All your clear and pleasing sentences will fall apart if you don't keep remembering that writing is linear and sequential, that logic is the glue that holds it together, that tension must be maintained from one sentence to the next and from one paragraph to the next and from one section to the next, and that narrative - good old-fashioned storytelling - is what should pull your readers along without their noticing the tug.

To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

What I want to do is to make people laugh so that they'll see things seriously.

Rewriting is the essence of writing well - where the game is won or lost.

Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.

Don't be kind of bold. Be bold.

Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.