Applause for the Memoir Writer

Bringing Your Memoir to the Stage Is Easier Than You Think

   If you come to Los Angeles hoping to visit Hollywood, the place where movies are made, you may run into a small problem: you won’t find it.

The Hollywood sign is there. Hollywood Boulevard is definitely there. But that enormous place called “Hollywood,” where the movies are made? No.

The film industry is nowhere and everywhere at the same time, which may explain why it is so difficult to get into it. It’s hard to knock on a door when you can’t find the building.

           Theater is different. Theater has a place. It has a stage. It has people. Sometimes it’s a professional theater; sometimes it’s a community theater, a school auditorium, a church hall, a library, or somebody’s living room. The principle is wonderfully simple: some people perform, other people watch. And you can walk in. So let’s use that!

          Wherever you live, some form of theater is probably happening nearby. And don’t think “real theater” means Broadway. Theater, like writing, singing, dancing, painting, and playing music, has been part of ordinary human life for thousands of years.

          Before you start writing, look around. What kind of theater exists where you live? Is there a school theater? A community theater? Does a local church put on plays? What about a college, library, or community center? Do you know a director? An actor? Someone who has always wanted to act and is simply waiting for somebody to ask?

          Find out everything you can about the theatrical life around you. Then go back to your memoir and ask a different question: Is there one story in it that could happen on one of those stages? Could it actually be performed, and who could perform it? Famous playwrights have usually written for theaters they knew and actors they knew. You can do the same. If you can picture the people and the place, it becomes much easier to choose the right story from your memoir.

          And yes, I said one story. Not your entire life. Choose one main story. Ideally, give it one main location, perhaps one or two additional locations, and a limited period of time. You still need conflict and a convincing ending, but theater gives you something film usually gives you much less of: time to talk. Your characters can talk about their feelings. They can remember. They can argue. They can tell each other about something that happened twenty years ago. Two people can sit at a kitchen table and talk for ten minutes. And you can add drama as much as you like. This is theater, after all.

          Don’t worry too much about professional play formatting at first. Start with characters, scenes, and dialogue. And don’t begin with a three-hour historical epic involving thirty-seven members of your extended family. Start smaller, aim for about 40–60 pages. That can give you a play of roughly an hour. You can devote that entire hour to one event and explore it in detail, with all the emotion it deserves.

           Once you have written your play, it is time to do something wonderfully old-fashioned: physically walk into a theater. Be your own producer, after all. Show your play to people who are involved in theater. Take the initiative. Bring some people together and read it aloud. If that goes well, try putting it on. You may discover that making theater is every bit as much fun as watching it. And there is one thing a play can give you that a book usually can’t: applause. Sometimes we all need it.

            If that sounds like too much social life, write a one-person play, and perform it yourself. Find a director, or someone who would like to try directing, and take your play to a library or community center. Do it once. Do it five times. Do it whenever you can find an audience.

            And if even that feels too brave, don’t leave the house. Bring the theater home. Write a short play about something that happened when your children were little. Print out the parts. The next time the whole family is together for Thanksgiving, hand your now-grown children the script and let them play themselves as kids. Or give the parts to your grandchildren and let them play their parents. I am sure that children would love playing their parents as kids, especially if you make it funny.

          And then the life you lived, and later wrote about, will come alive again, this time in the voices and laughter of your grandchildren.

           A memoir is a book about life. And theater has always been part of our lives. Bringing the two together can be surprisingly easy and a lot of fun. There are probably a hundred other ways to do it, but I’m not going to list them for you. If you managed to write a memoir, you already have enough imagination, determination, and courage to come up with a few of your own great ideas.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2026.  All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.

Your Life Is a Movie. Almost.

Six Things to Do BEFORE Turning Your Memoir Into a Screenplay

Memoirs are an incredible source of unique, moving, deeply personal stories - stories, written by life itself. The author lived through these events, and is telling us about their own experience. What could be more cinematic? It’s like being inside a tornado and taking notes on everything you see. Is it worth trying to turn all that into a screenplay? Absolutely.

But wait. Don’t download Final Draft yet.

Here are six things you need to do BEFORE that.

Watch some biopics. With a stopwatch.

Watch a few good biopics and pay attention to how they move through time. Flashbacks? Interviews? Memories? An old photograph that suddenly transports us to 1973? Then pick one and watch it with a stopwatch.

A screenplay page is roughly one minute of screen time, and most feature scripts are around 90–100 pages. Find a few professional screenplays online and look at them. There are very few words on those pages. No long explanations of what someone feels or remembers. Mostly: what we see, what happens, what people say.

Now time a scene. Two minutes? Congratulations. You have approximately two pages. This is the first unpleasant discovery: there is no way to fit absolutely everything in your memoir. So stop thinking like the person who lived it. You are now sitting in a movie theater with popcorn. What would you actually want to watch?

Decide what movie you’re making.

A life lived is not automatically a movie. Annoying, but true. Even biopics that cover an entire life usually have one central event or period holding everything together. Ask people who have read your memoir what they think the most important event is. Their answers may surprise you. 

Pick a few possibilities and ask yourself which one already has a beginning, conflict, and ending, and which one you would actually pay to see. That can become your main story. Everything else can be introduced with memories and flashbacks.

You can also tell the story chronologically.  That works, too. But you will probably need some device that lets you travel through time without making the audience feel like they are watching a very long PowerPoint presentation: an interview, a conversation, a photograph, a newspaper article, a memory.

If you choose this route, decide where the movie ends before deciding everything that comes before it. Your ending may tell you what the movie is actually about.

Make a pile of tiny stories.

Take every event you think belongs in the movie and give it one page. Maximum.

Beginning. Something happens. Ending.

That page should tell us what happened, why it matters to the character, and how it connects to the larger story.

Now you have a pile of little stories. Look at them. Some should be tragic. Some frightening. Some romantic. And please, some should be funny. Even tragic lives contain funny stories. Human beings are inconvenient that way.

If your main story is the spine of the movie, keep the memories and flashbacks that connect to it. If you’re telling the story chronologically, keep the events that move us toward your chosen ending. You can save a few tiny atmospheric memories simply because you love them. Keep them under a minute. And start cutting. You will be doing a lot of that.

Now cut the people.

This part may feel slightly criminal.

You cannot bring everyone from your memoir into the movie. Choose a small group of people who matter throughout the story.

Sometimes you may even have to give something that happened with Person A to Person B, simply because the audience already knows Person B and has feelings about them.

Yes, that means the movie may not be literally accurate in every detail. The audience will survive. What matters is that they have enough time with your characters to love them, hate them, fear for them, miss them, anything except wonder: Wait, who is this again?

Try your stories on actual humans.

Memoir is literature. Screenwriting is drama. Drama has one particularly cruel feature: the audience is sitting there while you are doing it.

Think of telling a story at a party. Someone laughs: good. Someone leans closer: excellent. Someone checks their phone: trouble. Three people suddenly need drinks: serious trouble.

Take some of your one-page stories and tell them to friends. Don’t begin with, “This is incredibly important because…” Just tell the story. Watch what happens.

The stories that make people genuinely want to know what happens next are probably the ones worth keeping.

Tell the entire movie in 3–5 pages.

Eventually, if you want producers to read your screenplay, you will encounter loglines, synopses, treatments, and several other documents, apparently invented to prevent writers from enjoying themselves. Ignore them for now.

There is one thing I never start a screenplay without doing: I tell the entire movie as a simple story in three to five pages. Beginning to end. Writing a memoir is a little like painting a beautiful house in watercolor. A screenplay is closer to the engineering plan for that house. Before you start building, you need to know what holds it up.

So write the whole movie as a short story. See where it begins. See where it ends. See which events suddenly look unnecessary when you only have five pages. This is hard. Much harder than it sounds. But if you can make the whole movie work in a few pages, you can make it work as a screenplay too. 

The next two steps: write the screenplay, then write your Oscar speech. Although you can start with the speech…

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2026.  All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.

Pay It Forward

By Natalia

In high school, I loved theater. But my friend Tatiana? She loved mathematics and literature. She knew that I was always writing something, usually some kind of nonsense. One day, she invited me to a literary workshop run by her father, who was a poet. She went there because she was friends with the group and wrote poetry herself. I went out of curiosity. I didn’t connect my life with writing in any serious way. I was planning to become a theater director.

At that first meeting, I saw young poets for the first time. Some were my age, some older. They were all strange, very different from theater kids. There was a large table in the room, and everyone sat around it. One by one, they read their new poems. Tatiana’s father, V.A. Leykin, sat at the head of the table with his arms crossed and his head lowered. Sometimes he closed his eyes. Sometimes he covered them with his hand. He listened very carefully. Afterward, he spoke about the poems, pointed to specific lines, and said what he liked.

At the end, I expected him to assign homework or explain something. Instead, he read the newest poems he’d written. Then, his students would tell him their thoughts. He was a teacher and an authority, and at the same time, simply one of them. A poet among poets. Old enough to be their father, but not separated from them.

I didn’t dare read anything of my own. Their poems were serious and deep. I was writing funny sketches, small absurd plays. I felt like a stranger in this world of poetry. But I was enchanted. I just kept coming to listen.

I read all of Leykin’s poetry and fell deeply in love with it. I still remember much of it by heart. Later, I learned that he also wrote screenplays, so I watched his films, too. They were completely different from his poems, as if written by another person. For me, this opened up an entirely new world.

Then, the place where we met was shut down. Leykin told us that if we ever had something to share, we should come to his studio, a small, rented room where he wrote poems and screenplays.

By then, I had finished school, was studying at a theater academy, and had begun writing more. I had almost completed a large play, several small ones, fragments of stories and dialogue. And I was writing something else entirely, one-page monologues, spoken by incomprehensible characters, ending with an unexpected turn. I didn’t know what they were. But I needed someone to listen.

Gathering my courage, and relieved that there would be no poets this time, I began coming to V.A. Leykin studio, terribly ashamed that I could be interrupting his work. But he would stop. He would interrupt his thinking, his writing, his silence; for me, and for others like me. He would sit on a chair, fold his arms, lower his head, and listen as I read aloud.

Each time when I read these one-page monologues, he asked sincerely, “What is it that you’re writing?”

“I don’t know,” I said. It was something that appeared on its own.

“Write a book of short stories,” he suggested.

“I’ll try,” I said, and knew I wouldn’t. It felt pointless to me. We talked. We analyzed things. He gave advice. But the most important thing was this: he listened. He heard me. He spoke to me honestly.

When I was twenty, over three days, carried by some strange momentum, I wrote a screenplay for a children’s feature film. It wasn’t revolutionary. It was very much of its time. But it was complete, lively, and funny. Two years  later, a studio bought it. After that, I wrote screenplays. And he read everything I wrote.

Would I have become a writer without him? Probably. Or maybe not. But at a time when I didn’t understand who I was, what I was writing, or what I should do next, Leykin was my guide. My protection. My reason to finish things. Because of him, I wasn’t afraid of being alone with this strange process unfolding in my head. I had someone I could call. Someone who understood me, because he himself was the same.

Now, from where I am in life today, his willingness to stop his own work and simply give us his time seems almost unbelievable. None of us promised success or money. He himself was not a wealthy man, poetry never paid for that. He did it out of love. For us. For poetry. For literature. I was grateful to him then, and I remain grateful now. His poems, and the poems of those young poets, are forever part of my world.

Leykin is eighty-nine now. I know he is surrounded by the love of those whose mentor he was. And I send him love across the ocean. Passing on what he gave us, that is what I want to do. Pay it forward.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025.  All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.

Theater

By Natalia

We all love the theater as audience members. The music, the craft of the actors and directors, the lighting, the spell of language. It all comes together to create a growing sense of something extraordinary, something you can’t quite touch or explain. A true kind of miracle, alive and unfolding right in front of you.

But when you work in a professional theater, everything is there except the miracle. Theater is deeply physical, relentlessly practical. A building. Utilities. Wires. Sets being assembled. Costumes, wigs. Carpets that need vacuuming. For all of this to come together, it takes someone to set everything in motion, to bring the whole machine to life: a producer. Only then can something intangible, imagined by the authors, become real and turn into a miracle for the audience. Yes, all art is the creation of a miracle… and the selling of tickets.

  I studied at a theater academy, then worked in theater in various roles, and loved theater and theater people with all my heart. However, with time I realized that I don’t like being in the spotlight, and that this is not the art I am meant to pursue. My relatives breathed a sigh of relief: now I would finally find a “normal” job. After all, everyone knows that choosing a creative profession is the worst possible decision. But I had a different plan. I wanted to keep creating miracles, just in a different way.

  When I started writing, I was given the chance to deal only with miracles. My imagination was richer than any play or film, even life itself. It was freer. Better. I was no longer bound by censorship or industry trends, and I loved what I did unconditionally.

  But the moment I finished my first screenplay, the miracle ended. What had been a world of invisible images, seen only by me, turned into a stack of written pages, and once again, the practical side of things appeared before me. I had to do something with it, but no one could help me. Now it was my responsibility to deal with reality. I had to do both: create the miracle and sell the tickets. 

  And in that moment, the producer inside me came to life. I bravely began moving forward because I stubbornly believed that a screenplay does not exist on its own. If there is a script, a film must be made from it. Just as a play and its actors require a theater, a screenplay requires a production team. That conviction pushed me to keep going and to search for opportunities.

  For writers, people who mostly live inside their own imagination, producing is difficult. The pitching, the negotiations, the endless hours spent in futile conversations with directors and producers, the conflicts, the disappointments, the networking - all of it consumes far more time and energy than the writing itself. And for me, that is where most of the negative emotions live.

  With my first screenplay, getting it produced took two years. After that, it became easier. I began to find professionals who were on the same wavelength as me. I met talented people, and the time we spent creating together became a kind of absolute happiness. And when we managed to achieve a result, it felt deeply rewarding. Not because I stepped into the spotlight (writers and screenwriters rarely do), but because I saw how many people watched my films, read audience reviews about how they connected with the characters I created, and observed the faces of people in the theater as they watched the stage and felt that same sense of something extraordinary, something they couldn’t quite touch or explain.

  In those moments, any professional feels pure joy, not only from the result of hard work, but also a quiet sense of self-respect: for not giving up, for seeing the work through to the end, for being not only the author but also the producer of yourself, even when it’s incredibly hard.

  Just like in my beloved theater, where difficulty is constant, endurance matters above all, and the elevated intertwined with the grounded: music, text, light. The commute from New Jersey and back. Artistry. Transformation. Eight shows a week. Bad weather. An old building. Inspiration. Catharsis. Dressing rooms that smell. Cramped spaces. Rapture. The trembling edge of emotions. The bills paid for water and electricity. The full spectrum of human experience, so that the miracle can happen. 

Do we, as writers and self-producers, have the strength to take on this complexity and go the distance? I believe we do.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025. All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.

About Cakes

By Natalia

I’m going to allow myself a metaphor and compare screenplays and novels to cakes. It is not a particularly beautiful metaphor a writer would be proud of, cakes simply occupy a special place in my life.

In the past, people had religious visions. Saints appeared to them. I, however, have visions of cakes. Quite seriously. A slice of three-layer cake suddenly appears before my eyes, hovering there, insistently, and demands that I aspire to it. And I do aspire. But I cannot allow myself to eat cake every time I dream of it.

So I have reached a compromise. I study them. In shops. In cafés. I look at them very carefully, trying to guess their taste just by sight, which, as you know, is very close to writing.

Cakes are brave and infinitely diverse. Every culture and every era has had a hand in them. The layers can be vanilla, chocolate, nut, coffee, honey, green tea, or something else entirely. The batter can be based on whipped eggs, sour cream, or butter. There are endless kinds of frostings and toppings, and some simply refuse to get along with certain types of cake layers. The layers are soaked with syrups to keep them moist. Alcohol is often added to those syrups, which I consider one of the great achievements of civilization.

And then there is an entirely separate universe: making the cake look good. There are countless videos online where cakes are made perfectly even, like little towers. Special tools are used to decorate these towers with colored icings and glazes, caramel, sugar figurines. Somehow they even transfer photographs onto cakes. At this point, the cake begins to resemble a small architectural project.

The cakes available to my study in cafés and pastry shops are, for the most part, rather predictable. If my visions grow too insistent, and the cake that appears to me possesses some particularly extraordinary quality, I occasionally attempt to make it myself. But my God, how difficult it is. A layer may refuse to rise, or rise crooked, making it impossible to cut into three even parts. The cream may turn out too runny, or there may simply not be enough of it. Half an hour in, there is not a single clean dish left. And there is no way of knowing whether it tastes good until the entire thing has been assembled and left to soak for several hours.

If you have ever made a cake yourself, you know what I am talking about. A fully decorated three-layer cake is monstrously difficult to execute well. Usually, my cakes taste wonderful but look dreadful, yet my family loves them and insists that I am a real cake maker. Oh, thank you, but I am not. In cake-making, I am an amateur. A beginner.

But imagine that as an amateur pastry maker, I decided to start selling cakes, and like any reasonable person, I Googled how to do it. I would immediately be buried under advertisements. Various organizations and individuals would eagerly offer, for a modest fee:

• Someone would revise my cake so it could finally meet professional standards.

• Someone would teach me how to write a proper letter to a pastry agent, in case my cake wished to be represented.

• Someone would coach me on how to pitch my cake to the owner of an established pastry shop, in under thirty seconds, with confidence and clarity.

• Someone would reveal which cakes are currently trending, and how mine might be adjusted to fit the market.

• Someone would train me to perfect the first bite, those crucial opening seconds that determine whether anyone will commit to the rest of the cake.

• Someone would help me discover the true voice of my cake and remain faithful to it.

• Someone would guide me through my “pastry block,” should I find myself staring helplessly at my food processor, unable to begin.

No, thank you, people. I will not pay for this.

If this is work, then in order to sell cakes, I would have to go and work in a pastry shop and make, and make, and make cakes. Every day. For many days in a row. And I do not want that.

Quite selfishly, I would prefer that someone else suffer, mastering the craft of pastry, spending endless hours making and remaking, while I simply enjoy the result. Because I love cakes, and I need them for happiness.

I would only ask that this pastry chef, who sacrifices their life in pursuit of the perfect cake, and has probably long since stopped loving sweets, make them delicious and beautiful, use good ingredients, and allow themselves imagination. That there be many pastry chefs, and many cakes, of every possible kind, for every taste. Including, perhaps, the impossible, savory cakes without calories, which I sometimes dream of.

And while they struggle, making cakes for me, I will struggle, writing and rewriting screenplays and novels for them. Our work, after all, is nearly the same: endless practice, and the desire to make something… delicious.

But the pastry chef has one great advantage over me.

If at a party you say, “My cousin will be here soon. She’s a pastry chef, and she’s bringing her signature cake,” everyone is delighted. If you say, “My cousin will be here. She’s a writer, and she will read us chapters from her new book,” no one is.

This, perhaps, is the moment when my original metaphor, about books, films, and cakes, reveals its limits.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025. All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.

The Rose is Always Redder

By Natalia

In Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, Alice sees a beautiful garden through a small door. It’s the loveliest. She wants in. Really wants in. But she can’t figure it out. No one explains how much you’re supposed to eat or drink to become the right size. No rules. No system. Just vibes and self-blame. But Alice still wants in. So she does what everyone does when they don’t fit and don’t understand the rules:

1. Cries. A lot. Fully dysregulated.

2. Hangs out with a traumatized pest who rejects empathy

3. Obeys an authoritarian relic obsessed with an outdated system

4. Tries to keep up with an anxious character with ADHD who thinks she’s his assistant

5. Builds a connection with a character who smokes and talks in riddles and is completely fine, by the way

6. Wanders into the territory of a jealous bird who calls her a snake

7. Gets handed a baby by an unpleasant privileged character and instantly becomes unpaid childcare

8. Meets a charming ghost friend who shows up like an amateur but disappears like a professional

9. Follows etiquette at a dinner where everyone is clearly insane

At some point she adapts. Of course she does. She learns to be not too big, not too small. Just right. So she gets in. Oh, this is the loveliest garden you ever saw, where roses are painted and everything is fake!  Chaos, noise, and insane games of cards and croquet. People get their heads chopped off constantly, or at least are threatened with that. No one is good enough. Anyone can be guilty at any moment. Does Alice like it there? No. No one does. And she wants out more than she ever wanted in.

Now take that door and write on it, “The Industry,” and go back to the beginning.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025.  All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.

The Art of Food Making

By Natalia

“At the end of the day, we’re all food makers. Food making is in our DNA. It’s part of what makes us human.”

What do food makers think about their art and craft?

A mom of toddlers: I heat up dino nuggets or mac and cheese in the microwave, and sometimes they eat pizza.

A Michelin-starred chef: May I suggest the black caviar in a butter emulsion? It is served with butterfly-shaped sugar crisps.

A conveyor belt operator: We produce 60,000 portions of frozen meals a day.

A line cook in a restaurant: We go through up to 30 liters of oil every night, and everything cooks in under three minutes.

A factory line operator: This baloney contains sodium nitrite, sodium erythorbate, sodium phosphates, monosodium glutamate, and artificial colors like Red 40, Yellow 5, and Blue 1.

A molecular gastronomy specialist: We can turn anything into liquid, gel, or foam.

And all of them are food makers. Good thing we, narrative builders, word shapers, meaning jugglers, fame seekers, and motherfuckers, don’t use such broad terms for ourselves.

© Natalia Nightingale-Grey. 2025. All rights reserved. Reposting or quoting is allowed only with proper credit and a link to the original.