Prepare for a hard truth: We’re pretty bad at most things when we first try them.
This article, published in the New York Times Smarter Living newsletter, holds important lessons for memoirists and other nonfiction book authors. Namely, that writing—even if you’re passionately drawn to it, takes a lot of work, […]
One morning in mid-August a few years ago, I stood in my small condo in Denver paralyzed by fear and inertia. My beloved older sister had died of cancer ten months earlier, my mother died two months after that, and my father decided that very morning he didn’t want to […]
I’ve taught writing for years, primarily to adults who yearn to tell stories about personal experience. I’ve worked with doctors and lawyers, comedians and chronic liars, entrepreneurs and private eyes, and not one but two strippers—both of whom also happened to be English teachers.
Sitting at a glossy mahogany dining table […]
I suck. I’m not a real writer. I’m not Mary Karr. I’m not David Sedaris. I’m not Cheryl Strayed. I mean… who am I kidding? I hear comments like these from my coaching clients all the time, and it saddens me to hear how mean […]
A few weeks ago, I was nearing the end of a daylong intensive with a client who’d come to me for help mapping out a nonfiction book. When the day began, she spoke of wanting to write a book about leadership—something that might gather together years of insight she’d gained […]
I’m going to go out on a limb and suggest that every one of us has experienced something we’d rather not talk about. A traumatic incident. A crushing failure. An embarrassing mistake. A time we were so divorced from our true wants and needs that we acted out of character […]
I have a friend who absolutely loves to write. For the last six years, she’s gotten up early every Saturday and Sunday morning to devote several hours of writing time to her book. She loves carving out time in a busy schedule to focus on her project. She loves […]
I’ve taught memoir writing for well over a decade. In that time, I’ve worked with somewhere around two thousand writers who were driven to write about difficult experiences that caused some kind of internal split between how they’d acted and who they really were. In other words, they wrote because […]
