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 …
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 …