Category: How To and Tips
How to Write Fiction That’s True by Jann Alexander
If Virginia Woolfe was right when she wrote, “the truer the facts the better the fiction” in her classic A Room of One’s Own, there’s no better inspiration for writing a story than a true one. Find an old news clipping from 1892 or a web article published yesterday—you can’t invent anything stranger than the truth. Fiction that […]
On Writing WHEN NEWS BREAKS by Carol Lin
Memoir is inherently about relevance, being current, a hot property in the ever-demanding attention economy. Yet, I waited seventeen years to write WHEN NEWS BREAKS. Before you judge me as naïve, please know the pressure to publish immediately after leaving CNN in 2008 made sense to me. I was fresh off the anchor desk and […]
I’m a Story Scavenger…Are You? by Barbara Josselsohn
Three summers ago, while vacationing in Sonoma, California, my family and I went to Jack London State Historic Park. We were looking to do some good hiking, and we’d been told they had some great trails. We first entered the visitor center to get a map and our bearings. I almost didn’t make it back […]
Do I Really Want to Rewrite this? By Jane Wilson-Howarth
Way back in 2007, I was fortunate enough to see the publication, by Peir 9 in Australia, of my memoir A Glimpse of Eternal Snows. I’d been working on it off-and-on for 12 years. In essence the book was about David, our middle son who was born with various medical challenges including holes in his […]
On Choosing Book Titles by Suzanne Trauth
A Rose is a Rose is a Rose…or is it? “What’s in a name? That which we call a rose, By any other name would smell as sweet.” Shakespeare was undoubtedly onto something here… though Mark Twain conceded that “names are not always what they seem.” Do the same sentiments apply to book titles? Those […]
What Is a Novel-in-Stories, and Why Might You Want to Write One? by Laura Bonazzoli
A dozen years ago, I fell in love with a strange little book first published in 1919 by an author named Sherwood Anderson. Called Winesburg, Ohio, it’s composed of 22 “tales” narrating the lives of 22 residents of a small Midwestern town. We meet a schoolteacher who, past ten o’clock on a snowy winter night, […]
Both Jekyll and Hyde: Writing Memoir in Two Voices by Georgine Hodgkinson
A teacher once told me that if you want to write about trauma in memoir, you’d best wait a decade to do it. At the time I thought this was silly. Why not write while the details were still fresh? But I’ve come to see the wisdom in it: distance is what lets a memoirist […]
I’ve Launched Products for 27 Years. My Own Book Broke Every Rule By Pandora Villaseñor
The spreadsheet headers were crisp. The follow-up formulas were locked. The list of contacts was promising. I selected the elevator pitch for my memoir in the Notes app and copied it. Yet my thumb hovered over the DM. I couldn’t make myself paste. I closed the social app. Twenty-seven years of sales, business development, and […]
Believe Your Story Matters: Seven Lessons from Writing a Memoir by Ebony Walden
A few days ago, I was sitting on my couch, typing away on my laptop, when I heard four heavy thumps. I looked out the window and saw the UPS man leaving. On my porch sat four boxes of my new book. I lifted one of the thirty-pound boxes, carried it inside, and opened it […]
How I Learned to Write the Story Only I Could Tell
When I committed myself ten years ago to write my memoir, The Mould Maker, about my relationship with my transgender father. I had to figure out how to set up a sustainable practice for, what was to me, a mammoth task. For most accomplished writers I know and have read about, the common advice is […]
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