Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 6

When Anthony Doerr Calls: Finding the Narrative River in Memoir

By Turner Houston

I look at the overflowing pile of the second revision of my memoir. Now what? Someone has to help me, but not just anyone. Exhausted, I drop my head down on the manuscript and close my eyes, trying to conjure someone who’ll understand what I’m trying to capture…

Somewhere in the darkness my phone shrills. An Idaho area code. I don’t know anyone in Idaho. Must be yet another frigging scam call.

“NOW WHAT?” I scream into the phone.

There’s the sound of… something o...

Awakening the Writer on the Black Leather Chair

By Joseph O’Day

Years after we salvaged the black leather chair from my mother-in-law’s house, it was collecting dust in the far corner of our master bedroom, a convenient storage spot for my big green exercise ball. My wife Kris suggested donating the chair to charity to reduce clutter. “No way,” I said. “That’s my writing chair.”     

As Kris well knows, I’ve been thinking about writing for decades, my output consisting of a handful of essays and scribblings, remnants of courses taken...

How They Did It: Scene Creation in Lee Martin’s “Bastards”

By Ethan Gilsdorf

Scenes are integral to the craft of writing: moments where the reader is immersed in a particular setting or place, dramatic things are happening, characters are interacting, and big things are changing.

But I find my nonfiction students wary of scenes. Perhaps they seem the province of fiction writers, or they tread too deep into murky waters of verifiable memory. Writers drawing on past experiences worry they can’t possibly remember enough details or dialogue to fait...

Too-Much-ness: When the Story is “About Too Many Things”

By Arya Samuelson

In the second year of my MFA program, I submitted a workshop essay about queer desires, lost friendships, being too close with my mother, and watching an octopus splayed against the aquarium glass, gruesome and glorious.

There are two pieces of feedback that I remember from that workshop. The first was from a student in the class who told me that it was “about too many things.”

Those words clenched around my throat, their sting reminiscent of a familiar childhood st...

When Writing Pulled Up a Chair

By Kathryn M. Bowman Johnson

Before my mother took ill, I was a morning person. I’d wake before sunrise to brew coffee and scribble into a notebook while the world slept. There was peace in that ritual, the warm hum of the pot, the whisper of a pen on paper.

But as my mother’s health declined, those mornings vanished. For six years, I woke and slept around meals, blood pressure readings, pill charts, and cleaning up accidents. Caregiving became the center, the rhythm, the reason.

My ...

Adding While Subtracting

By Kristin Owens

Readers want to be pulled into the story quickly. Riveting opening lines and powerful first pages can do this effectively. But after hooking them, how do writers hold their attention until The End?

The challenge of sustaining attention is often called the “messy middle,” and the problem is that we writers keep pulling out the same tool: writing more words. We pile on the superlatives, double-down on metaphors, or simply throw additional words on the page to see what sti...

The Shit in the Cheese: In Praise of Imperfect Prose

By Kate Keleher

I once met a brilliant, possibly deranged Frenchman who said something that I think about every time I sit down to write.

He was a professional affineur—an expert in the traditional process of ripening and aging cheeses in caves—and I was a recent liberal arts grad working as a babysitter, interviewing for a job at his fancy cheese shop, hungry for wisdom and guidance in any form. I listened to his screed against the American cheese industry like a lost soul seeking spir...

Rejection as Revelation: How Rejection Shaped Our Best Work

By Erin Wood & Elizabeth Kleinfeld

Erin Wood

Recently, we both landed essays that we’d workshopped intensely—and the anguish of rejection was an essential part of the process.

As members of a CNF writing group meeting regularly for three years, we’ve witnessed the evolution of each other’s work, seeing it transform on the page and peeking behind the curtain as rejections and publishing unfolded. For both of us, process meant not only revisions on screen, but deepening understanding of th...

Braving the Locked Room: On Memoir as Therapy

By Stephanie Mitchell

I had been coaching a memoir writer for six months and my client was three-quarters done with the first draft when she told me she was quitting.

It had been a difficult road—her story was traumatic, and she had written shattering chapters about personal tragedies in blood-soaked detail. She wasn’t an experienced writer, but she’d felt a call to get her story out into the world, and reliving her experiences was wringing her dry. Our coaching sessions were as much ab...

No Expiration on Dreams: How I Published My Debut Novel at Seventy-Seven

By Trish McDonald

“Don’t you realize everything has an expiration date?”

A literary agent asked me this question as I stood in front of a panel of publishing executives. It was 2020 and I had entered a contest offering a book contract to the winner. Six writers would compete for the grand prize. The judges were publishers, publicists, and Los Angeles agents.

I’d been scrolling on Facebook when a notice about the contest, “Pitch Week,” caught my eye. The post was from a publisher I kn...