I don’t remember deciding to write a memoir. Famous, accomplished people write memoirs; I am neither. It seems to me the memoir just slipped in while I was actually involved with something else. Several years ago I went to Italy with a group from Arizona State University to study Renaissance art in Florence. I was…
Author: Diane
What made you think there would be readers for your memoir? And why write it so many years after the fact?
Well, of course, I wondered about readers. Would there be any, or should I consider a limited edition of two books only—one for each daughter? But I remembered a maxim from my retailing background, Know your competition. I walked the stacks at the library, looked at shelves in the bookstore and Googled for books about Spain in general…
What kind of research did you do or need, and how did you remember so many details?
I double checked dates. For example, I knew that Franco had died on November 20, 1975, but I couldn’t name the day. When research showed it had been on a Thursday, a school day for my daughters, I felt a flush of details that I would not have remembered otherwise. It turned out the details…
What was the hardest part of this story to write?
In a nutshell, I couldn’t find the through-line. In fact, I didn’t even know the definition of a through-line. According to Writers’ Digest, the through-line creates the forward momentum that makes the story absorbing and the protagonist spring to life. “You’re just writing a bunch of anecdotes,” a writing instructor told me. “Nobody’s going to read a bunch…