November 2011

I just finished rereading Patricia Hampl’s The Florist’s Daughter for a class I’m teaching, and one of Hampl’s techniques I was most impressed with was her use of the recurring motif.  These images, references, and anecdotes crop up repeatedly through her memoir and serve to bind her otherwise wandering reflections together; they become a structural […]

When I teach personal essay writing, many students are surprised to learn that essays needn’t make a point or answer a question.  An essay may ask a question, explore it, and arrive at a better way to ask the question.  What makes an essay work is movement.  Readers need to arrive at a different place

The best literature revolves around a central core of an idea or emotion—what I like to call the heartbeat.  The heartbeat pumps life into every artery and vein of a story.  It unifies.  It doesn’t prevent the inclusion of other themes and motifs, but it does rise to prominence. This heartbeat almost never reveals itself

When writers, and especially memoir writers, first begin generating a manuscript, we often understand our words to be extensions of our deepest self.  What we’ve written is an external manifestation of our very being.  Our identity is bound up in the black print of our creation—and rightly so.  This level of over-identification helps invest our

Here’s a common scenario with intermediate creative nonfiction writers:  They’ve gotten over the initial hurdles to writing true stories—fear of what others will think, mistrust of their memories, difficulties establishing the writing habit—and they’ve experienced the rush of elation that comes with drafting.  They may have even dabbled in revision and overcome their resistance to

Poor revision, unfairly maligned due to a quirk of human nature!   We beasts prefer prowling on familiar territory, rooting up the same soil with the same scratching of our forelegs.   We know the terrain of a first draft:   the blank page, the tentative start, the discomfort of seeing our brilliant thoughts so

I’ve recently become a great fan of chronology, the true representation of the order of events.   Stories, according to E.M. Forster, are narratives of events arranged in their time sequence, with the great advantage of making the audience want to know what happens next.   Beginning, middle, end:   the formula is as old

Underneath the act of writing memoir is an implicit belief:   A wholeness exists among the fractured memories of a life.   If we didn’t believe this, it’s unlikely any memoirist would take on the endeavor.   In fact, I suspect many people write memoir because they long for a complete, unified perspective on their

Over the course of years of working on my own writing and coaching others, I’ve come to recognize a stumbling place in the process of writing a book.   There comes a moment, usually around the completion of a first full draft, when the project seems utterly overwhelming.   A new form of writer’s block

The greatest nonfiction writers are the ones who are willing to put up with extremely uncomfortable, miserable thoughts, for days and weeks and years on end.   –Carol Bly After allowing my novel to rest for half a year, I’ve recently launched back in to make some fairly major changes:   restructuring the first hundred pages,