Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 12

Lean into the Lemons: How Detail Powers Scenes

By Allison K Williams

Recently, I read advice to writers about how to trim their manuscripts when they’ve got too many words: “Cut facts, not emotions; cut scenes, not emotions.”

Um, hell no.

Because while it’s counterintuitive to cut the love and keep the lemons, it’s details that make emotion. Facts. Details stretch time, make moments important, and most of all, make the reader feel with and for the character on the page.

Sure, we can write how much we love our wife, how we feel...

No silos, no hidden truths, and no shitty first drafts: A Q&A with Nicole Graev Lipson

By Asya Partan

Nicole Graev Lipson’s memoir in essays, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters, examines myriad female archetypes and the ways in which women perform, internalize, and defy cultural expectations. Asya Partan spoke with Lipson about crafting intricate, intimate, award-winning narratives, word by word.

Asya Partan: In its complexity and sophistication, Mothers and Other Fictional Characters defies categorization, exploring girlhood, motherhood, love, cultural criticism, psy...

What Happens When Someone in Real Life Feels Left Out on the Page

By Nikki Campo

A couple of years ago, I wrote an essay about a pasta-making tradition my Italian-American dad and I share, one we started before my mom died. I sent the published version to my dad and his new wife, Linda. Normally, they’d reply after reading my stories and let me know what they thought. I’d grown used to their feedback. But this time, I got only silence.

For the handful of years I’d been writing, I felt a tension between my dad and my work. I had a graduate degree in bu...

Brevity’s Reading Period

If you are a writer who submits your work to Brevity, our thrice-yearly magazine featuring very brief literary essays, you should note that our reading period will end in two weeks, on May 1, 2025. We will of course continue to read and process what has been submitted up to that point, but we will no longer accept work through Submittable (until we reopen in September).

For those of you who send work to the Brevity Blog, our “almost daily” discussion of writing craft and the writing life...

Trust the Process

By Susan Beiderwieden

You might say I’m a late bloomer, but I prefer the term emerging writer. Following retirement with the freedom to pursue a long-held dream of writing, I realized I was starting from ground zero. How exactly do you transform a nurse educator into a writer?

Without a definitive ‘how to’ textbook, I took an inventory of my skills. Possessing only high school level English courses and one Shakespeare class in university, wasn’t reassuring. My knowledge of the basic rul...

Writing from Your Environment

By Tamara Dean

During interviews about my new essay collection, Shelter and Storm, I’ve been asked what surprised me about living in rural Wisconsin. One surprise was how strange and fascinating nature is up-close, day-to-day. I saw the most extraordinary things—raccoons swinging like monkeys through the treetops, a snake in a square knot on a path in the woods. Another surprise was how volatile weather dictated our activities, and how storms dismantled, in an instant, the structures we’d ...

On Photography as a Form of Note Taking

By Diana Ruzova 

Growing up, my parents and I would spend long Sunday afternoons on our leather sectional looking at our family photos or watching home videos from not that long ago. Be it nostalgia or something else, I was raised with a sense of pride and downright obsession with our growing family archive. When friends would come over and I would imitate my parents, pull out the family albums instead of turning on the Nintendo, they would raise their eyebrows, confused. One friend called...

Taste the Gazpacho, Smell the Hyacinths: Literary Transference in Memoir

By Maureen Stanton

In The Art of Fiction: Notes on Craft for Young Writers, John Gardner famously wrote about the “fictive dream,” whereby writers use “images that appeal to our senses” so that readers “seem to move among the characters, lean with them against the fictional walls, taste the fictional gazpacho, smell the fictional hyacinths.” Concrete, sensory details, Gardner writes, create “a kind of dream, a rich and vivid play in the mind.”

Most readers know that sensation when immer...

I Had My Memoir Legally Vetted: Here’s What I Learned

By Jillian Barnet

Four years and a dozen drafts into writing my memoir, the prospect of publishing started to become real. While I had done my best to be accurate and generous to the real-life characters populating my book, I worried about being sued for libel if someone disagreed with my account. Libel, a form of defamation in writing, is a false statement that has the potential to harm someone’s reputation. Especially when we’re writing about sensitive topics such as mental illness, abus...

My Mentor’s Mentor Text: An Interview with Paul Lisicky about Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell

By Amy Beth Sisson

Pictured: Paul Lisicky

Paul Lisicky’s latest book Song So Wild and Blue: A Life with the Music of Joni Mitchell, is part Joni Mitchell playlist, part fan letter, and part memoir. It is rich in explorations of writing craft such as the importance of mentors and how work in other art forms informs writing. The book has an elegant and complex narrative structure, alternating close listening to Joni’s compositions with vignettes about Paul’s life as a writer, teacher, partner...