The first martini

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Greetings from The San Francisco Writers Conference where hundreds of authors and authors-to-be are milling about. 🍾✍🏽

Lots of memoirists here, and yesterday during a panel, I thought of a practical exercise to help memoir writers learn to put their natural speaking voices on the page.

🍸

Try this:

Pretend you and your best friend are sitting on a very comfortable couch, and you’re well into a martini. (Even if you don’t drink alcohol, you can probably imagine how this can work.)

Now choose a scene or situation from a story you want to tell, and tell it to your best friend using the words you’d use if you were in the headspace of someone into or after after their first martini.

You might be relaxed, disinhibited—maybe animated, full of ideas. There might be laughing, swearing, challenging opinions, slang, expressions that are very much “yours.“

It’s very unlikely you’d use proper, formal language—the kind that makes narrative sound stiff.

And remember to use contractions when you write.

Everybody speaks in contractions (except maybe that scary old headmistress in your historical novel).

Hit record on your phone, and let it rip!