A memoir student asked me recently if it was okay that she was skipping ahead in the chronology she planned for her story. She was jumping a time period of several years to write about a part that came more easily to her to write. The material she was skipping
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With memoir, or creative nonfiction, you’re required to show—to animate—relevant events in stories you create from out of experience. What can you do if you don’t remember something clearly? You’ll draw on a combination of memory and imagination.
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Every week I talk with people at different points on the writing journey. Some people have an idea for a book, some have finished a first draft, some have started writing and want to know the best next steps. With all the writers I work with, we start by considering
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The question can come any time of the day or night: “Does my story matter?”
It can stop you in your tracks.
The question doesn’t usually come asking for an answer either. Why is that? Because the question is more an expression of self-doubt than a real question asking for a real answer….
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I spoke with Mag Dimond on Facebook Live, on her show, “Writers Coming Together.” We talked about writing memoir — what’s needed in a book people will want to read — and much more. I talk about what I learned creating my book Girlhood in America, about some of
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No matter how unique and compelling your story is, you set the bar impossibly high when you say you want a bestseller and nothing less. There’s no way to know that’s what your book can be. The publishing market can be a tough world to enter with anything less than
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Music has captivated over the airwaves for almost a century, with every decade defined by its trends. Like me, you may feel that some incidents or time periods in your life have a soundtrack. Music describes a feeling and an era like little else can. (Bing Crosby is the ‘40s,
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We live in a world of specifics. Specifics define people and places. Specifics point to the moments that make up the bigger picture. They are the details that give writing a feeling of immediacy. They take your readers along with you. Well-chosen details bring the world of the story to life.
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When is a writer vulnerable? How about every day. In her still-popular Ted Talk, “The Power of Vulnerability,” a research professor who has spent the past two decades studying courage, vulnerability, shame, and empathy, and the best-selling author of several books on related topics, Brene Brown says that part of
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You’re at the movies and the lights dim. A camera pans a cityscape. This is called a long shot. There’s no action but you get a sense of a location. Next, the camera moves in, focusing on something specific, maybe a particular building in that cityscape. The camera moves in
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