Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 29

Blue Collar, Less-Educated, Rough Around the Edges: The Other Marginalized Writers

By Mashaw McGuinnis

An acquaintance of mine texted after reading some of my novel-in-progress. “Don’t try so hard with stereotypical language and trailer park folks… I don’t buy it.” I wanted to disappear into the furniture, but instead I texted back a bumbling explanation that I wasn’t trying too hard, that the people in my stories are the people that I know, and I know them well.

I always dread sharing my work because my middle-class friends never believe me when I say my characters, ...

The Spielberg List: Determining What Actually Belongs in Your Memoir

By Beth Kaplan

I recently had a meeting with a new client who’d hired me as his writing coach. Glen is a retired businessman who has never done any creative writing but now wants to produce a memoir-type chronicle for family and friends, and, who knows, perhaps the wider world. He told me about himself, that he’s grateful for a good life, with a successful career and a happy marriage to a woman he adored, although he was forced to endure the tragically “long slow goodbye” of her dementia. ...

But My Sister Remembers It Differently: On Working with Contested Memories

By Dinty W. Moore

It happens time and again—a writer I am working with turns to me and says, “I want to use this memory, but I just shared it with my sister, and she has an entirely different version of events.”

My answer: “Well of course she does!”

Disparities in distant memory—and often even recent memory—are simply inevitable. It is how our minds work. What is important as writers is that we don’t let these apparent contradictions tumble us into uncertainty mode, stall our projec...

“And Then One Day” — A Writing Exercise Combining Scene and Summary

By Mary Jones

I wrote the essay “The Father” unusually fast, on the “Notes” feature on my phone, and it has not changed much, if at all, from my earliest draft. The shortest story in The Goodbye Process: Stories, it is also the only story in the collection that is fully nonfiction. (It was originally published as an essay in Brevity.)

I don’t usually write fast. Most of my stories are composed over the course of years and usually require many drafts before they are complete. “The Father...

From Chronological to Spiral Structure — Why and How

By Jillian Barnet

Two years into writing my memoir, I felt as if I were wearing someone else’s itchy, ill-fitting clothes. I’d followed a chronological, hero’s journey structure: the protagonist pursues a quest, faces challenges, gains insights, and, at the end of three tidy acts, returns transformed. In The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers, by Christopher Vogler and the more feminist version, Kim Hudson’s The Virgin’s Promise, I’d read that this classic scaffold would keep m...

What Rick Rubin Taught Me About Who My Book Is For

By Jennifer Wilson

While scrolling Instagram, I stumbled across a video of renowned record producer Rick Rubin talking about one of the central questions of art-making: who is it for? 

“The audience comes last,” he said, as he sat cross-legged in shorts and orange-tinted glasses. “I’m not making it for them. I’m making it for me. And it turns out that when you make something truly for yourself, you’re doing the best thing you possibly can for the audience.” 

Wait. What? 

Aspiring ...

Getting Surreal: Rebooting the Over-Heated Writer Brain with Art

By Camille LeFevre

During the hottest summer in recorded human history, I moved to northern Arizona. I settled into our old, squatty, family-owned house with views of red sandstone peaks that eons of geological and climatic forces shaped into spectacular, surreal rock formations. When I lived in the house with Gram in the 1970s, we didn’t have air conditioning. We’d close the house in the morning and turn on fans. At night, we’d crank open the windows, and cool breezes would sweep down off...

Your Will Upon a Stone

By Michael Copperman

“If you concentrate your will upon a stone, it can pass through it.”

I learned this Japanese proverb at the age of five, in my father’s Aikido dojo, hearing it read aloud from the little black book called shokashu by a sensei in a black hakama and gi, and then repeating the words in my own little boy voice. The proverb was supposed to speak to how willpower could harness the power of ki, or living energy, but I took the verse to heart and focused on the things I cou...

Feeling Isolated As A Writer? Maybe You Need to Buddy Up

By Donna Cameron

Nobel prize winning author Olga Tokarczuk likened writing to solitary confinement. Fellow laureate Saul Bellow asserted that his chosen profession had made him a loner.

While most of us have supportive friends and family, they may not understand that when we’re staring off into space, or frozen halfway up or down the staircase (forgetting entirely which way we were headed), we are writing.

A writer needs at least one friend who is also a writer.

It’s as essential...

The Second-Best Residency Prep

By Jamie Beth Cohen

Being awarded a two-week residency—alone in a converted horse barn in Maine to work on my memoir in progress—was, as any writer might imagine, a dream come true. It was also a vote of confidence in my writing when I desperately needed one and, from a practical standpoint, it was a break from the daily grind of housework, kid transport, and my day job. But, like any good over-thinker, once the elation of an email that wasn’t a rejection wore off, I became obsessed with m...