Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 41

Creative Nonfiction or Fiction: On Choosing the Best Genre for Our Material

By Nancy McCabe

My early training was mostly in fiction writing, but eventually, after years of writing autobiographical fiction that wasn’t quite working, I turned to creative nonfiction. Suddenly, my work clicked. I realized that by disguising real events as fiction, I’d been draining all of the drama from them. Writing them as creative nonfiction lifted the veil on that real-life drama and made my material more direct and powerful.

Because I have written both fiction and nonfiction, ...

Writing Alone, Writing Together: Lessons from Self-Styled Retreats

By Samuel Autman

A year into my first adjunct teaching position, I was in my early 40s and had completed an MFA in nonfiction from Columbia University. I hadn’t published much since defecting from daily journalism seven years prior, but hoped my newspaper background and new advanced degree might make me a strong candidate for tenure track positions in journalism, creative writing, or hybrid jobs. Job applications were yielding nothing, however. I needed publications and fast.

A poet fri...

Memory Matters—But to Whom?

Photo of Unlucky-Economist347’s grandmother and mother in the Belgian Congo in the 1950s. (photo from Reddit)

By Allison K Williams

As an editor who coaches writers to publication, I’m often asked:

I have my [parents’/grandparents’] [love letters/diaries/journals/taped interviews] and [photos/memorabilia/public documents] about them. What can I do with this material?

The quick, crass answer: Nobody cares. Put them in a shoebox and remember to label them so your kids know who the h...

Great Beginnings: Inviting the Reader to Enter

By Ronnie Blair

Writing an essay about great beginnings is intimidating because readers expect you to start the essay with a great beginning. Failing that you are tempted to retreat and go in search of another, safer, simpler topic. Quantum physics, perhaps.

But failure happens often in writing and other endeavors, so the other alternative is to plunge ahead regardless, which is what I shall do now.

Writers are well versed in the concept of writing a lead (or lede, as some journalist...

“You want me to do what?” Audio Memoir at Home

By Charlotte Wilkins

“Not that!” I squawked at the acceptance email from “Dorothy Parker’s Ashes’” informing me my essay would appear in the next issue. It wasn’t the editor’s minor edits I freaked over, it was this: Also, we would love for you to record your essay. Just do it on your phone in a quiet place.

Right.

I’m not a member of the generation born with an iPhone in one ear and a tablet on their lap. A computer wasn’t a household commodity because it took up an entire room, an...

How “Fast Car” Taught Me to Trust My Story

By Vicki Mayk

A decade ago, an agent read the memoir about my daughter that I had labored over in my MFA program. After extolling the positives— “very well written”—she announced, “There are already a lot of memoirs out there about mental illness.”

The pronouncement was clear: The market was saturated.

Disheartened and paralyzed, I stepped away from the memoir and wrote another book. But when an epiphany about my memoir’s theme brought me back to the manuscript, I still wondered if i...

What’s the Point of Writing?

By Sarah Carson

What’s the point of writing, anyway? a lady asks the table.

Four weeks of workshops in the library basement and no one has called her a genius yet, asked to see the manuscript she carries in her purse.

I get it.

In the 8th grade, I quit the basketball team just to make a show of it. The coach pulled me out of study hall, begged me to reconsider, and 25 years later I still remember everything about the moment: the extant hairs of his mustache. The way his glasses fe...

I’m a Developmental Editor – These are the Five Biggest Issues I See in Memoir Drafts

By Katie Bannon

As a developmental editor, I have read hundreds of memoir manuscripts, in addition to revising my own. Every manuscript I work on has unique craft challenges. Still, there are common trends in my feedback. Most of us can sense when something in our manuscript is falling flat, but we’re so close to the material that it’s challenging to identify areas for improvement. Even with my editorial background, it’s easier to pinpoint issues in someone else’s writing than my own.

H...

Wait—Did That Really Happen?

By Amy Roost

“Nothing has really happened until it has been described.” ~Virginia Woolf

Surely everyone knows the feeling of having experienced something so disconcerting or shocking they ask themselves, Did that really happen? But that’s not what Woolf was referring to. She was emphasizing the describing not the happening.

She was referring to trauma, her own. Specifically, the sexual assault she endured.

I too suffered sexual abuse by my older brother, and for decades I’d desc...

The Craft of Chewy Words

By Jamie Etheridge

In the beginning, was the word. Slurp.

Two syllables. Sounds like it is written. Onomatopoeic.

Slurp. Sounds dirty. Sounds like a mouthing, a bodily function. A wet sucking sound. A movement. Action.

The slope of the word charms me. The soft gentle glide of S, dipping down into the low lUr before landing with a flat thud against the hard, full stop of P. Splat.

Slurp is a word that never leaves you guessing. There is no ambivalence, the subtext is as clear as...