(Writing Fiction Based On Your Life: A Chat With Jessica Berg)

In this episode of “Writer’s Digest Presents,” editor Michael Woodson sits down with Robert to discuss his new book American Scare: Florida’s Hidden Cold War on Black and Queer Lives (on sale today), how he infuses literary sensibilities to his historical nonfiction, and more.

About the Author

Robert W. Fieseler is a journalist investigating marginalized groups and a scholar excavating forgotten histories. A National Lesbian and Gay Journalists Association Journalist of the Year and recipient of the Pulitzer Traveling Fellowship, his debut book Tinderbox won seven awards, including the Edgar Award, and his reporting has appeared in Slate, Commonweal, and River Teeth, among others. Fieseler graduated co-valedictorian from the Columbia Journalism School and is pursuing a PhD at Tulane University as a Mellon Fellow. He lives with his husband on the gayest street in New Orleans.

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From the Episode

On Choosing What to Write About: “It’s a lot like falling in love, but from a horrific standpoint, because you’re dealing with history. It’s typically something that engages me intellectually while simultaneously taking this side door into my heart in a way where I can’t stop obsessing about it.“

“I have this problem that I’ve had since I was very little where I want to know the story that others don’t want me to know. That’s the juicy stuff! That’s the gay gossip!”

On Incorporating Fiction Craft Practices In Literary Nonfiction: “I love nonfiction that can employ literary and aesthetic sensibilities, where they have respect for the line, for the musicality of language, where they have a respect for and an understanding of mood and atmosphere, which is very difficult to communicate to an academic historian, but I think it matters. I also love plotting, set-up and pay-off, introducing threads and paying them off later. And I like the way that literature allows for revelation—where there’s just moments where you feel like you’re entire body’s lit up.”

Listen To The Episode

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In this post, Matthew discusses how letting go of expectations led him to something more surprising and truthful in his debut literary nonfiction book, Bjarki, Not Bjarki, his advice for other writers, and more!

Name: Matthew J. C. Clark
Book title: Bjarki, Not Bjarki: On Floorboards, Love, and Irreconcilable Differences
Publisher: University of Iowa Press
Release date: January 24, 2024
Genre/category: Literary Nonfiction
Elevator pitch: (String-heavy orchestration could be uplifting could be ominous) (Deep-voiced narrator) (Scent of popcorn) Two men, a forest of pines, the world’s widest floorboards, a crumbling marriage, a changing climate, an insurrection at the capital, a crab rangoon, a bag of wood shavings: How do we make sense of The World, especially when the floor beneath our feet is always expanding and contracting, cupping and gapping?

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What prompted you to write this book?

Bjarki, Not Bjarki started as a magazine style essay about a wood mill in central Maine that manufactures the widest, purest, most metaphorical pine floorboards around. As a carpenter, I was interested in these American Dream Boards and I wanted to profile the owner, Bjarki Thor Gunnarsson. However, Bjarki turned out not to be who I wanted him to be—whatever that means.

I remember composing descriptions so that he appeared to be some kind of romantic notion of a wood guru. But that just didn’t feel right. When I allowed myself to really write him as I saw him—not as I wanted to see him—it blew things wide open. Now I was free to write about my relationship with him, both as his friend and as his documentarian.

As I looked closely at how I wanted Bjarki to be somebody else, I saw that wanting everywhere. I wanted me to be someone different too, and The World, and my floor, and my marriage, etc. Suddenly, I was writing a book about so much more than a man who makes pine floorboards.

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

I started researching the magazine style essay in January of 2017 and The Book, Bjarki, Not Bjarki, was acquired by University of Iowa Press in November of 2022. And now it’s being published in January of 2024. Seven years! Is that a long time? It feels like a long time, and like no time at all. Once I let go of needing to know what The Book was about, The Book was free to become whatever it wanted, which is something much weirder, wilder, and I’d say more beautiful than anything I could have imagined.

So much of the process of writing and revising is an exercise in trust. After allowing myself to drop into this place of not-knowing, I started making all these decisions about form and content that I didn’t understand. Parentheses riddle the book. I address the reader directly. Bjarki is (briefly) transformed into an eggplant (an eggplant!). Then I curse out Henry David Thoreau. My therapist makes repeated cameos. If you had told me it would be a good idea to do those things before I did them, I would have without a thought dismissed you.

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

I have never published a book before, and though I know people who have, for some reason I only heard about their experience in broad outline. Much of the process is still a mystery to me, maybe a mystery to many of the people involved.

I would love to make a movie—maybe a Muppet movie—called The Muppets Publish a Book, in which, for whatever reason, probably some combination of AI and internet video-streaming, the whole publishing industry is shut down, and it is left to the Muppets to publish books and, in the process, explain the process to us. The movie should probably have a much more Muppet-y title. Like, how does an Editor decide what book to buy? What are the mechanics of her intuition? And, who decides how many copies to print? And what about fonts? Who decides fonts (and how?) (I love Bjarki, Not Bjarki’s font!)? Who designs fonts? How do you become a font designer? Is it too late for me to design fonts?!

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

Ohmygod, yes. The whole process was a surprise. Sort of like Life. Like everything. Like coffee. Like, you know you’re going to have a cup of coffee in the morning, but you don’t know if you’re going to burn your tongue on that first sip, or spill the coffee, or forget to grind the beans and end up doing a pour over with whole beans rather grounds. (I found myself doing that the other morning.)

I think that during the early phases of writing Bjarki, Not Bjarki, I spent a lot of time trying to control and anticipate and not be surprised (This is what coffee tastes like, etc.), which led to much more predictable (boring) writing. Like, if I had described Bjarki (the main character) as I wanted him to be (insert romantic-notion-of-wood-guru here), I think I would have ended up writing a magazine style essay you’ve already read. Now, after letting Bjarki surprise me in real life and letting myself write without constraint, Bjarki has become a much more surprising, funny, messy, and therefore more believable (and lovable) part of the book. Love—that’s a big one. I was definitely surprised when I realized I’d set out to write about a man who makes floorboards and ended up writing a book about love.

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

I feel like I’m being a little long-winded here, and I’m not even chewing gum! (I can go on and on when I chew gum.) So, maybe just a few bullet points. I hope readers will:

• Gain a greater understanding about how a tree standing in the forest is turned into your floor.
• Appreciate a little the miracle of this existence (trees, photosynthesis, spongiology).
• See the humanity in the people involved in that process (love those people (seriously.)).
• Glimpse how much of the world we experience is based on assumptions about that world, not The Actual World—whatever that is.
• Enjoy a few quiet reflective hours, perhaps napping intermittently on a couch by the wood stove.

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

There is so much good advice out there already! And often, for whatever reason (Platitude!) (I don’t need advice!) (Please, that advice-giver wants to make a Muppet movie!), I failed to really heed that advice. But anyway, here’s a piece of advice that I think my younger self could have used: Don’t worry about knowing exactly what you want to say. Trust that what you want to say—even if you don’t know what it is—needs to be said, and eventually, inevitably, will be.

And trust that you do have something to say. Everyone has something to say. Just keep writing. Just keep writing. As you draft and revise, perhaps for what feels like an eternity (It is an eternity. (An eternity exists in every moment.)), whatever needs to be said, you will eventually say.

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Lynne Reeves Griffin is an internationally recognized family counselor, public speaker, teacher, and writer of fiction and nonfiction. Her work has appeared in Parents, Psychology Today, Solstice Literary Magazine, Chautauqua Journal, Brain, Child, and more. Writing as Lynne Reeves, her novel of domestic suspense, The Dangers of an Ordinary Night has been called “uncommonly assured” (Kirkus Reviews) and “shatteringly original…written with a tender eloquence that will break your heart” (Hank Phillippi Ryan).

Both women write about the impact of addiction on the family dynamic in their latest books.

Lynne Reeves Griffin: I write about education and parenting, and some personal essay too, but there’s a good deal of my family life growing up that I leave off limits. I may get there some day, and be able to disclose certain things, but I wonder how did you decide to write so openly about your experience with addiction alongside your quest to find answers to what teed up your children’s risk?

Jessica Lahey: At this point, I’ve been writing about myself and my family for a while, so there’s hardly anything that’s off-limits for me. As a journalist, that’s what I’ve always written. From my first piece that was published in The Atlantic that went viral and led to The Gift of Failure. Everything I write comes from a place of, ‘What am I curious about? Here’s what I’m seeing happening in my school, and how do I fix that? Here’s what I’m seeing with my children, and how do I fix that?’

I can only write about what I’m interested in. For me, the intersection of memoir and nonfiction is also my favorite place to read. I think the most interesting stories have to be attached to people, which is why we end up caring about them.

Lynne: Absolutely. A few years ago, I became enamored with the HBO documentary, “Heroin: Cape Cod USA.” I still had so many questions after watching it that I reached out to some of the mothers who participated in those support groups. A number of them really wanted to talk to me about what puts children at risk for addiction. At the time, I was toying with whether or not to write a nonfiction book about predictive risk, but it turns out the novelist in me decided to go the fictional route.

When I read your book, I thought, ‘Okay, Jess took the memoir plus parenting self-help path.’ You used story as a vehicle for content, but the story is you, which makes it more emotionally resonant to readers.

(A Conversation With Cai Emmons About Her Novel, Sinking Islands)

Jessica: I think that’s where the best journalism comes from. That’s where we connect—through stories. That’s why Dopesick by Beth Macy was such a fantastic book, because it relates to that story. Here’s how this relates to being human. Or Mill Town by Kerri Arsenault. The angle on writing my book was to be as helpful to kids and their parents as possible. This book was about trying to end intergenerational substance abuse. And that is something we talk about a lot in this house.

Lynne: I wondered what conversations you and your husband had about how much of your story to disclose to your sons, how candid to be with them. And how to navigate those relationship dilemmas in the book.

Jessica: My husband is also a writer. Tim writes mostly about medical ethics and infectious disease. We have a lot of conversations about how you tell stories, especially medical stories, without breaking confidentiality. Still, it’s a tough line to walk, and the question always becomes, ‘Is this my story to tell or someone else’s story to tell? And if it’s someone else’s story to tell, then I have to get permission or give a pseudonym.’

When it comes to my kids, who are older now, (18 and 22), we have a lot of conversations about what’s cool with them and what’s not. They have permission to say no to things. Which means as a writer, there are a lot of stories in my head that I really, really want to tell and I cannot.

Lynne: That’s often why I choose to write fiction. Particularly where addiction risk is concerned, I’ve found it hard to convince parents and teachers that the predictive evidence is there as early as infancy and early childhood. Which means prevention programs that don’t begin until middle school and high school, are too little, too late.

That’s also why I was excited when I read your book. You delve right into that evidence, and the effective prevention that’s rooted in social emotional learning (SEL), which can start really early.

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Jessica: Absolutely. And understanding that stress—like the adverse childhood experiences Nadine Burke Harris talks about in her book The Deepest Well—is not just being hit as a child. It’s intergenerational addiction. It’s systemic racism. It’s all of these other experiences that turn our genes on and off and make us more susceptible to things like substance abuse and mental illnesses.

Lynne: And yet with all this research, we’re still dealing with the stigma of it. We still have great difficulty talking about it the same way we talk about having pneumonia or heart disease. Why is the secrecy still so insidious?

Jessica: It’s shame; it’s guilt. I think that’s the real problem with the secrecy. How family members pretend everything is fine, when what kids are perceiving they’re told they aren’t perceiving. That’s been one of the most harmful things in terms of dealing with addiction in my family. And so the one thing I knew, was that not talking about it was never going to be possible for me.

In my book, I mention Susan Cheever’s quote about the elephant in the room. A lot of people are trying to silently move around an elephant to not talk about the problem. And that’s just really disturbing for kids.

Lynne: It’s one of the things I try to examine in my book. Secrecy around addiction has an impact, even if the children look like they’re doing well.

Jessica: My husband who’s vigilant and a physician, and who knows what to look for, had no idea of the scope of my problem. Which is so common. People are living with you and they’re just not seeing it. It actually feeds the secrecy piece as well. It keeps it going.

Lynne: Which allows the addiction to creep up on you. Which I see a lot with women who struggle with anxiety. It starts to escalate as different demands on their system mount. Even though they might have had a handle on their drinking before.

Jessica: Yeah, mine actually peaked when I was writing full-time. And I was teaching full-time in middle school and I had all the usual teacher duties. I had a young child and a kid in middle school. I was always working on a piece. I had all these feelings of obligation about what I was supposed to be doing in my life. It was a lot. I thought I was handling all of that okay. And clearly I wasn’t.

Lynne: It’s how women are socialized. They think, ‘If I can do all that, I must be fine.’ But the real question is, ‘Is the addiction messing with my life? Or is it enough for me to stop?’

Jessica: That’s the reason I’m out there talking about it so much. The minute I talk about my experience, it frees someone else up to talk about it too. That’s the best thing ever. They think, ‘If she could be an alcoholic then what does that say about me?’ It’s what might prompt people to question their drinking.

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And I have to add, I’m allowed to talk about it. I get, “Oh, you’re so brave.” But it’s my job. My duty to talk about it, so that other people may be able to who maybe can’t right now. For another woman, with so much stacked against her, if she goes out there and says publicly that she’s also an addict or an alcoholic, it could be another strike against her and she might lose her children.

Lynne: I hear what you’re saying and I agree. And still I think you’re brave, because like you, I have family stories to tell, but I don’t feel emotionally safe enough to tell them yet. So I write novels. I’m still plagued by certain life experiences and want to continue to revisit them, but I need more psychic distance to be able to do so.

I think any way we can get encouraging messages like yours out there is really, really important. No one single approach to addiction education will work, especially if it’s our goal to try and disseminate all that is knowable. And there’s a lot in this topic that is knowable.

Jessica: My thinking always is, since we know that the prevention programs that work are really glorified social emotional learning (SEL) programs with health components, I always ask: would this be in a good SEL program? Okay, then, I’m using it. The ability to take perspective and engage in deep listening and empathy is really hard for kids, but if you can make that part of everyday learning, all the better.

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(Joy Castro: On Ambitious Characters in Literary Fiction)

You used to be facing one way, but now—with one swift, assured movement—you are facing another. You pivoted.

So it always feels like a study in spin (another fine and yet co-opted verb) when academic administrators refer to the way teachers pivoted to online teaching in early 2020 when the COVID pandemic hit. Based on my observations, scrambled madly seems a more apt phrase, or waded through chaos, or groped, or struggled, or barely kept our heads above water while pretending to know what we were doing.

Yet pivot we did, all across the world. As rapidly as possible, we learned challenging new ways of teaching, and some aspects turned out to be cool.

When the university where I teach announced that it would reopen this fall for in-person teaching (with a mask mandate, a voluntary vaccine registry, and regular testing), I was eager to be in a seminar room with real humans again, but I also decided to try to retain the best of what I’d learned by incorporating one key aspect of teaching online into an in-person graduate course on writing literary nonfiction.

Before the pandemic, in past creative writing workshops, I’d occasionally invited a writer whose work we were reading to Skype in. (Skype! Ah, those days of yore.) These virtual visits were always wonderful: They’d appear on a screen, we’d ask them questions, they’d say brilliant and revealing things about craft and process and yearning and the writer’s life, and we’d all feel good. The writers would feel good about the chance to share their work and thoughts with eager, curious, highly informed readers; the students would feel good about matching a face and a voice and personality quirks to the name—about learning from the living person behind the published words on the page.

And then it would all evaporate into the ether.

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But COVID taught us how to navigate Zoom, with all its various pitfalls and possibilities, and so this fall, while still focusing on my own graduate students’ work, I decided to open that visiting-writer experience, for free, to everyone; to preserve the video-recorded conversations for future viewers; and to highlight—following efforts to decolonize the writing workshop by Matthew Salesses, Beth Nguyen, and Felicia Rose Chavez—the work of BIPOC essayists.

The Zoom webinar series, Writing Brilliant Essays, is free and open to the public. On Monday afternoons at 5pm Eastern, we’ve met with Patricia Engel to discuss “La Ciudad Mágica,” her shimmering essay about Miami. We’ve talked with Beth Nguyen about her New Yorker essay “How America Ruined My Name for Me,” and with Matt to learn more about his groundbreaking book Craft in the Real World, new this year from Catapult. With Amelia de la Luz Montes, we’ve discussed how she wrote her devastating essay “Trigger Warnings” about witnessing her father’s suicide when she was 16. The dazzling Elissa Washuta, author of White Magic, out just this year from Tin House, spoke with us about her essays “Apocalypse Logic” in The Offing and “White Witchery” in Guernica.

Focusing on only one or two essays at a time—and reading them closely beforehand—lets us dive deeply into the texture of the work: how it’s structured, how it moves on the page, the specific choices the author made, so the conversations really do operate at the level of a graduate workshop—for free, for anyone interested in how essays work or how to write a great one.

But even more valuable, perhaps, might be the intimacy of the authors’ revelations about the writer’s life: how to persist in the face of self-doubt, how to trick the shy self into generating drafts about personal material, how to roll with surprise.

My graduate students can choose to co-host episodes with me, too, if they like, so they can gain professionalization experience and a little exposure. Poised, prepared, and eloquent, emerging writers like Jordan Charlton, Caroliena Cabada, Tara Ballard, and Cass Diaz are doing a smashing job.

There’s still time to join us this fall, and all you need to do is register. Soon we’ll talk with Hope Wabuke about her stunning Paris Review essay “The Pain of the KKK Joke” and her piece in Creative Nonfiction, “The Animal in the Yard”; with two-time Booker-Prize-shortlisted Chigozie Obioma about “The Ghosts of My Student Years in Northern Cyprus,” which appeared in The Guardian; with Lakota author Tom Gannon about an excerpt from his forthcoming memoir LifeLook: Confessions of a Crossblood Birder; and with National Book Award Finalist Jerald Walker about his nuanced take “Designated Driver” in Harvard Review. Last but not least, we’ll meet with an editor-in-chief who’s actively acquiring essay collections for a university press to ask what she looks for and how she decides.

Everyone is welcome to all these conversations, and there’s always time for questions from the audience. Established professional writers have tuned in, as have high school students aspiring to publish their work.

It seems perhaps paradoxical that a pandemic—which has us all masked, carefully monitoring the barriers between inside and outside—has also made the classroom fruitfully permeable, letting the outside in (visiting writers from all over, an audience of the public) and the inside out (our class and students, revealed to all the world) in a kind of porosity that leads to new configurations of generosity, sharing, and exchange.

As for me, I’m having so much fun learning from our guest writers—and from my students’ sharp insights!—that I just might keep Writing Brilliant Essays going after the semester ends.

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The post Writing Brilliant Essays appeared first on Writer's Digest.

(How to Write About Grief: 5 Things to Consider When Writing Difficult Topics)

My conclusion came when my parents were diagnosed with respective health conditions (Mom had Parkinson’s disease and Leukemia while Dad had Alzheimer’s disease), I became their co-caregiver. Working with my two sisters, I provided help and support where and when I could. The job wasn’t something I was expecting and I—admittedly—struggled to manage many new responsibilities while watching my parents decline both physically and mentally. Advice I had heard from other caregivers finally began to sink in—I couldn’t continue to effectively take care of my parents if I didn’t take care of myself in the process. Writing proved to be an excellent coping mechanism. I found that by sharing many of my experiences, thoughts, and frustrations on paper, I reduced my stress level, relaxed, and recharged.

Being consumed with caregiving duties, I didn’t realize then that I was well on my way to finding my own writing nonfiction niche (or what I really wanted to write about specifically). Writing about seniors and senior care provided me a chance to, not only, help myself but also to help others. Many of my completed stories were published in a local senior’s newspaper and, in due course, became the platforms for my two published guidebooks for prospective, new, and current caregivers.

Why specialize? Whether it’s senior care, computers, professional sports, freelance writing, Goliath Beetles, or whatever, by writing about a certain topic, writers become more recognized as specialists, authorities, or subject matter experts in that topic. Writing specialists are sought out for more lucrative assignments, media interviews, public speaking opportunities, and so on—all of which can greatly enhance a writer’s exposure and professional reputation.

Often, these requests come unexpectedly and can be flattering to a writer. Speaking personally, since solely focusing on caregiving, I have been approached to write for many publications, present webinars, act as a lead writer with the development of a caregiving toolkit, and guest on radio podcasts and television news broadcasts.

Writers don’t need aging parents to find their own nonfiction niches. Here are several other proven methods.

14 Tips for Finding Your Writing Nonfiction Niche

Write About What You Know

This is common advice for writers at any stage of their careers and it makes a great deal of sense. By writing about a familiar topic, a writer can show more passion with completing a story—passion that can easily extend into personal promotional efforts where readers can better recognize a writer’s devotion. Choosing a topic of personal interest will also make writing about this topic more attractive and less time-consuming (writers can draw from their own knowledge rather than research or seek out experts to interview). Writers need to consider the depth of a subject … are there numerous angles to address? By identifying personal interests or strengths, a writer can develop a personalized niche.

Write About What You Don’t Know

Writers shouldn’t be afraid to look outside their own personal interests. Learning about something new may open new doors and result in regular “how-to” story assignments.

(7 Tips For Writing About Trauma)

Choose a Relevant Niche

Writing about something is one thing, but writers will want their work read. It became obvious to me that my own senior care niche was both timely and topical. Other subjects including personal health and wellness, financial advice, food and drink, entertainment, and/or travel have widespread—and continual—popularity with readers and could be considered.

Read the News

By reading the daily newspaper or listening to the nightly newscast, writers can better learn about current events and, perhaps, identify a niche.

Browse the Bestsellers

Much like keeping current with the news, writers can also review the bestselling book titles on Amazon.com. This will better educate the writer as to what readers are reading currently and can help with developing a popular writing niche.

(5-Minute Memoir: Feeling the Words You Write)

Join a Facebook Group

When logging into Facebook, a writer could click on “Groups” and then enter a term into the “Search Groups” box. Resulting groups interested in that area or issue will be listed. Writers can join these groups, learn more about possible niches, chat with like-minded individuals, and collect story ideas.

Ask For Opinions

Sometimes we can’t always see what is directly in front of us. A family member, friend, or business colleague may be able to better identify a writer’s interests.

Once a writer has chosen his/her own nonfiction niche, how can he/she use that niche moving forward?

Target Trade Publications

Abundant newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and e-newsletters exist across North America. Writers could research these publications (by picking up a copy of the Writer’s Market, visiting publication websites, and reading specific publications to get a feel for desired content, tone, freelance—in-house writer ratio, etc.) and pitch story ideas to each editor. Editors can easily recognize writing subject matter experts and will assign stories to them. By submitting quality content and developing a relationship of trust with an editor, a niche writer may be given other opportunities. I was approached about becoming a bi-monthly columnist. Writing specialists will be trusted to deliver a well-written and well-researched story by a deadline date, offer fresh ideas, and provide a new “voice.”

(How I Stopped Sabotaging My Writing Goals: Confessions of a Late Bloomer)

Pursue a Style

Writing subject matter experts don’t have to just focus on one, or two, specific topics … they can certainly broaden their scope. Writers could build a strong niche of writing grant applications (for non-profit associations), employee training manuals (for new hires), and /or resumes or cover letters (for job seekers). A friend of mine and fellow writer even niche wrote astrological forecasts for quite some time!

Become a Professional Speaker

Introverted writers may shy away from being in the spotlight, but public speaking can generate more freelance writing clients and/or book sales. Writers nervous about facing an audience can build confidence by joining Toastmasters and presenting to smaller groups (I began by scheduling numerous caregiving talks with local Rotary Clubs who were interested in booking guest speakers).

Blog

Setting up a blog is easy to do. Niche writers can post their own content on their schedule and develop an audience.

Tweet

Twitter can become a powerful tool for niche writers. With my own account, I discuss seniors and senior-related issues, offer caregiving advice, and frequently share links to my posted/published stories. By doing so, I have seen my number of “followers” steadily increase. Other social media channels including Facebook and LinkedIn are also worthwhile.

(Nothing Is Fiction)

Write Books

Author Stephen King has written 62 novels and sold 350 million books—many of which are horrors. Obviously, King has found his writing niche and used this to become a successful author. Niche writers not ready to tackle a book project independently may partner with others to offer their name and credibility to a published book.

Teach

Others may want to learn about a niche writer’s subject matter expertise. A recognized niche writer could offer in-person or online classes.

The choice to generalize or specialize is, of course, the writer’s decision to make. Finding, building, and maintaining a niche all take time and effort but writers can find focusing in a specific area certainly rewarding.

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(Joshua M. Greene: On Balancing Poetry and Conciseness in Biographies)

“I’ve read some of your books,” an energetic voice said. “You should write my father’s biography. He was a Holocaust survivor who—”

“Stop right there,” I interrupted, “I’m flattered, but no more Holocaust. No more darkness. I’m focusing on the light.”

“Are you kidding?” the caller shouted. “My father was a walking torchlight. Listen to me. He survived forced labor, two years of beatings and starvation in Auschwitz, freezing death marches. He was 19 and weighed only 88 pounds when the U.S. Army liberated him from camp Mauthausen. Then he came to America with only a grammar school education and ended up becoming a Wall Street legend. When he passed away, he left an oil and banking empire with assets of more than $4 billion. He became an advocate for justice, a founder of the Washington Holocaust Museum. He dined at the White House with the President. His life is an ode to the American Dream. Talk about the light, his life was a beacon of hope for all immigrants…”

I did some research. The caller was Ivan Wilzig, son of renowned businessman Siggi Wilzig (1927-2003). Stories about Siggi portrayed him as a brilliant businessman, playful and generous, and someone who loved his life so deeply he would get up in restaurants and start singing and dancing. Might writing about this dynamic survivor shed light on the Holocaust as something more than human misery?

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One story in his testimony for the Steven Spielberg Shoah Foundation archive told me a lot about his ingenuity and unwillingness to let adversity get him down. After one particularly grueling day of hard labor in Auschwitz, Siggi and other prisoners were confronted by a drunken guard who demanded, “Who knows how to sing?” Nobody moved, so the guard beat one of the prisoners to death with the butt of his rifle. Siggi calculated that the guard might kill all of them if no one sang, so he stood up, jumped side to side, and began singing. The guard clapped, stomped his boots, then handed the young prisoner a slice of stale bread.

By January 1945, Germany was losing the war, and Siggi was among many who were forced to walk hundreds of miles to camp Mauthausen in Austria. The ground was thick with ice and mud. Siggi’s shoelaces broke off. He risked losing his shoes, and without shoes, he would quickly die of frostbite. When guards stopped the march for the night, Siggi crawled over to a birch tree and peeled off strips of bark. Then he twisted the strips together into a thread and tied the thread around his shoes. They held. A thread woven from tree bark saved his life.

Siggi’s testimony included dozens of such stories that describe how in Auschwitz ingenuity and initiative could not guarantee survival, but they could help. Would Siggi have survived anyway had he not exercised such initiative? Maybe, but for him being a religious Jew did not preclude exercising personal initiative. Taking action in his view was extending an invitation for higher forces to intervene. However it happened, Siggi survived, and his material success after emigrating to America provided him with the resources to become one of the most astonishing David-and-Goliath stories of post-war America. What were the odds that twisting bark into a shoelace would save his life? If he hadn’t attempted it, none at all. He put that same ingenuity to work in business.

Despite what he’d been through, Siggi enjoyed every minute of his life. On occasion, he clicked his heels together, raised his right hand, and shouted, “Heil Hitler!” with the nonchalance of wishing someone “Have a nice day.” Making fun of his former Nazi oppressors was Siggi’s way of saying, “To heck with you, Adolf, you and your master plan. It didn’t quite work out the way you expected, did it? We Jews are alive, we’re well, and we love our lives.”

Siggi never escaped recurring nightmares of what he’d witnessed: families torn apart, people dying from starvation, the ashes of burnt human bodies scattered across concentration campgrounds as fertilizer. Worst of all were nightmares of seeing his own children marched to their death in gas chambers. Yet, always overjoyed by his life, Siggi had a way of processing even that.

“As terrible as it sounds,” he told an interviewer, “I don’t think I could live without the nightmares. They give me a very ultra-realistic sense of the difference between life and death. They remind me how precious life is, particularly as a Jew, and I would never give that up.”

Siggi stood less than five-and-a-half feet short, but friends remember him as a commanding presence, a towering giant who overwhelmed everyone with his ebullience and sly sense of humor. A bright light like Siggi doesn’t erase the horror of what occurred not so long ago, but writing about his life helped me reassess my own. His ability to emerge from the darkness and find, in its aftermath, joy, beauty, and a sense of purpose—that was a perspective on history’s darkest hour I had not seen before.

It’s not likely I will ever sing at the top of my lungs in a restaurant, but remembering the image of Siggi doing so is a continuous inspiration and an important reminder for me that life is always a blessing.

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(Liz Heinecke: On Writing Creative Nonfiction)

To construct my colorful idea for the narrative while accurately relating events in the lives of the dancer and the scientist, I turned to creative nonfiction. While I was not able to find any evidence of Marie dancing in her lab and had to abandon that idea, the technique allowed me to write parallel biographies, based on extensive research, that read like a novel.

Here are some of the tools and resources I used to bring Radiant: The Dancer, The Scientist, and a Friendship Forged in Light to life while sticking to the facts.

6 Tools for Writing Nonfiction That Breathes

A Timeline

One of the first things I did was draw an awkwardly large timeline on the back of an old poster board, laying out the major events in Marie and Loie’s lives. Because the book was centered around the friendship of the two women and the radioactive element radium, I highlighted their interactions with one another, along with Loie’s experiences with science and invention.

The timeline allowed me to discover interesting events, such as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, that intersected with their stories. It also helped me decide which years and events to focus on. Before long, the poster board was filled with scribbles and I had a vague map for my book.

Libraries

Naturally, I read every book about Loie and Marie I could get my hands on, bookmarking every mention of their meetings and correspondence. To glean more insight into the dancer, I visited the New York Public Library of Performing Arts to document their extensive Loie Fuller collection.

(Jeff Guinn: Conducting Field Research for More Authentic Nonfiction & Historic Fiction)

By the time I sat down to write the first chapter of Radiant, I had months of reading and research under my belt. Loie and Marie were living, breathing characters in my mind. I knew how they dressed, who they loved, and how they took their coffee or tea.

With three teenagers at home and limited time and resources, I also learned that librarians often have contact information for local researchers who can be hired to help track down and photograph research documents.

Newspapers

There is a treasure trove of old newspapers available online. I subscribed to a website that gave me access to thousands of old papers, and it was worth every penny. Besides learning about my subjects, I could see what was happening in different cities on any given day— weather, cultural events, politics, and news.

Although the facts are sometimes skewed in old newspapers, the journalism gives a unique insight into historical trends and attitudes. Newspapers are also great places to find interesting quotes.

Postcards and Letters

It is relatively simple to find old postcards, magazines, and journals for sale online. Frequently, they are not expensive and offer a unique peek into history. Marie Curie is so famous that all her notes and letters are in libraries and museums, but Loie Fuller is less known and wrote thousands of letters during her lifetime.

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By frequently checking online auction sites, I was able to purchase a few of Loie’s old handwritten notes, including one penned from her home on rue Cortambert around 1900, which helped me imitate the dancer’s awkward French/English wording to recreate the well-documented letter that she had written to Marie, asking for some radium.

Photographs, Music, Films, and Maps

Audio and visual resources helped me immerse myself in the worlds of Marie and Loie. Some days, I listened to the music Loie danced to, while I wrote. A video clip at the Curie Museum in Paris allowed me to hear Marie’s voice and observe her mannerisms, including a tick she had with her fingers, which I had read about but was difficult to imagine.

Antique maps, guides, and films of the Paris Exposition of 1900, which I found online, took me on a tour of the world fair. I spent several days tracking down the exact location of Loie’s theater and exploring every attraction on that street. Old movies from the exposition took me up the Eiffel tower and let me ride on the fair’s famous moving sidewalk.

Travel

If possible, experiencing a place firsthand is the best way to write about it. The September before the pandemic hit, I was fortunate enough to visit Paris for a week, to visit libraries, museums, and the places Loie and Marie had lived and worked.

At the Folies–Bergère, it was thrilling to sit in the balcony where Loie sat, watch a performance on the stage where she danced, and see with my own eyes how the burlesque club was laid out, which had been difficult to discern from online photos and written description. I wandered in silence through the sunlit Rodin museum at Meudon, where Loie took the Curies to meet the sculptor.

At the Curie Museum, I peered into Marie’s lab and sat in the courtyard garden beside trees she had planted with her own hands. The streets of Paris were covered with chestnuts and I laughed at fat, glossy pigeons taking baths in the streets of Montmartre—details which eventually made it into the manuscript.

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Stories of identity—who we are and where we have come from—are the most compelling harbingers of all. Our family’s stories—why our grandparents chose to leave their countries of origin, snippets of how our parents met, our mother’s bedtime stories, tales of our ancestors’ achievements whether real, embellished, or outright imaginary, are the stuff of who we are. They are the key to exploring what life is all about and they teach us that people from our past shape our present. Family stories connect the past and present to the future.

Throughout history, these stories have been passed down through the art of storytelling. Experts say when we can reminisce about events from the past and retell stories from our ancestors’ lives we can gain greater self-esteem, the ability to be introspective during life’s challenges, and gain increased emotional understanding.

Now, more than ever, many of us are looking to our ancestors to anchor and guide us through the weeks, months, and possibly years ahead. Here are four reasons why it is more important than ever to unlock your family stories and uncover our true connections:

1. To keep the faith: We look to our ancestors for enlightenment, for spiritual inspiration to help guide us where we are going. At a crucial time in our world, when we are becoming increasingly stressed, we yearn to travel in our minds and hearts into the lives of our ancestors and physically to their places of origin. To have come from a specific place, no matter how long ago, is to be connected to a much more meaningful self-narrative.

Consider the experience of Don Grossnickle. For more than 10 years, he has dedicated his life to helping high school football players who have been struck down by paralyzing spinal cord injuries navigate the huge challenges they and their families face as they try to move on in life with their serious injuries long after the game is over. As co-founder of Gridiron Alliance, an organization dedicated to promoting awareness and prevention of catastrophic injuries to high school student athletes, and a deacon in the Catholic Church, Grossnickle preaches the power of grit and resilience to get through life’s toughest times and to move forward.

His life purpose, he says, was inspired by his Swedish grandmother, Maja. Maja was his mentor and the woman he aspired to emulate, and he had always been in awe of the stories she told about coming to America and surviving her husband’s sudden death and the Great Depression. For Grossnickle, his grandmother epitomized the lessons in perseverance he was trying to inspire the athletes with.

(How to Write About Family in a Memoir)

Through his research, he discovered his grandmother’s steamer trunk that she had brought with her from Sweden as an immigrant to America in 1922. Inside, he found photos, archives, and a treasure trove of family history.

“My grandmother beautifully portrayed how our ancestors and their inspirational and sometimes imperfect stories contribute to the future. With twenty-twenty hindsight as a gift, it is our job to share their legacy with others. Grandma Maja first inspired me to become a teacher. With advanced degrees, I wrote articles and books and spoke about the problem of high school dropout rates. Grandma Maja’s legacy inspires my work today.”

2. To gain empathy for others. While trying out two of the most popular DNA testing services—Ancestry.com and 23andMe.com—all Carole Hines wanted to know was why her brother was so tall, so blond, and so strikingly opposite looking compared to her own five-foot-three, black-haired self. The questions started at a young age, when she intuitively knew that “something made me really different from my brother and sister.” That simple knowing would take Hines, sixty-nine, who lives with her wife, Mavis, in both San Francisco and New York City, on a long journey of race and ethnicity.

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Fast-forward to 2017, when Hines took her DNA test. She discovered she was mostly Latino, with traces of Native American, Ashkenazi Jewish, and Basque.

The finding was freeing, says Hines.

Throughout her life, Hines says she remembers marching to a different drummer than her siblings and family members. Her intellectual bent and passion to crusade for people who cannot speak up for themselves were mainstays.

“I’ve never understood racism or prejudice and anything that diminishes people because of their race or ethnicity or how they live. Now I better understand what I instinctively knew in my pores, that I was of a different color, that I was a little bit different. Maybe I feel so strongly because I was fighting unconsciously for myself.”

(3 Rules on Writing About Your Family)

Taneya Koonce, the associate director of research for the Center for Knowledge Management at Vanderbilt University in Nashville, Tennessee, agrees.

“I knew my ancestors must have been slaves, I’d read about what that must have been like in history books, but when I learned I had an ancestor who escaped all of that, it really put the background of what exists in so many African Americans’ homes in context for me,” she says. “I went from living in a family that just never talked about any of this, except to occasionally say our relatives were sharecroppers, to really feeling what it must have been like.

“I think learning about family history brings people together and helps us better understand the political and cultural climate that inspired our own lives. I think it gives us a better understanding of what we think are our differences. Instead of dividing us, they can help unite us. We all can really appreciate what our families have gone through and take these lessons of perseverance and put them into play in our own lives.”

3. To gain a greater understanding of yourself: Delving into family stories can lead to self-discovery and a broader sense of connection. Some say it can be healing. “Research on family history argue it performs the task of anchoring a sense of ‘self’ through tracing ancestral connection and cultural belonging, seeing it as a form of storied ‘identity‐work,’” according to a study by the University of Manchester’s Wendy Bottero.

Kristine (Kearney) Celorio has experienced a whirlwind of adventures during the last two years. Married to Alejandro Celorio, a Mexican diplomat to the United States, and the mother of two young children—Alex, seven, and Audrey, four—Celorio and her family moved to Mexico City from Washington, DC, in 2018.

Celorio had grown up with adoptive parents in a San Francisco suburb but decided to research her biological parents.

“Ultimately, finding my biological father has filled a small gap in my understanding of who I am,” says Celorio. “I feel kind of relieved now that the picture is more complete. Suddenly, there are no more questions. For so many years, I had all those questions. Now, I just know a little bit more about me. But I am still who I was before, someone who was raised in an incredibly happy family. It’s just that now I know more about this other piece that is part of my life.”

4. To inspire and empower self-discovery: Who am I? Where do I come from? And where am I going? Those were the questions the always-inquisitive Caroline Guntur (then Caroline Nilsson) peppered her parents with from an early age on.

Born in Sweden, Guntur was an only child. She lost her maternal grandparents during her childhood. Her paternal grandparents were not in her life, either. Through her research, she uncovered her family went all the way back to the Vikings.

(Writing Historical Fiction Based On A Family Story)

“I found story after story about this amazing adventurer, my relative, and it changed my whole attitude toward life,” she says. “I went from being insecure to understanding that I was really standing on the shoulders of some utterly amazing people. Newfound confidence and a sense of adventure propelled me forward like never before, and because of this, I dared to emigrate to the U.S. by myself at age eighteen with a few dollars and a backpack.”

She adds: “My family’s story was a gift to me and had a profound effect. Seeing that they went all the way back to the Vikings and that there was so much courage and adventure in their lives helped me explore and own that part of myself. If we do not write our stories, they will get lost. You will discover something that will change your life in one way or another. I promise it will rock your world in a positive way. If more of us explored our histories and learned about the struggles people faced and overcame, I think we would have a more tolerant world.”

Why tell our stories now? Bottom line: The timing for us to tell our stories is critical. Many first-, second-, and third-generation immigrants are more intricately connected to their family’s roots, but younger generations are farther removed from the ancestral ties. They need the tools and the inspiration to know that the journey to the past can be closer than it seems.

In our ever-changing world, there is no substitute for a legacy of family stories to provide direction, a sense of identity, and to serve as a reminder of the grit and inspiration needed to move ahead. When we tell our family stories, we can find compassion in the lives and circumstances of the ones who came before us and to realize how they have helped shape our own lives. Especially now, we can hold on to them and forge ahead in the face of uncertainty and challenge.

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This article appeared in the May/June issue of Writer’s Digest. Click here to order a digital download of the issue

Characters are the soul of what’s come to be called creative nonfiction, an umbrella term that covers memoir, the personal essay and literary journalism, among others. But characters in nonfiction present special problems: While characters in fiction are often based on real people, there’s still that screen. In nonfiction, by contrast, the writer is telling the reader: These people I’m bringing to you are real.

A lot has been written about characters and character when it comes to fiction. Many of the same techniques apply to nonfiction: Through detail, through gesture, through talk, through close understanding of whole lives before and after the scope of your story, you make your people vivid in your reader’s head.

Craft True-to-Life Nonfiction Characters

Enhancing Characterization

When writing nonfiction, much of the work of characterization is done for you. The character has been made, characterization is complete, the family history is in place, the physical description is a given. But that doesn’t make anything easier. The chore is merely different: doing justice to a person who you and many others have known, while also doing justice to the fact that you know that person in your own way, filtered through your own emotions, biases, and experiences.

In The Glass Castle, a memoir by Jeannette Walls, we don’t meet her father right away. The first scene in the book gives us little Jeannette, age 3, cooking hot dogs for herself, life as normal in her nutty household, at least until she sets herself on fire. We meet her father, the redoubtable Rex Walls, when he comes to the hospital to visit her—she’s been badly burned. He thinks the little girl should have been taken to the witch doctor who cured her older sister’s scorpion sting. He threatens a doctor with a beating for saying that bandages are necessary and finally gets thrown out of the hospital by a guard. Then we see him again (and hear him, smell him, touch him, very nearly taste him):

A few days later, when I had been at the hospital for about six weeks, Dad appeared alone in the doorway of my room. He told me we were going to check out, Rex Walls–style.

“Are you sure this is okay?” I asked.

“You just trust your old man,” Dad said.

He unhooked my right arm from the sling over my head. As he held me close, I breathed in his familiar smell of Vitalis, whiskey, and cigarette smoke. It reminded me of home.

Dad hurried down the hall with me in his arms. A nurse yelled for us to stop, but Dad broke into a run. He pushed open an emergency exit door and sprinted down the stairs and out to the street. Our car, a beat-up Plymouth we called the Blue Goose, was parked around the corner, the engine idling. Mom was upfront, Lori and Brian in the back with Juju. Dad slid me across the seat next to Mom and took the wheel.

“You don’t have to worry anymore, baby,” Dad said. “You’re safe now.”

Using Action to Influence Characterization

In the previous example, we see the man in action, but we see him from the little girl’s point of view. She doesn’t judge her old man—he’s a hero, her knight in shining armor. Later, Walls will report from her writer’s desk: “In my mind, Dad was perfect, although he did have what Mom called a little bit of a drinking situation.”

But here, early in the narrative, it’s all in the moment, all from a particular point of view. We see the hospital, but only as required to give the action a context, and only as the 3-year-old sees it. A nurse yells—that’s our reality check—this guy is over the top. We burst out an emergency door, feel the air, hear the alarms going off without Walls having to say anything about these things. We get the name of the family car, the sense that it’s not exactly a Mercedes, that they’re not exactly Mercedes people. And off they go.

Rex is established, in fact, all but literally burned into the reader’s mind. We suspend our readerly judgment, adopt the child’s point of view: She does seem safer. We’re in a particular time and don’t leave it. We’re in a particular place. We’re seeing things from a particular point of view. The mode is action, action, action, and it’s effective.

The burned girl and her family are home only a short time before Dad gets it in his fiery head that the FBI is after them. And off they go in the middle of the night, traveling light, leaving behind all their memories, bills, and belongings.

Using Exposition to Provide a Complete Portrait

Now that we’ve seen her dangerous father in several scenes, Walls takes a paragraph to describe him in exposition:

Everybody said Dad was a genius. He could build or fix anything. One time when a neighbor’s TV set broke, Dad opened the back and used a macaroni noodle to insulate some crossed wires. The neighbor couldn’t get over it. He went around telling everyone in town that Dad sure knew how to use his noodle. Dad was an expert in math and physics and electricity. He read books on calculus and logarithmic algebra and loved what he called the poetry and symmetry of math. He told us about the magic qualities every number has and how numbers unlock the secrets of the universe. But Dad’s main interest was energy: thermal energy, nuclear energy, solar energy, electrical energy, and energy from the wind. He said there were so many untapped sources of energy in the world that it was ridiculous to be burning all that fossil fuel.

Walls is still working from the kid’s point of view, trading in family stories. Of course, not everybody thought Rex Walls was a genius. The adult writer is standing back, withholding judgment, letting us readers come to our own conclusions, make our own judgments. Later in the memoir, the writer-at-her-desk will have more to say. Later in the memoir, she’ll condemn her father in some ways, while loving him, missing him. But for now, in the early pages of the book, Walls is content to stay in the moment and put her wild father in front of us as he was.

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