November 2011

Mark Doty, in a class on writing memoir, said that three forces are at play in any personal narrative:  the spoken, the unspoken, and the unspeakable.  The dynamic between these triune forces is what gives a story life. As I understand it, the spoken force consists of the words on the page—that is, the story […]

Whenever I begin to work with a writer on his or her project, I always ask two questions.  The first is “Why are you writing this?”  The answers I get are often similar—“Because I learned things from my experience I want to share with others”; “Because it’s good therapy”; “Because the world needs to hear

Carol Bly wrote that the essential question we must ask during what she calls “the long middle stage” of writing is, “What more do I have to say about this topic?”  Certainly this is a good question to ask early on, when we’ve completed a draft and are unsure where to go next.  Usually we’re

The handiest revision tool I know is an empty notebook.  Even the presence of that notebook, silent and full of potential in my desk drawer, influences my writing.  Why?  Because those empty pages, which I’m saving for the purpose of “seeing my subject anew,” exert the same creative potential as the empty pages of my

Lately I’ve been feeling like a revision evangelical.  The majority of my teaching time is spent converting beginning and intermediate writers into revisers—that is, into writers who labor beyond their rough drafts into more and more mature versions, taking their creative ideas through the paces of the writing process until they become polished work.  Learning

The vast majority of revision work entails either expanding passages that further your piece’s heartbeat and cutting those that don’t—the old Michelangelo story about chipping away all the marble that’s not the angel.  Both activities are guided by discernment.  In spiritual circles, discernment means careful listening for what the Quakers call way.  What path is

Last month I wrote about the importance of dismissing the audience for the sake of creating a safe, private space where we can take creative risks.  The corollary to this, equally valuable, is that for writing to flourish we must at some point welcome the audience.  If a writer only considers the self the primary

“You must sympathize with the reader’s plight (most readers are in trouble about half the time) but never seek to know the reader’s wants.  Your whole duty as a writer is to please and satisfy yourself, and the true writer always plays to an audience of one.” When I came upon these words in Strunk

No matter how much we know about our story’s content when we begin a creative project (be it fiction or creative nonfiction), unknowns lurk around every corner and it’s best, I believe, to think of our material as an untamed wilderness.  If we assume we know this territory, we close ourselves off to the possibility

I recently led a manuscript review for a second draft of a book-length memoir.  As often happens at this stage, the class discussed what the book was about at its core, helping the author articulate its purpose and drive, and then named the thematic threads that unify the many disparate stories.  Some of these themes