Katrina Video Writing

How does hearing the stories of Katrina survivors help you better narrate your own memoir?
What strategies do they use that you can also use to make your memoir stronger?

Hearing the stories of the Katrina survivors definitely helps me better my own memoir because hearing these people talk about what happened to them, you can feel the emotions they had when it all happened. That makes me put more things in my memoir that will provoke emotion in my readers. I want them to be able to feel everything I felt and, boy, I went through A LOT of feelings during the time in my life that my memoir takes place. With the Katrina survivors, they also tell us about the struggle they had and how they tried to overcome it by trying to get helicopters and rescue people to help them. And not all memoirs are struggles but mine is a struggle and how I overcame that struggle and it helps me to put more detail so that the reader can feel the struggle with me but I also want the reader to overcome the struggle with me as well.
The strategies they use that I can also use to make my memoir stronger are that they use specific details and conversations they had. Reverend Walker and Sean Penn talk about how they met each other and they recall conversations between them that made them want to help victims together. They talk about what it was like wading through water for miles that came up to their chest and how hard it was. Hearing the survivors recall conversations made me realize that my memoir would be much better if I put specific conversations in that would make the reader understand the situation more clearly than if I just wrote about the situation and didn’t put a conversation.