(Writing With Immediacy in Memoir.)

But now Grandpa—we’ve been on terms of endearment for three decades and counting—knows that my traditional Cuban father tried to ban me from playing baseball after I got my first period. That’s what you get for becoming a señorita.

I doubt my athletic exploits will stick in Grandpa’s mind. But will he be thinking about that first period the next time I visit him in Florida?

And he hasn’t even made it to the major depression I went through when our daughter turned six, the same age I’d been when we were kicked out of our home in Cuba. One night a guard arrived unexpectedly with our exit papers. We’d been waiting three years as gusanos, worms, the revolution’s term for people like us who were trying to leave the country. We suffered insults, turned over our house and what little else we owned to the revolution, and left friends and family behind we knew we’d never see again.

Will my father-in-law’s still-sharp mind focus on that part of the story or the parts where I reveal more than he and, let’s face it, even I expected? Will he think I’m weak for having suffered from depression? Stupid for telling the world how my ovaries impacted my baseball career? Will he feel embarrassed for his son and grandchildren, whose privacy has taken a hit because of my writing affliction?

I worked on Property of the Revolution: From a Cuban Barrio to a New Hampshire Mill Town for many years, off and on, and nonstop for the last three. I thought carefully about my goals for the book, what to put in, what to leave out, story structure, chapter titles, Cuban history, US politics, quotations vs italics, and, of course, commas.

What never crossed my mind was that my menstruation history would one day end up somewhere in Grandpa’s head. That doesn’t seem fair to either of us.

Grandpa isn’t the only reader I’m worried about. I have neighbors, acquaintances, and friends who are quite analytical, private, introverted, and measured. They’re also super punctual, by the way. Some of them have gone out of their way to tell me how much they loved the book. Behind their praise, I sometimes hear the faintest question: Why would you reveal those things?

No one ever told me to think about those questions prior to publication. During the writing years, I was asking other questions, like, would the book ever be finished, would it ever see the inside of a bookstore? I felt entirely alone, as if I were groping my way through an unlit house in search of something vital—a word, an idea, a memory—that might or might not even exist. Those worries kept me far from the reality of how naked I’d feel one day when the book was in front of readers—real human beings.

When I started, I didn’t even want to write a memoir. I had wanted to write a novel based on our family’s experiences as refugees and fledgling Cuban Americans. But an acquaintance with years of experience in the publishing world told me, back when the idea of writing a book first started toying with me, that a memoir would be easier to write and possibly easier to sell. She was wrong.

Click to continue.

I didn’t know many people in publishing then, so I set off to write a memoir. I realized early on that telling truths that I’d kept hidden from myself most of my life—not just my own truths but my family’s—and respecting historical facts were going to clobber me. I also knew those challenges might even make an author out of me, if I could pull it off.

As a journalist, I was comfortable anchoring our family’s story in historical events, the 1959 revolution, The Bay of Pigs Invasion, The Missile Crisis, the Mariel Boatlift, the Elián González controversy, etc. But I wanted readers to understand how those events impacted us personally. I wanted them to feel what we felt when the nightly news jumped out of the television set and landed on our sofa.

To bring them into that intimate space, I needed to earn their trust. I think that’s why I wrote about the dicey truths that another writer might have omitted. My reader, I hoped, would recognize the difficulty of sharing deeply personal moments and value my story even more as a result.

It’s a calculus all writers make, consciously or not. We are peeling away the layers of our soul with each word. Our ideas, our values, our mistakes and idiosyncrasies are all up for analysis, ridicule, and, with luck, appreciation for offering something that makes a reader feel human, see the world differently, or takes them somewhere they’ve never been and won’t want to leave.

That’s what some readers have told me my memoir did for them. Hearing their reactions makes the years of work, the doubts and frustrations, the sacrificed privacy, the all-nighters, the no shower days, the tears—because who doesn’t cry when they’re writing a book—worth it.

Those moments have reminded me again of the battle cry my mother taught me when I was young. Ponte guapa. Make yourself brave. I write about the motto’s impact on my life in my memoir, and I talk about the phrase when I do presentations. Recently, in a high school Spanish class, a student asked if I thought the meaning of the phrase had changed over the course of my life. Did ponte guapa mean the same thing to me now as it did when I was a young, confused, refugee surrounded by uncertainty and loss?

I know, right? He was only 17 years old. His question made me realize that ponte guapa, when I was young, inspired me to be tough, to not cry, to not look at the hard or ugly things that were happening to me, to us.

Today, ponte guapa inspires me to look at the hard and ugly things that happened to me, to us, to cry if need be, and to not be afraid of sharing any of it with readers, including Grandpa. I am a memoirist. That’s what we do. That’s how we’re brave.

Check out Ana Hebra Flaster’s Property of the Revolution here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post Saying Enough or Too Much in Memoir appeared first on Writer's Digest.

In this interview, Sonita discusses the vulnerability that came with writing her new memoir, Sonita, the difference between writing a book and writing music, and more.

Name: Sonita Alizada
Literary agent: Watermark Agency
Book title: Sonita
Publisher: HarperCollins
Release date: July 8, 2025
Genre/category: Memoir
Elevator pitch: Nearly 15 million girls, including many in the U.S., are forced into marriage each year. Each of these girls has a price tag—and a story. Sonita Alizada was almost sold twice. Her price tag was $9,000. The money her family received for selling her would pay for her brother’s wife.

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

What prompted you to write this book?

What prompted me to write this book was a mix of pain, purpose, and a promise I made to myself.

I grew up in an environment where girls were often silenced and sold, and I knew that if I survived, I had to use my voice for those who couldn’t. This book is more than just my story, it’s the story of million of girls like me, whose dreams were interrupted but not erased. After some time of performing music and sharing my message through rap, I felt it was time to put it all into words, sharing my story from when I was about 5 years old until now. I wanted people to know what it means to be told you’re worthless—and what it means to fight that lie every single day. I wanted to tell some people that they should not say sorry when they hear my story, but to say that nothing is impossible, to say and believe that many other Sonitas out there could have the same or even better ending if they are seen and hear. 

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

It took me about five years to go from the first idea to the final manuscript and yes, the idea changed a lot along the way.

At first, I thought I was just writing down memories so I wouldn’t forget where I came from. But the more I wrote, the more I wanted to know/share, so I realized I was also writing for every girl who has been told “no.” I started with a focus on my personal journey from escaping child marriage, becoming a rapper, but over time, it became much more than that. I wanted to explore how music gave me power, how silence shaped me, and how resilience is not a single act but a lifelong process. The book evolved into a story not just about survival, but about transformation.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

Yes, there were many surprises and learning moments especially how long and emotional the publishing process can be.

One of the biggest surprises was how deeply involved I needed to be, even after writing the manuscript. I thought the hard part was over once I finished the draft but then came editing again and again where I had to relive painful moments and find new ways to express them with clarity and more detailed. I also learned how important it is to trust your voice, especially when others suggest changes. Another learning moment was realizing how much a good team matters like my editors, agent, and supporters helped shape the book into something far more powerful than I could’ve done alone.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

Yes, one of the biggest surprises was how hard it was to write about things I thought I had already processed.

I assumed that since I had spoken publicly and rapped about parts of my story, writing them down would be easy. But sitting alone with the silence of the page brought up emotions I didn’t expect. Grief, anger, even guilt. I also discovered that writing a book requires a different kind of vulnerability. In music, I could use rhythm and metaphor to express pain, but in the book, I had to slow down and dig deeper. Another surprise was how much healing happened in the process. Some chapters were so difficult I had to take breaks for days. But through that, I found clarity and even forgiveness, for myself and for others.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

I hope readers walk away from this book with a deeper understanding of what it means to fight for your voice in a world that tries to silence you.

This isn’t just a story about me, it’s about the girls who are still hidden, still being forced into silence, marriage, or invisibility. I want readers to feel empathy, yes, but also urgency. I hope they feel inspired to challenge injustice, to believe in the power of their own voice, and to support others who are fighting to be heard. And for those who’ve been through pain or oppression, I hope they see this book as proof that healing is possible and that dreams are worth chasing, even when the world tells you otherwise.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

My one piece of advice is: Write like no one is watching at first.

Don’t worry about sounding perfect or being accepted. Just tell the truth. The raw, messy, emotional truth. That’s where the power is. You can always shape it later, but if you censor yourself too early, you’ll lose the heart of what you’re trying to say. Also, be patient. Writing takes time, not just to finish the pages, but to understand yourself through them. Some days it will hurt. Other days it will heal. But keep going. Your story matters more than you know.

The post Sonita Alizada: Resilience Is Not a Single Act but a Lifelong Process appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(The Art of Imagination and Finding Voice in Memoir.)

I knew all of this and still, writing Flood—a memoir that aimed to act as a house that could hold the story of my husband’s affair, the birth of our twins, and the clownish care I received in response to an aggressive tumor in my right breast—I fell prey to doubt. Doubt was delivered through other people’s opinions in writers’ workshops that I charged on my credit card and also in graduate school where earning an MFA required producing an effective manuscript. The stakes felt high. I could not fail in the telling of my own story.

The overwhelming advice I received was to write the entire memoir in past tense. But I wrote it in present tense. This isn’t happening now an advisor wrote on my manuscript with a red pen.

There is nothing more immediate than bad news about your health. Far less immediate is writing about that news and having it become a book. Or not having it become a book. What I did have were two legal-sized boxes filled with past-tense drafts. Each was a natural evolution of the one before and also not right. Immediacy—that elemental thing that keeps a reader turning pages—was missing, like a house without a foundation.

Immediacy, urgency, and pacing are sometimes used interchangeably when describing a piece of writing, but they are different. The pacing of a story is the speed in which it travels. Urgency is the engine that drives it. Immediacy is akin to prioritizing. In a moment of crisis, there is no time for reflection. There is only do this now. For me, this was whatever the moment required: couples counseling, caring for two babies, chemotherapy—crying.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard had a great deal to say about immediacy. The entirety of his Intuition of the Instant from 1932 is devoted to unpicking Gaston Roupnel’s dramatic novel Siloë. Specifically Roupnel’s idea that “time has but one reality, the reality of the instant.”

The reality I was working so hard to describe was a series of instants lived underwater. But first I had to see the waves.

The following is a three-step blueprint that I developed for Flood:

1. I printed the complete manuscript and laid it out, chapter by chapter, on the floor.
2. Reading the last paragraph of chapter one followed by the first paragraph of chapter two, I asked myself are these paragraphs in conversation with each other.
3. When they were, immediacy was present. When they weren’t, I considered the penultimate paragraph of chapter one. I often found that the last paragraph of any chapter could be eliminated.

With my manuscript spilled all over the living room, I dug through a diary I’d written contemporaneously. What was remarkable was the effusion of exclamation points: Things are great! I shaved my head! The babies cried all day! I rarely use exclamation points. Their presence in the diary was like a series of red flags around a construction site.

Click to continue.

I excavated those exclamation points as if I was digging for the first time. Rewriting the series of medical events in present tense and letting flashbacks remain in past tense resulted in the manuscript reading organically. The wave of one event led to another. A house appeared before my eyes.

Bachelard’s understanding of Roupnel’s novel is concerned with the sensation of immediate comprehension, “a moment when we suddenly understand our own message.” It’s in these flashes of insight that we know how to behave. Why when we cut our thumb slicing cucumbers for dinner, we don’t keep slicing cucumbers but instantly determine what’s appropriate: bandage in the bathroom or stitches at the hospital.

When I adopted past tense, something vital was lost. It was as if I was writing my way out instead of writing my way in. As Roupnel wrote in Siloë, “It is in the virtue of this present alone—in it and through it—that we become aware of existence. There is an absolute identity between the feeling of the present and the feeling of life.”

As the authority on our own work—even if it means going against the advice of seasoned writers we admire and respect—we have to be willing to swim. Past tense or present tense, fast or slow pacing, sustained or relaxed urgency, all of these are secondary to the immediate.

When Flood was accepted for publication, I burned the boxes of wholly past-tense drafts in my backyard. Then the rain came.

Check out Christine Kalafus’ Flood here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post Writing With Immediacy in Memoir appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(The Messy House of Memoir.)

I bucked any remaining social anxiety that has lingered since my son Christopher died nine years ago and set up a meeting with a woman I didn’t know, to gather up some perspective since she is further down the book publishing path. As with my grieving journey, it has benefited me to look to the women walking ahead. I arranged to meet with her at a local coffee shop. Watching her take a sip of her latte after swirling it with cream, I listened to her describe how she shifted her life’s course from being miserable in her banking career to becoming the writer she dreamt she’d become since she was a little girl. It turns out, that to write, publish, and market a book, although increasingly commonplace (in fact, I’m beginning to wonder if writing a memoir has become a rite of passage for all midlife women) throws you into a world without a roadmap.

I took a gulp of my americano and looked across at her wizened hazel eyes and recognized immediately that she too had embarked without having any idea what it would look like. I soaked up her validation as we agreed upon the importance of asking for direction and support along the way. Like me, she didn’t need her hand held but wanted help navigating the necessary, bountiful, and varied resources available to writers. Writing courses, writing communities, writing groups and partners, writing retreats, writing editors and coaches. The two of us alternatively nodding our heads concluding that writing and publishing a book demands devotion, commitment, passion, and purpose to see it through. And money. And time. And more money.

We chuckled as we homed in on the fact that the writing path asked us to adapt to unforeseen setbacks, learn to advocate for what we needed, integrate feedback, and spend more years writing than we could have anticipated. Writing my memoir took seven years of writing and crafting alongside grieving, parenting, and working full-time. And at least a year of editing and design to prepare it for print, along with jam-packed preparation to market it by discerning which suggestions to follow, getting a head shot, procuring blurbs, and trying to become technologically savvy enough to prepare to promote it on social media with flare. No wonder, I told Nancy, when I was finally ready to release my sacred work into the world, my soul laid bare, I asked myself, not for the first time, “Why am I doing this again?”

As Nancy told me she is about to market her third book, the answer to that question began to crystallize. I have developed close friendships with my writing partners whom I met eight years ago at a writing retreat. We have laughed, cried, and shared our stories of surviving trauma and heartache. I have had the privilege of getting to know a cohort of women publishing with my publisher. We have cheered on one another as each book has launched. Nancy, whom it feels like I’ve known for a lot longer than the hour we sat together, told me writing taught her to get to know herself more intimately. She writes to commune with nature and relate her observations about what getting deeply present reveals to her. Writing has taught me so much, taken me to the truth, and given me strength in my vulnerability in hopes that the tears in my words might help anyone hurting feel less alone.  

The question of “Why?” will vary for each of us who contemplate putting a book into the world. But for me, my son is my reason. May “Reaching for Beautiful” honor Christopher, capture the story of his life and help his spirit shine on. If you knew him when he was here, you get to remember his brightness. If you didn’t, I get to brag about it. Writing my memoir, even had I not decided to publish it, was healing for me and ultimately needed to be shared. It connected me to my child when I entered the darkness, enabled me to express and move through every messy iteration of my grief, reflect on my firstborn’s life and reconcile every decision I made as his mom so I could make meaning of my seismic loss and survive it. Despite not knowing what it would take to get here, my writing journey has offered so many unexpected gifts beyond the healing of connecting to myself and my son. For anyone embarking on this writing journey, may you walk the winding path alongside a community of fellow women travelers.   

Check out Sally McQuillen’s Reaching for Beautiful here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post Why I Wrote and Published My Memoir appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(Using Magic as Metaphor in Fantasy Novels.)

When we started opening the crates holding the old props and equipment, I flashed back on being backstage—walking through its fluid darkness, the humming crowds through the curtain, and my mother in black sequins smelling of hair spray and fresh lipstick. Then we rolled out the big gold top hat; I had jumped out of it in the opening number. It was a large stylish prop of ribbed wire and shiny gold plaster. And there she was—my stage-struck 14-year-old self in her first high heels jumping out of that hat to a round of applause. I viscerally felt her excitement and dewy optimism. Everywhere she looked was the promise of magic.  

A magic I had not found in my adult life. I didn’t like my job or where I lived, and my romantic relationships always fizzled out. I felt a little lost and sad, and yet I’d had this incredible adventure in the big magic show. To see and touch again all the old props—the musty foulards, foam birds, wire lady, battered wardrobe trunks—reminded me I had once experienced something grand. I wanted to understand that and write about it. I didn’t know why exactly. I just hoped it would lift me out of my malaise.

There is something intrinsically entrancing about a magic show and it doesn’t matter what side of the curtain one is on. A woman rises off the ground in inky blue light. All the backstage maneuvering to make this happen cannot diminish the feeling we are being lured into another way of seeing. Even backstage, amid all the secret compartments and angled mirrors, I believed something extraordinary could happen at any moment, and it wasn’t just my youthful exuberance.

We innately want to be released from a narrow, predictable world. As I began writing the book, I started to see what I had found, lost, and wanted to find again.

In writing The Magician’s Daughter – A Memoir, I had to embody the young girl I once was. I began reading my journals from the road. I had filled two 200-page notebooks with my musings, and apparently, I believed my father’s show was going to make me a famous magician’s assistant. But before the magic show, I’d had another dream. Stashed in my kid’s bedroom closet, were still my old music albums. They were reminders of my biggest dream of all—I wanted to be a famous rock-n-roll star. When the fancy illusion show came along, I traded my dream for my father’s dream even though all I had to do on stage was dress up, hand him props, and jump out of boxes. That’s when I realized this memoir would be about my journey back to myself within the light and motion of a magic show. 

A magic show with plenty of mishaps and disappointments. 

My father’s one cherished dream inspired this tour. He wanted to be a Las Vegas headliner and hoped that tour would be a springboard to a casino booking. Before I was born, he had manned his own traveling illusion show, and now he wanted to revive it in a big way.

Click to continue.

In The Magician’s Daughter – A Memoir I share his excitement for a steady venue in neon-lit Las Vegas, and also his discouragement as difficulties mount on the road. Each time I’m so disillusioned. I assume my father will pack-up the show and sweep us all back home, yet each time he keeps on. As I wrote, I recalled his determination and great belief in himself, people, and life. It’s what sent him on that quest for glory in the first place. What a great example he was to me. At least when I was a kid.

My adult relationship with my father was strained. I had discounted all his best, most inspiring qualities and even the magic show had become tainted. That was one reason why I was in such a mess. I was determined to—do it on my own. Each time I sat in front of the computer screen, I had to be honest. I’d been handed magic on stage and off. It was time to journey back to myself again, and love and appreciate my father and his magic show once more.

I worked on the book for many years unable to complete it. Finally, I admitted I didn’t want my father to read it because I had revealed many of his tricks and illusions. Some of the illusions were so intertwined with the plot, I had no choice. Other times it was purely poetic ornamentation. I also revealed tricks to give my readers a true backstage view into the artificial innards of a magic show. But the main reason was this—in order for my young self to find real magic on the road, I had to first know what isn’t magic. And there is nothing very magical about a magician’s secrets—a clip on a boater hat, sliding doors, black thread, eyelids on a floating ball, an extra card in an inside pocket. So uninteresting and hush hush.

When I joined the magic show, I understood nothing about its inner workings. What better way to bring the reader into the story. I discover the secrets, wonders, curiosities of the magic show as the reader does. We both watch my father for the first time load his pockets behind his wardrobe trunk. We both see that little claw on his thumb—a  thumb-tip with a razor blade duct-taped to the top. And we wonder, what act does he use that in? 

I had told my father I was writing a book and offered no other details. Each time I thought of publication, I wondered: How would I break the news I had exposed his floating piano? And everything else? He was guarded and cautious regarding his illusion show. Secrets are the beating animal heart of every magic show. No way I’d get by unscathed.

Throughout all this, author and poet Mark Doty was on my mind. His memoir Firebird cost him his relationship with his father which he wrote about in the essay “Return to Sender.” This line always stayed with me: “I have told the truth, which may indeed set you free, but not without the price of betrayal.” Betrayal, as strong as the word is, feels right in this situation. I wasn’t a stranger but a daughter whom he had trusted as an assistant. 

I shared the dilemma with a few writers. Some sympathized, others were dismissive, and one writer was angry. “Are you kidding me? You’re going to let him stop you. You have a right to tell your story.” 

What I’ve learned is that only I know what to do. It’s a personal decision without a right or wrong. Despite the issues between my father and I, there was love. He’d been generous to me in many ways, and in exchange, knowing my memoir would upset and embarrass him, I decided, at the age of 40, not to publish it till he was dead. This wasn’t exactly going to be soon. At the time, he was a happy and active senior citizen galivanting around Las Vegas and Hollywood performing and attending professional magic functions with my mother. I waited 13 years. He died in 2015. And the memoir is publishing this year. 

I cannot explain how the magic show changed me, without explaining how writing this book changed me. I went back to the beginning and saved myself. Magic. If I really look, it’s everywhere.

Check out Katy Grabel’s The Magician’s Daughter here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post On Finding, Losing, and Re-finding the Magic appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(The Art of Imagination and Finding Voice in Memoir.)

The situation of her now classic tale “Fierce Attachments,” Gornick comments, is about her life with her mother in the Bronx in the 1950s, alternating with walks taken in Manhattan in the 1980s. But the story itself, what she hoped to reveal through her storytelling, was that “she could not leave her mother, because she had become her mother.” 

When I set out to tell my story about my mother, called The End is the Beginning: A Personal History of My Mother, I wanted to explore my fierce attachment to my mother, which differed from Gornick’s attachment to hers.  I had not become my mother. My mother was crippled by history, raised to be a mother and wife until tragedy hit and she was left with eventually four daughters to raise on her own without a livelihood.

Since she had come of age in the 1930s, 40s, and 50s, when women were raised to be wives and mothers and sex objects to a man, after my father died, my mother felt her only alternative was to go on quest to find a new husband and be taken care of again. Enormous social change began in the 70s and 80s. My mother was essentially buffeted by history. She did not have the skills or training to lead a fully independent life. I was driven to be independent since I saw and witnessed the fallout.

Often a question drives a memoir, for the memoirist, a need to sort out or understand something; a quest for truth. The quest that drove me to write my memoir about my mother was to find out who she was before she gave birth to me, and why so much of my inner life was wrapped up in hers? Plus, she had led an interesting and important life I felt compelled to tell: one of an individual shaped by circumstances beyond her control. How would exploring or reconstructing her past shed light on my question?

Writing a memoir, or setting out to write a memoir, is a messy enterprise. How do you sort out what aspects to tell to bring forth a life? And how do you shape them into a story? The situation, how I would tell the story, was, I discovered almost organically, was that I would write my mother’s life from the end to the beginning, or in reverse chronology, from my initial grief at her passing, to the last chapter, the year she was born, touching on the pivotal decades of her life that shaped her.  Finding the shape to organize the story was essential. What I did not yet know, until I finished my book—there should always be a surprise for the writer—was that since my mother suffered from Alzheimer’s the last 10 years of her life, by writing her story backwards, I was essentially bringing her alive again.

Click to continue.

In writing memoir, the writer must find the best way to tell the truth. If a memoir is a house, its structure is its scaffolding. There is a shape to it, a structure, and it is made of rooms, furnishings, and the recreation of individuals breathing life into the tale. If the rooms form the chapters, the furnishings of the story are the vivid details, sensations, and imagery that evoke place and a time and bring the story to life. Finding the rhythm that brings forth the shadows and shades of memory can be, as I’ve said, a messy and emotional enterprise for the writer, rocking the house, with fears of betrayal, and questions of whether that “disinterested reader” will be interested in the personal tale.

But the story is not worth telling if the wagers aren’t high. The memoirist has her eyes on what she sees, tastes, smells, touches, whether she is recalling recollections from the past or the present. She has to bring forth the unsayable to capture a truthful and full-dimensional life. The tension and pacing come from the situations enacted, the experience told. Memory is the furnace, the engine for the memorist. Authenticity is crucial as is deep introspection.  Personal writing is a journey of self-discovery with the intention that, as Gornick remarks, a “disinterested reader” will want to come along for the ride.

Gornick says: “Memoirs belong to the category of literature, not of journalism. It is a misunderstanding to read a memoir as though the writer owes the reader the same record of literal accuracy that is owed in newspaper reporting or in literary journalism. What the memoirist owes the reader is the ability to persuade that the narrator is trying, as honestly as possible, to get to the bottom of the experience at hand.”

How does the memorist achieve this? While the memoirist strives to capture the most authentic experience of living through periods of time, a story emerges. The memoirist knows she must keep the narrative moving; hence, she must decide which aspects of a life to tell that will keep the reader hooked. All of life cannot be told. It is the juxtaposition of events, how they form their own mysterious chronology, whether the book is told from the beginning to the end, or the end to the beginning, that creates the tension in the story. The emotional stakes for the writer who digs deeply are the reader’s gain.

Check out Jill Bialosky’s The End Is the Beginning here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post The Messy House of Memoir appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(How to Write Your Memoir as a Thriller.)

Writing about coming of age in the face of my father’s schizophrenia, there was so much I didn’t remember about childhood memories from years ago and so much about his illness I didn’t know. How could I fill in the gaps of memory and experience to convey an honest and compelling story?

There’s a growing interest in what’s been termed speculative creative nonfiction. A way of writing into the gaps of our stories through research and using speculative language to signal that you are writing into what you don’t know, to invite the reader to imagine with you.

Research Questions to Fill in the Gaps

To convey the mystery of my father’s schizophrenic unraveling I researched every question that came up as I wrote: Cross cultural and biomedical studies helped me better understand the limits of our medical and cultural understanding of schizophrenia.

I read about the epigenetic and environmental factors. I found cross cultural comparisons of care and recovery. I learned about best practices for care: early diagnosis and multi-pronged supports. I read biblical analysis that compared prophetic writing with the DSMV (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) and philosophical and psychoanalytical writing on psychosis and dissociation.

Like a riddle, I posed the questions I imagined I might have had as a child, the questions my father may have been ruminating on. That research became a through line sprinkled lightly into my memoir, an omniscient narrator to connect the missing pieces of the puzzle of our lives.

Write Versions That Investigate Multiple Points of View

I interviewed family members and wrote the first draft in the first person to imagine his experience of his first breakdown. It was a story I had heard many times over the years. The way he marched over to them in a paranoid haze, “The Mob was after him, had planted drugs in the turntable.”

The harrowing drive from Fredonia University in upstate NY to LI. The family believing his story. My grandmothers scribble on the back on the graduation program. “If we’re found dead it was the mob.” And the heartbreak at the police station when the officer identifies my father’s story as a fabrication of his mind. But how could I relay my father’s experience, his own memories stolen by a lifetime of medication and electro-shock therapy?

I intuitively used the technique Alex Marzano-Lesnevich articulated for Imagining Histories. I wrote into my lost experience with “measured imagination” what absolutely could have happened?  I wrote the scene; first from his POV and then combined what others told me using language that signals the ways, as writers we sometimes have to imagine, wonder, and suppose.

Click to continue.

Use the Setting and Characters to Access the Emotional World of the Self

What experiences gave the reader the most insights into our story?

I open the story at the drowning of my half-sister because this public tragedy is the view most people have of mental illness. I wanted to tell the story beyond the headline. Partly I needed to understand what brought my father to drive off that pier blocks from my childhood home, how the stigma, isolation, and self-medication had brought him to this point.

Also, I wanted to show his paternal dedication despite or maybe because of the profound nature of his illness. I used that scene and setting to face off the danger I may have felt as a child, to humanize our lives. I mined our trauma, what Alex Marzano-Lesnevich coins the shadow archive, to give voice to what often remain invisible narratives?

I started my memoir when my children were asking questions I didn’t have answers to. When did Grandpa first know he had schizophrenia? Did Grandpa really think he could fly like a bird to get closer to the sun? What was real and what was imagined, and how were both a part of who their grandpa was?

My father’s illness was so much his own, the voices he heard, the meanings he attached to the signs and symbols of our life went unspoken and unexamined. It felt as if he was protecting me from his demons and I think he was. The inheritance of the child of a schizophrenic is a story without words, a fable without a moral. Sometimes these are the stories that need to be told.

Check out Natasha Williams’ The Parts of Him I Kept here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post The Art of Imagination and Finding Voice in Memoir appeared first on Writer's Digest.

In this interview, Craig discusses the evolution of an essay-driven documentary into his new memoir, Ginseng Roots, his hope for readers, and more.

Name: Craig Thompson
Literary agent: PJ Mark, Janklow & Nesbit
Book title: Ginseng Roots
Publisher: Pantheon
Release date: April 29, 2025
Genre/category: Memoir; documentary
Previous titles: Blankets (2003, Drawn & Quarterly), Habibi (2011, Pantheon), Good-bye, Chunky Rice (1999, Pantheon), Carnet de Voyage (2004, Drawn & Quarterly), Space Dumplins (2015, Scholastic)
Elevator pitch: Ginseng Roots follows the author’s childhood laboring on ginseng farms in rural Wisconsin to the many tangled threads of this medicinal Chinese root; the trade relationship between China and the U.S., class divide, child labor, immigration, corporate agriculture, environmentalism, plant-based healing, and holistic healing for the global economy.

Bookshop | Amazon
[WD uses affiliate links.]

What prompted you to write this book?

In an age of environmental crisis, I wanted to write a book with a plant at the center of the narrative. Ginseng is a medicinal root prized in Chinese medicine that initiated the trade relationship between China and the U.S. during the birth of our nation in 1784.  But it was also my very first job, working 40 hours a week during my summer vacations when I was 10 years old, being paid a dollar an hour, which in my young mind translated to “one comic book an hour.” We were a poor, working-class family; and without ginseng work, I wouldn’t have been able to afford the comic books that influenced my future career.

How long did it take to go from idea to publication? And did the idea change during the process?

14 years between inception and publication! Ginseng Roots began with a research trip to China in April 2011, distracted for years by other projects, resumed in 2017 with a book tour in South Korea, and the first International Ginseng Festival in my hometown, Wisconsin. What was initially intended as an essay-driven documentary with a plant at its center expanded to a memoir, a sequel of sorts to Blankets, exploring my childhood and dynamics with my family, my hometown, and the work that I do, then and now.

Were there any surprises or learning moments in the publishing process for this title?

The biggest learning curve was serializing the book as 12, 32-page pamphlets, the first time I worked in this traditional comic book format during my 25-year cartooning career. Then, when the series was complete, realizing it lacked a narrative thread to tie all the individual issues together, I added 70 narrative pages to the final book. These focus on my own personal health crisis and the rapid degeneration of my drawing hand, which began with an injury in China, led to years of treatments—including radiation, and culminated with Chinese Medicine and ingesting ginseng.

Were there any surprises in the writing process for this book?

The book begins with my personal recollections of working in ginseng agriculture but expands to interviews with nearly 80 people—from my earliest employers to the current mega-growers with gardens 1,000 times the size I worked on. I interviewed growers, buyers, distributors, Chinese Medicine practitioners, Hmong farmers from refugee camps, retailers in South Korea, and wild ginseng hunters in Northeast China.

The two biggest surprises are that my tiny hometown, population 1,200, was the largest producer of American Ginseng in the world when I was kid. Equally surprising was that the biggest producer of Wisconsin Ginseng is now China, grown from Wisconsin seed, but in Chinese soil, on endless acreage of corporate farms.

What do you hope readers will get out of your book?

The book illustrates the way one agricultural crop can connect opposite ends of the earth, and a huge diversity of people and lived experiences. More importantly, I hope my memoir allows readers to access their own memories of family, where and how they grew up, and the meaning and value of our labor.

If you could share one piece of advice with other writers, what would it be?

Always, my advice is simply to finish something. In my youth, I used to start many projects and abandon them after 10 or 20 pages. The first book I completed (Good-bye, Chunky Rice in 1999) finally kick-started my career momentum. Now, in mid-career slump, I found myself starting and abandoning books again, at least three different projects, before finally sticking with Ginseng Roots. It was the most strenuous book of my career, but emerging on the other side, I feel like I truly survived something.

The post Craig Thompson: On Working Through Writing Slumps appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(Walter Mosley on Characterization.)

Overcoming my surprise, I blurted out that I was a big fan of his crime novels, that I’d written a memoir called Constant Comedy, and that I’d just finished writing a thriller called What She’s Hiding.

“You wrote a memoir and then a thriller? That,” he said, “is like going from wrestling to boxing!”

I laughed. “Can I quote you?” He nodded yes, smiled, and ended the conversation shortly thereafter.

Mr. Mosley’s insight stayed on my mind for weeks, but was he right? In parsing his metaphor, I concluded that while wrestling is spirited grappling, boxing involves getting hit in the face, losing teeth, risking a concussion, and, occasionally, dying. My takeaway from Mr. Mosley’s observation? Writing fiction is more treacherous and takes a different kind of writer. But the more I thought about this, the less I felt it applied to me and my writing.

My memoir, Constant Comedy: How I Started Comedy Central and Lost My Sense of Humor, recounts how I started the Comedy Central cable channel in the late 1980s. I hoped that readers of Constant Comedy would see how difficult it was to start the world’s first all-comedy network; and that they knew that after HBO launched the channel, it was ravaged by the press and almost didn’t survive its first year! The memoir was my story of how I was overwhelmed by a tough business situation of my own making.

But I wanted the book to be more exciting than that, so I started writing toward cliffhangers: the dozens of times that I faced some seemingly insurmountable problem that would mean the end of my quest to bring a comedy channel into the world. Despite knowing the eventual outcome (the channel survived and ultimately thrived), I hoped writing it with cliffhangers would keep readers wanting to find out how I persevered despite facing impossible odds. Mortal danger? No, but certainly career-ending danger, damaged self-image danger, and failure danger. These would be the high stakes that would propel my story.

The first time someone said to me, “It’s a page turner! I couldn’t put it down!” I knew I’d succeeded in the eyes of at least one reader.

Click to continue.

Unlike my memoir, my thriller, What She’s Hiding, isn’t about me, but rather about something I’d pondered for most of my life: How does a non-violent person (like me) face mortal danger? How would someone (like me) react? So, I began the story of a mild-mannered lawyer (Henry) who finds himself in a life-threatening situation. I kept writing to see what would happen to him. Writing in the first person enabled me to envision Henry’s dangerous world through his eyes. I got to know his quirks, his sense of humor, and his values. As I wrote, I discovered how Henry would handle his unfamiliar yet dangerous situation. It soon began to feel as if I were writing Henry’s memoir!

One thing that supported my feeling that I was writing Henry’s memoir is that it’s written in the first person. Had I chosen to write my thriller in the third person, it would have been a much different writing experience. First-person narrative of any sort, fiction or nonfiction, limits the writer’s ability to do anything other than observe. There’s no way to know how others feel unless they explicitly show their feelings or voice them in dialogue. Only the narrator can have internal monologues. I chose to write What She’s Hiding as a first-person narrative from Henry’s point of view because after writing my memoir, I liked telling the story from one person’s vantage point.

So, do I agree that moving from memoir to fiction is like going from wrestling to boxing, as Walter Mosley suggested? For me, it was more like going from wrestling with your big brother to being on the school wrestling team and facing an unknown opponent. Similar, but with surprises.

Check out Art Bell’s What She’s Hiding here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post How to Write Your Memoir as a Thriller and Your Thriller as a Memoir appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(10 Ways to Improve Your Writing While Thinking Like a Comedy Writer.)

Suddenly, a loud ruckus shatters the early morning hush as a middle-aged man and woman board the plane. 

“You’re the one who left me,” the woman is shouting. 

“I would never have left you if it hadn’t been for the gun,” the man shouts back.

As the couple heads down the aisle, I glance nervously at the two empty seats next to me. I breathe a sigh of relief as they squabble all the way to the back of the plane. But fate is not kind on this day. They circle back and end up, you guessed it, in the two seats right next to mine.

“Hi there. I’m Martha. What’s your name?” The woman leans over toward me, her voice loud and coarse, the alcohol on her breath overwhelming.

“Hello,” I murmur reluctantly while groping through my backpack for something to read.

To the amusement of the early morning passengers, Martha returns to her bickering with the man next to her, the whine of the plane’s engines no match for her booming tirade. More entertaining than any inflight movie, we soon learn that the man is Martha’s ex-husband, Henry. He used to hit Martha. He used to throw her up against the wall of their trailer. But Martha still loved him. Until the day something inside of her snapped and she waited for him in the driveway where Henry came face-to-face with his own shotgun. He never hit Martha again. 

With all thoughts of napping now aside, coffee finally arrives. For me, that is. Martha has ordered a Bloody Mary.

She asks me again for my name. “Rita,” I tell her.

She tells me about the guy she lives with now who refuses to marry her. She tells me how much she misses her mother who died when Martha was 12. She tells me about her 21-year-old son who recently stole her life savings and disappeared. The details of her life rush by like the clouds outside the window. Despite myself, I feel my heart welling up in sympathy.

As I finally set my book down and truly listen to Martha, an uncontrollable shiver suddenly lances up my spine. Maybe it’s a draft. Maybe it’s the chill of her words. Immediately, Martha takes off her blue vinyl coat and gently places it around my shoulders despite my very sincere objections.

When we finally land, I try to return the coat. But Martha stubbornly refuses. She tells me that it gives her great pleasure to leave me with this gift.  Not wanting to delay her departure a moment longer, I agree to keep it, just until she gets off the plane. 

As I walk up the jetway, I assure myself that I’m just hanging on to the coat in case I see Martha in the airport. But the coat eventually makes it all the way back home where it now resides in the basement.

Why did I keep the coat?

I had to write about it. In order to try to make sense of the inexplicable events of that flight, I had to recreate the scene—beginning, middle, and end—over and over and over again until I reached a place of understanding. Until my word and thought processing illuminated what, besides the coat, I could take away from that plane.

The resulting essay led me to create more like it, which eventually led me to writing a column for The Providence Journal. I considered each piece to be an 800-word story. That’s all the space I had to work with so each and every word had to move the narrative forward, share an observation or experience, and ultimately leave readers with insights they might not have considered before.

Click to continue.

Surprisingly, each column had its own way of coming to me. Maybe this happens in your writing, too. Sometimes, you know exactly how to begin. Sometimes, the ending appears first. Often, you’ve got nothing at all except a visceral feeling that there’s something in your idea that’s worth excavating, a gem that needs to be tilled over and up and down and around until eventually it comes shining up to the surface.

Years later, when my husband and I dropped our youngest child at New York University for the first time and returned home to our “empty nest,” I found myself needing to do a lot of thinking which, for me, meant a lot of writing. In this new stage of life, as I encountered changes in my marriage and friendships, my aging parents and growing-up children, my work, my play, our house, our finances—just about everything—I kept writing. One story at a time. Eventually, I realized there might be a book here.

My memoir-in-essays needed a cohesive structure to hold it together. Chronology worked well with several flashbacks sprinkled in to provide a panoramic perspective. The characters were easy to work with since I’ve known them for years. I chose to ground each chapter in scene, which meant many of my earlier, narrative essays were discarded or rewritten. I explored the challenges of our empty nest in the early chapters and resolved them one way or another toward the end of the book. The theme of the book—how accidental motherhood changed me—became increasingly apparent as the stories melded together to form an overarching one.

Admittedly, the telling felt vulnerable at times. But I believe that honesty and authenticity is the only way to relate with readers. To share thoughts and feelings, painful and awkward though they might be at times. To find the answers to questions not unlike the ones that confronted me on that 6 AM flight to Boston.

Why did I keep the coat?

What made Martha so different? What possessed her to divulge the private details of her life to someone she had never met before? Even little children know enough not to talk to strangers. Oh, a pleasantry or two, perhaps, but not the intimate musings of a soul poured like coffee into the cup of the stranger seated in 24D. 

The unspoken rules of social etiquette have taught us to keep our distance. Keep our cards close. But unlike most of us, Martha did not play by those rules. The circumstances of her life had seen to that.

So there she was. Sitting next to me. Just exactly who she was and nothing else. “Hello stranger. Here, take the coat off my back. You’re cold and I like you. You listened to me.” 

No games.  No pretenses. Just stark, raving honesty. How could I expect anything less of myself?

And so the coat is still down there. Still in the basement. Tangible proof of what Martha taught me. That the boundaries we carefully construct are as fragile as gossamer. So why not reach beyond them while we still have the chance?

Give some time. Give some attention. Give some empathy.

Maybe even a coat.

Check out Rita Lussier’s And Now, Back to Me here:

Bookshop | Amazon

(WD uses affiliate links)

The post If the Coat Doesn’t Fit, Write About It appeared first on Writer's Digest.