[Watch the video interview on YouTube here]
Film Courage: Tony, I know you help people with screenwriting, fiction writing, and I believe even memoir writing.
What do you see with a lot of new writers who come to you and say, “I want to write a memoir.”
What mistakes do they often make in the beginning wanting to write a memoir?
Tony DuShane, Writer/Podcaster/Teacher: If they haven’t been writing, that’s what’s a big mistake.
They need to be writing and in the process of practicing writing.
If they’ve been doing that, then they might find a way to hit a memoir.
Memoirs, I think it’s trickier than fiction, because you really have to pull the reader in and learn the craft.
I feel like there’s a few memoirists that have done that really well over the years.
And there’s too many that get out there that are like just kind of have …And this happened and then we went here.
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To really craft a memoir, you have to craft the character that is you and also be the memo not be such a journalistic approach either.
It’s like let go a little bit.
Put two characters together, have the little James Frey disclaimer in the front.
I don’t know if you remember James Frey, A Million Little Pieces was that his book and he was on Oprah Book Club and then all of a sudden they denounced him because everything was fabricated and he did fabricate way too much.
But at the same time, I think you need to fabricate some in memoir in order to get the emotional truth of the story.
But the I feel like the better way to do that, which is how I handled Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk, which was actually started as a memoir.
Then I made it a novel, but there’s still it’s probably 60% absolute truth of things that happened…(Watch the video interview on YouTube here).
Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk by Tony DuShane –
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BIO:
Tony DuShane is the author of the semi-autobiographical novel Confessions of a Teenage Jesus Jerk. He adapted the screenplay for director Eric Stoltz, and the film is now available on Amazon Prime. His journalism and essays have appeared in The Los Angeles Times, Mother Jones, Penthouse, The Believer, and other media outlets. DuShane has hosted the author interview show Drinks with Tony since 2002.
He teaches novel and screenwriting at UCLA Extension.
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