Frelection: The Transformative Power of Reflection in Nonfiction
Late one September afternoon I was sitting with my friends’ three-year-old daughter at the edge of a lake in Central Park. “Look!” she said. “At the frelection of the clouds. In the water.” Yes, I thought. Frelection. The perfect word to suggest what we were witnessing. Frelection, the word itself turning backwards, suggesting the nature...
A Riff on the 2005 [NONFICTIONOW] Writing Conference
Writing is based on curiosity, not an obsession. Where are you? Come out of your comfort zone. Think honesty instead of truth. Don’t write for revenge. Are you reluctant to call attention to yourself? We all live with ambiguity. A place can be exterior (out in the world) or interior (psyche). What is your book...
Writing Brief: Notes on Past and Future Brevity Submissions
1. Good ideas are common; so are interesting experiences. The challenge is to develop the germ of a piece into something that is complete and resolved, and to do it in very few words. As Vivian Gornick explains in her book, The Situation and the Story, it’s not what happens to the writer that matters, it’s...
Innocence & Experience: Voice in Creative Nonfiction
When I was studying fiction for my MFA degree, one of my teachers told me that “voice is everything.” As true as this is in fiction, it’s equally true in nonfiction. For even though I’m telling my own personal story, the voice I use isn’t my everyday speaking voice. In fact, my observation, both from...
Copyediting. Vital. Do It or Have It Done.
Maybe most apprentice writers don’t think that copyediting and proofreading manuscripts are issues of craft, but if they don’t, they’re wrong. These are the most basic craft matters in the book, in any book. Professional writing must be 100% clean. It must be free of errors in punctuation, usage, mechanics, and spelling. No typos. Period....
On the “Speedy Narrative”
Teaching an advanced nonfiction course this spring, I assigned Anne Lamott’s Traveling Mercies. Just about everybody loved the book, for a number of reasons—the vivid writing, the sense of detail, the humor and frankness of her account of her gradual coming to faith. As I tried to understand how she achieved these effects, it occurred to me that often...
Laughing Through Life: Humor in Autobiographical Writing
“Analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Few people are interested and the frog dies of it.” — E.B. White Jim Wayne Miller, in a 1993 address to the Fourth Festival of Appalachian Humor at Berea College in Kentucky said, “Humor and analysis go at things in altogether different ways. Humor puts things together—in surprising...
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