that one's entire life must go into the project. People who read your life's history want to relive that life with you. They want to walk where you walked, even breathe the air you breathed, as much as is possible through the medium of the printed page. The authors are relentless in pushing the aspiring writer into achieving a great victory over the fear and uncertainty that face new writers.

"Breathe Life into Your Life Story" is a great introduction to writing that even experienced authors will find helpful.... Maybe we should be aiming at developing the confidence, and the skills, required to pen an exciting autobiography. This book is an excellent place to start. It is highly recommended.

4 of 4 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Fun Read; A Great Gift!, August 6, 2007

By	Thor (California) - See all my reviews

This book SHOWS how to write an interesting life story. If you're not particularly famous, you may wonder whether your story is worth telling. Yet, as the authors point out, many of today's most popular memoirs are written by people who are otherwise fairly anonymous--who manage to create fascinating stories out of everyday lives. This book examines how they do it.

This is a great gift for a parent or other relative whose life story you would like to read. It is constantly encouraging and is written in an easy-to-read, straightforward way. It is a fun book to browse. The artwork by Amy Hadley is catchy and appropriate and there are dozens of wonderful quotes in the extra-wide margins about writing.

If you are reading the other reviews on this book, you should be aware that Amazon seems to have mistakenly appended several reviews that do not pertain to this book. Just ignore the reviews that deal with Mormon philosophy. This is NOT a Mormon book (not that there is anything wrong with that, as Jerry Seinfeld might say) -- IT IS A BOOK ABOUT WRITING!