I used to lead an after-school writing club for middle school students. Even though they’d all signed up because they liked to write, there were still some days (I’m sure you know them well) when it was hard to get them motivated. One time, on a day when no one was up to it, I led them through a theatre exercise I’d learned in college. I told them I was thinking of a story (I wasn’t) and had them ask yes/no questions about it. Whatever they asked, I answered ‘no’ to the first two questions and ‘yes’ to the third.

“Is it about kids?” “Nope.”
“Is there magic?” “No.”
“Does it happen in New York” “Yes!”

Soon they were all talking over each other, guessing where the story was heading. The entire mood had shifted. Instead of completing an assignment, they were playing a game.

A few years later I found the same game in Keith Johnstone’s Impro, a great book of improvisational theatre exercises that work just as well for your writing (or any creative practice). He talks about the panic most people feel when they’re asked to invent something from scratch and how reframing the approach can offer a way to arrive at the same results more comfortably.

That reframe can be a way to avoid feeling responsible for your own imagination (as it does with guessing the contents of someone else’s story) or it can be a way to add guidelines that make the blank page feel less intimidating and more like a game you’ve been invited to play. One of my favorite prompts, also from Impro, is one of those games.

“If I say ‘Make up a story’, then most people are paralysed. If I say ‘describe a routine and then interrupt it’, people see no problem.”

Describe a routine and then interrupt it. So simple! But also, I think, a prompt that leads to stranger and perhaps more interesting and organic stories than if you plotted one out the way we’re all taught to think we’re supposed to.

Routine: Dan always drives to work. Interruption: One morning he finds his car up on blocks and a flyer for an evangelical church wedged beneath his wiper.

Routine: Ellen is an artist who has only ever dated other artists. Interruption: Despite herself, Ellen realizes she’s falling in love with her downstairs neighbor, the tax attorney.

Routine: The horses at Big Hank’s Dude Ranch have always been friendly to visitors. Interruption: One Sunday morning, the horses decide they’ve had enough.

You can use this idea of interrupting a routine for a new scene, for a structure to a new story, or as a way to revise an existing project that’s gone stale. What are the routines you’ve already established? An action, a relationship dynamic, a way of life. A routine can be anything. So can the interruption.

This idea applies to more than just narrative and performance. Kent Rogowski has a lovely and disorienting series where he combines different puzzle sets that have pieces with the same shape, turning two otherwise commonplace images — a horse, a bouquet of flowers — into something entirely new. The routine of looking at a horse is interrupted and we’re invited to experience it with fresh eyes.

Beyond these routines in our work, there are also the routines in how we make our work. Maybe you only try to write at a certain time of day, or in certain conditions. Or maybe you think writing is supposed to be hard, or serious, or labored over for hours at a time in silent isolation.

By noticing these routines, we give ourselves the opportunity to interrupt them, to shift our experience from completing an assignment to playing a game, and, in the process, make it all a little more fun.

Once you identify which routines work for you, you can use them to find your writing rhythm and build a sustainable, enjoyable practice.

Want to learn more? Josh’s upcoming “Finding Your Writing Rhythm” class is all about building a writing practice that actually sticks. Through structure, prompts, and accountability, you’ll develop a rhythm that works for your life—and keeps you moving forward, even when motivation dips. This is a great entry point if you’ve been trying (and not quite succeeding) to build a sustainable writing habit on your own.

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“I want to know more about your writing process. How did you go about compiling, discerning what to include, and how to structure your book?” the moderator, Austenne Grey, asked me and Mark Stieler, my fellow panelist at the Southern Festival of Books.

I was there to talk about my new co-authored book, Go Back and Fetch It, while Mark was speaking about his newest Johnny Cash book, The Complete Johnny Cash: Lyrics from a Lifetime of Songwriting. We had both already shared stories about why we wrote these books and how our previous books had left us with unanswered questions—questions we hoped these books could answer.

When Austenne asked us about process, I immediately thought about structure—because I think about structure a lot.

“I often remember something that one of my mentors told me,” I said. “Chronology is your friend.” In nonfiction, we are dealing with the truth, with real events, and it is often simply easiest to move from the earliest thing that happened to the most recent. Both Mark and I had structured the books we were discussing this way.

What I didn’t say was that sometimes chronology is your friend—but you need something else, too. In writing, people often talk about the narrative arc—developing the story, the rising tension, the climax, the release. As classic as it is, I love Jane Alison’s take on this structure: “But something that swells and tautens until climax, then collapses? Bit masculo-sexual, no?”

Even though Alison’s book Meander, Spiral, Explode analyzes structure in fiction, her ideas about different structures work for nonfiction, too. This basic arc isn’t how our lives work. They’re filled with ups and downs, times that seem to plateau, and maybe even a spiral or two—and they don’t end when the book ends. It would be surprising if we could make every nonfiction book follow an arc.

I believe that nonfiction books strive to answer a question (or questions), and we have to figure out how to formulate that answer.

In the opening to Beth Macy’s new book, Paper Girl: A Memoir of Home and Family in a Fractured America, she writes: “Something was happening to our beloved hometown that didn’t quite fit the pat explanations offered by economists and sociologists… How does a community lose contact with its faith in schools? And what happens when it does? … What happens when the middle class vanishes…?”

Her book is chronological in a way; she spends a year back in her hometown from 2023 to 2024, trying to understand the community there. But to answer her questions, she braids together three strands: her childhood and the opportunity education gave her; her current relationship with her siblings and the people she grew up with; and the story of a recent high school graduate, Silas, whom she considers to be the 2025 version of herself. Tensions come and go, but the story isn’t built to move to a single point and then resolve (everyone’s lives will go on after the end of the book, after all).

Instead, the weaving creates the meaning. We see how Silas is both different from and similar to Macy, and how her conversations with her siblings and friends—and her research—explain why and how things have changed since she left her hometown in the 1980s. Through this braiding, we understand what happens when a community loses faith in schools and the impact of that on the middle class in America.

Memoirs that deal with internal questions and personal discovery might be better suited to a spiral, where we travel farther inward until an answer is revealed. If we are writing an essay with many facets, perhaps we meander toward the answer(s). Maybe tension and relief happen again and again as we struggle with the same problem in wavelets. Or perhaps we build ideas like blocks over the course of a piece so that the whole becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

And that’s the thing—there are so many ways to structure a piece that are not a narrative arc, and often they serve our story better.

Want to go deeper?

In Kristina’s Advanced Craft Workshop: Finding Your Structure, you’ll explore a range of alternative story frameworks—from braiding and spirals to modular and collage-style forms—and apply them directly to your own work. Whether you’re stuck in a draft or starting something new, this class will help you unlock the structure your story actually needs.

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I’m still not sure how it started. Maybe we were talking about our fathers; maybe it was our fascination with vintage jetliners. But when my friend Doug Hilsinger made an offhand comment about what his dad had done aboard an airliner over Ethiopia in 1972, I was hooked. 

“It was pretty wild,” Doug said. “Someone pulled the pin on a grenade, and my dad actually ended up kind of saving the plane.” 

That turned out to be an understatement. As Doug spun out the tale — a band of armed insurgents aboard a commercial jetliner and a pitched gun battle at 30,000 feet, his dad truly the hero at the center of it all — I knew I needed to write about it. Everything lined up: It was a thrilling story, no one had written about it in decades and I had access to scans of old newspaper articles about one of the story’s central figures. Piece of cake, right? 

I did end up writing about it, in a Deep Dive published on Narratively called “Anatomy of an Absolutely Wild 1970s Hijacking You’ve Never Heard Of,” but no, not quite. For one thing, there was the challenge of finding still-living witnesses. Few, if any, of the people actually aboard the airplane that day were still alive. Professor Rod Hilsinger, Doug’s father, had died in 2000. His colleague and companion on the flight, Dr. Richard Wylie, had passed away in 2018. Even secondary sources, such as Betty Schantz, Professor Hilsinger’s wife at the time of the hijacking, were disappearing (I was dismayed to learn she’d died a year or so before I began my research). I did manage to speak with Hilsinger’s first wife, but in an eerie resonance, she passed away only a month or two after our conversation.

That left children and grandchildren. I had several conversations with Professor  Hilsinger’s four kids, including Doug, which helped fill in sensory details and backstory — the fact that the “priceless relics” bestowed upon Hilsinger by Emperor Haile Selassie as a reward for his heroic actions turned out to be cheap fakes stuck with me. But having all been children at the time of the incident, there were limits as to what they remembered or ever knew. 

On a personal note, I don’t think I’ll ever forget my conversation with Ann Searight, daughter of one of the elderly British birdwatchers cited in the piece. Now well into her 80s, Ann is witty and vivacious, speaking in a posh and arch idiom, right down to her rolled Rs. Having been an adult at the time of the hijacking, she was the one exception, providing small details like the ground crew’s shocked reaction once the plane landed. Once I’d exhausted these few living sources, though, it was time to pursue other avenues. 

This brings me to the first piece of advice, which is: Dig deep and reach out to every single person you can find who’s closely related to the subjects at hand. While they can — and probably will — offer recollections that have faded or become distorted over time, they’re more likely to provide granular (and unusual) details than the official sources. They might have leads on other potential sources, too. Then keep going.

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A couple of years ago, I was stuck on an essay detailing my ambivalence towards motherhood. I understood the source of my indifference (a messy family of origin) and that it was intensified by everyone around me insisting these feelings were simply a “phase.” I knew how to relay these facts—but not how to transcend them, how to make meaning of them for my imagined reader. In short, how to turn it into an essay.

And so I started to question the nonfiction writer’s unspoken promise to “the truth.” Frankly, it felt presumptuous to claim what I wrote—my first-person and therefore inherently subjective perspective—was unequivocally the truth. Not to mention boring; my favorite essayists and memoirists were usually rooting around for answers in the dark, not airing out their collection of facts for readers to applaud.

Immediately, I thought of ’s memoir, In the Dream House, which served as a sort of literary worry stone for me. Whenever I found myself feeling hemmed in by real or imagined writing “rules,” I’d re-read her “Dream House As Choose Your Own Adventure” chapter. The narrator (or “you”, as Machado’s memoir is written in second person) awakes to their girlfriend staring at them, saying that the narrator tossed and turned all night, keeping her awake. The narrator, frozen, lists out all the ways events could transpire next:

Besides this being a singularly brilliant craft decision in its mirroring of the impossible stuck-ness of an abusive relationship, it is also a clear reflection of how life lived, and not simply remembered, feels. It’s a wonder any of us gain enough clarity to write about past events, about past selves, with any degree of assuredness; often, the confusion, the indecision, the constant state of wondering what’s going to happen next, falls away with time—and so, too, from our essays.

Chronicling my indecision surrounding motherhood, only to declare in writing that I had decided one way or the other, didn’t feel “true.” Frankly, claiming I was writing my feelings out with the goal of deciding also felt false. I was writing about my indecision because I didn’t know who I could be as a mother, who other members of my family could’ve been under different circumstances, how these two unrealities affect one another in the reality that is. In fact, I found those questions to be more “true” to my lived experience than forcing myself into some sort of fabricated “aha!” moment.

And so I imagined that child of mine. And that led me to imagine my mother and who she was before me or my brother existed. Surely she imagined me in turn, before I existed. And my brother, who he might become. I followed these speculations down, down, down; each one felt much more true to the pain and the hope that lived at the center of my essay.

Because that’s the thing about writing nonfiction: Sometimes it’s not the true events that speak. It’s the true emotions. Slippery, unruly creatures that evade sensory description and transcend the observable world we try so desperately hard to relay, to build, in essay.

In a 2018 Q&A with Electric Literature, Carmen Maria Machado said of In the Dream House, which was then a work in progress:

The answer is a resounding yes. Our job as nonfiction writers is not to relay events beat for beat no matter what, but instead to strive for unflinching honesty about the myriad of shapes the truth can take.

And the truth is: Just because it’s nonfiction doesn’t mean we know what happens next.

Ready to try it out?

In Writing the “What If”—Speculative Nonfiction Workshop, a six-week class led by author and editor Haley Swanson, writers will engage with memoirs, poems, and essays that play with the “what if” of things—speculating on what could’ve been—and work on incorporating this approach into your own nonfiction writing.

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For today, enjoy this StoryCraft piece from Jaz about one of the most exciting elements of this burgeoning blended genre.

If every memoir is a peek into someone’s worldview, then might your story require a little world-building?

Audre Lorde thought so.

The late poet’s memoir Zami: A New Spelling of My Name shows us how fantastical elements can truly drive home a nonfiction story’s themes. Lorde coined the term “biomythography”—a story that combines history, biography, and myth— to describe her approach to memoir writing with Zami. You might tilt your head at the thought of “myth” in memoir. I did. But then I delved into Lorde’s book.

Zami is a poetic coming-of-age story that follows the life of Audre Lorde (1934-1992) as she finds her voice through her relationships with several fascinating women. The “myth” in Zami comes in Lorde’s retelling of a mythical version of her mother’s homeland, Carriacou, Grenada.

Real-life Carriacou is a tiny island in the southeastern Caribbean. But for Lorde, who grew up loving tales of Carriacou her mother told her as a child, the island became far more magical in her mind the more she learned about herself and her queerness. She began to think of Carriacou as a land full of powerful, lesbian goddesses. She imagined that all of the strong women she encountered, who helped her discover her voice, could be from this place, and this idea was like an anchor for the author’s journey.

Lorde’s evolving idea of Carriacou, or the myth of the place, became a sort of poetic metaphor for Zami’s biggest theme; finding home and belonging. Because she first defines the “real” version of Carriacou, and expresses her fascination with all that she wished she could learn about it, we, the readers, understand that the mythical version is simply a north star for the author, guiding Lorde’s life experiences and evolution throughout the book.

One of the ways my own book, Pansy, “world builds” and incorporates Lorde’s concept of myth in memoir is by playing with the idea of dreams and dreaming. Early dreams from my childhood of an older version of myself help guide this non-linear memoir forward, as I attempt to become this person that only exists in an “unreal” place. Using the fantastical element of dreams to emphasize themes of Black exceptionalism and transness add an extra level of depth and understanding by giving readers a peek into my childhood psyche.

Incorporating elements from biomythography, or myth in memoir, is just one of the ways memoir can benefit from magical realism. Like Audra Lorde, I’ve come to understand that with memoir, it’s much less about the lived experiences than it is about how you choose to recount them. Your personal recounting of your story, or the world-building you do to express your life experiences, is the magic that ties it all together.

In How to Write a Memoir with Magical Realism I’ll be teaching how to incorporate magical realism into your own memoir writing by highlighting some of its most versatile approaches: personification of a theme or idea, poetic influence in tone, metaphor, and, of course, biomythography.

So, what are some of the myths that represent themes in your life? Let’s find out.

I hope you’ll join me for the ride!

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One major function of nonfiction is reporting on the truth. A report may look different depending on the nature of the reportage, because different people have different perspectives on real-life events. Are you adhering to un-skewed facts at whatever cost? Are you exploring your own subjectivity, or someone else’s? Are you testing the limits of memory?

Odds are if you’re reading this, you already know a thing or two about the impossibility of capturing the unvarnished truth. Regardless of your intent as a journalist, scholar or essayist, there’s no disowning the singularity of your viewpoint or the life that’s shaped it.

As someone who writes both fiction and nonfiction, it’s actually exciting to me that the truth can be such a tricky thing to pin down. It doesn’t mean that we’re awash in a sea of uncertainty, ungrounded by anything remotely resembling facts. What it actually means is that capturing the truth works more like writing a novel than churning out a quick-turn news dispatch: Each of us has our own impression of what’s happened and why, and those impressions play a far greater role in what happens next than we’re often willing to admit.

Acknowledging this is the first step toward mining your nonfiction for novel ideas. Embrace protagonist syndrome, even if it’s just as a thought experiment. Take a first-person piece you wrote, and consider the fact that while it’s one hundred percent nonfiction, it’s also one hundred percent your own perspective.

Ask yourself: How might X or Y event in my life have looked from a secondary or tertiary character’s perspective? How have you shaped the world around you to “fit” you? What does a world that “fits” look like versus one that doesn’t?

Please keep in mind that acknowledging the reality of your perspective isn’t the same as arguing that it’s the only one worth listening to. In fact, it’s quite the opposite: by reflecting on the fact that you may not be the sole arbiter of truth (or moral rectitude, or rationality, etc.) in a given situation, you are actually making space for other perspectives, and for the bigger truth—which is that reality is so much more complex than we want to believe it to be.

Go back to your essays and articles and memoir. Look them over for signs of where your perspective could end and others’ could begin. Write into that other perspective —no matter how scary or alien or taboo it feels—and see what comes of it. Train your gaze on yourself, but from a different set of eyes.

I’ve been doing a lot of thinking along these lines lately, and it’s resulted in the following exercise:

• Consider a moment when a friend or family member with whom you’d been close said or did something that made you feel misaligned with and alienated from them. You know how you felt—confusion, fear, betrayal—so now write a monologue investigating their perspective. What sorts of circumstances, thoughts and emotions would conspire to cause someone to do this thing? You know how you perceived this person’s actions—but how might they have perceived yours? Once you’ve found your way into this new perspective, you might begin exploring other perspectives closer to it, or closer to but still distinct from your own.

• If you’re feeling up to it, train your gaze on yourself training your gaze on yourself (hello, literary modernism!) You’ll no doubt be surprised what yields from that psychedelic hall of mirrors. Before you know it, you may well write the first chapter of your novel.

Ready to dive into fiction? In From Essays to Novels: Fiction Writing for the Nonfiction Writer, Rafael will help you put the considerable research and storytelling skills you’ve built as a memoirist, essayist journalist or scholar to work on your first substantial piece of fiction.

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And just around the corner, starting February 12, is the next session of Caroline Rothstein’s popular class Deeply Personal: Writing First-Person Essays on Raw and Difficult Topics. Today, we asked Caroline to share this StoryCraft article about her own writing process.

My writing talks to me. It tells me who it is. Shows me––draft after draft after draft. And my job, as the writer, is not only to transmit and transmute the content that begs to pour itself out of my fingers as they dance across the home row keys, but to listen. To witness my piece—be it an essay, a poem, a stretch of dialogue for a novel or film, the nut graf of a reported feature, or the closing monologue of a musical or play—tell me who it is.

Let’s take my recent personal essay “Dust,” which appeared in “my word(s),” the quarterly nonfiction series I publish on my website. The essay inspiration came while watching A Cowboy Christmas Romance on Netflix (I’m a rom com film and romance novel fiend). Near the end of the film, there was a dust storm underway (soon to be treacherous with thunder and lightning and rain) to which I had a visceral reaction. Suddenly, it reminded me of a dust storm I drove through in 2007 while on a three-month solo road trip around the United States.

Now. Sometimes I write personal essays based on a topic I’ve been asked to write about. Sometimes it’s a topic I’ve wanted to write about, and suddenly something clicks and I’m able to let it pour and flow. And sometimes the piece finds me. Something out of nowhere—like lightning itself—strikes my inspiration, and I write. That’s what happened here. The latter. The piece took the wheel—pun intended; said: drive.

Here are the first four paragraphs of the first draft:

I was watching A Cowboy Christmas Romance on Netflix this past weekend on January 3, 2026, when, with exactly 18 minutes left to go in the film, a dust storm began to rattle the cattle ranch where the plotline took place. Suddenly, I was 23 years old on a three-month solo road trip around the United States of America, trucking my silver Volvo sedan I called “Antelope” (after the Phish song “Run Like an Antelope”) across Arizona in the wake of a wild dust storm.

My car felt mauled that day. I had just left the Painted Desert, a spectacular site featuring nature’s ability to turn itself into awe. Again and again. Nature’s built like that. Scientifically. Spiritually. Able to balance the forever both/and that is divinity and practicality.

I wish we did that more often. Us. Humans. That particular kind of balancing act.

We’re able to. Us. Humans.

After writing this opening, I really got in my own feelings about that road trip. I took the wheel back from the essay and went digging in my computer for an unwieldy 451-word paragraph I remembered writing in a book proposal for the book about this road trip I’ve been working on for 18 years (!!!). I copy/pasted the massive paragraph and plopped it in to now draft two of my “Dust” essay. I was sure this paragraph was a perfect fit.

Then I thought more about dust. I thought about poet Anis Mojgani’s “Shake the Dust,” which led me to bring some of the sentiments of Mojgani’s piece—about literally shaking the dust when stuff gets challenging and hard—into my essay. Now we were getting somewhere. The essay was telling me: This is who I want to be. Cool.

I wrote the rest of the piece. But when I got to draft five, something about that 451-word paragraph kept staring me in the face. I kept checking in with myself and my essay to ask: Do you (the paragraph) really want to be in this essay? Or am I (me, the writer) trying to force it based on my own nostalgia?

This is a thing I do. Maybe you do it too. I get super, duper wildly nostalgic in my personal essay writing and love including stuff that literally only matters to me. Like, little cute moments of connection or memories or moments that hype up my heart but have absolutely nothing to do with the writing content and task at hand!

I realized, as I got to draft 5, that’s what was going on with that 451-word paragraph. And only because I’m trying to prove a point here, in hopes of helping you learn to listen to your own work—and understand the difference between listening to our pieces and screaming over the voice of the piece itself (as I did with this massive paragraph)—I’m going to share it with you so you can see it—in comparison with the final published piece—and see why it doesn’t work:

It was on this same journey that I set the foundation for my adulthood. While stir-frying tofu and vegetables in Atlanta, where I spent six months working at a friend’s sports bar to save up for my road trip, I realized that, now financially independent for the first time in my life, I literally couldn’t afford to have an eating disorder, a realization that helped to feed and sustain my recovery. At the base of the Edmund Pettus Bridge in Selma, Alabama, overlooking an abandoned construction site, it hit me that the civil rights movement was still very much underway, with all too little actual progress made, and that I would commit my life to helping see racial justice to fruition. At a Best Western in Clarksdale, Mississippi, I felt my hunger as a writer literally busting my bra from its seams as I stormed into my hotel room, tossed off said bra, and sat down at my laptop computer to write. In Santa Fe, New Mexico, I felt the mountains suck me in. They whispered into my ears. You’re an artist, they said. You’re on the right path, they kissed. There, I walked into a museum to find Jack Kerouac’s “On the Road” manuscript on display. Coincidentally. And I knew this was my road trip. Minus the drugs. Minus the misogyny. And so by the time I reached Canyonlands National Park in Utah, sitting alone at the mountain’s edge overlooking the Colorado River, I felt whole. I sat there with my legs crossed, my hair shoved into a tight, yet messy bun on top of my head, wisps jetted out behind the thick black cotton headband I would ultimately wear to its deterioration, my dead brother’s black Northface fleece engulfing my torso, my Oakley sunglasses adorning my skull, my ear holes filled with miniature silver hoops—two on the right, three on the left—my nose, mildly freckled by the sun scorched days I’d spent traversing ancient canyons in Moab, Utah. And I sat there thinking: this is freedom. This is the loneliness that encapsulates humanity. This is the infinity that G-d asks—begs, pleads, ushers—us to embrace daily. I sat there thinking, here I am alone at the edge of a cliff in Utah, and I have no one with whom to share this stunning glory, except for myself. I am the only person that will ever remember this moment I’m having. I can retell it for years and decades to come, but no one—no partner, no family member, no loved one, living or dead—can ever know what it was like at this moment on this day to sit in my flesh and taste this infinity.

It’s cute, right/write? Filled with feels. But it has nothing to do with the dust!

Each piece is unique. Each piece has its own voice. My job as the writer is to bear witness to the chorus of sounds driving the words (I’ve really mixed my metaphors here) and let them breathe.

Maybe your chorus looks—and feels—different. But I do feel strongly that, universally, each piece has its own voice. And learning to listen to it, especially with personal essays, where our own voices can often get in the way, is critical to letting a piece become its true, authentic and honest self.

We’ll be playing with things like this in my next cohort of “Deeply Personal: Writing First-Person Essays on Raw and Difficult Topics.” I hope you can join. Bring your voices. All of them. We’ll make a chorus of our own together in class.

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One thing I like to emphasize when I teach revision is that writing is a physical act.

If we want our stories and memoirs to speak to the universal, we must look outside the bounds of our own experience, even beyond the current limits of our imaginations, and start thinking outside the box.

One way to make that happen is to get up out of your chair. Go on a walk, a run, a bike ride. Pace the room. Talk to ourselves — Yes, of course writers talk to themselves! We must! — sing to ourselves; you name it. Physically, we can leave the spaces where we wrote our early drafts and move our bodies, working in new environments and with new movements in order to jump-start revision.

We can also inquire about the internal landscapes of our own minds. Explicitly understanding our creative processes by tracking how we decide and why we decide, is one of the most important, yet invisible, things we do. Something starts — a jolt through the body, an image in the mind’s eye, a sense memory triggered — and that initial impulse gradually takes hold, inviting us to turn what we’re experiencing into a narrative on the page. Sometimes it comes out quite literally — perhaps as freewriting or journaling or even speaking into a recorder about past experiences. Other times, it comes out in fiction that seems eons away from anything we’ve personally experienced. But in either case, it begins in the mind — or the heart-mind, perhaps — which brings me to another technique writers can experiment with when preparing to revise: meditation.

If we explore mindfulness or meditation, these skills are immediately transferable into our lives as creative thinkers. While I’m rarely thinking about “what I’m going to do about that problem in chapter eight” during my meditation sessions, I don’t think it’s a stretch to say that the skills I’ve developed by focusing on the breath (checking in with my body and mind through the space of my cells, my lungs, my movement, the room, the continent, the globe…) are the same skills that help when I’m trying to revise.

Revision is about looking close and then looking closer. It’s about that space between the in-breath and the out-breath, or the space between the end of one sentence and the start of another. These spaces are often overlooked, but if we look closely, mindfully, what do we find there? What stories are waiting to come out? How does what rises up speak more keenly to the human experience than our earlier drafts? What if we were to write into the page, rather than across or down the page?

Each of these techniques — movement, inquiry, and meditation — can help writers gain critical perspective on their own work and see new possibilities within a draft.

But what about when we’re ready to return to the page? We’ve allowed the manuscript to rest or even workshopped it; we’ve gone on a long walk and taken a break. We feel like we’re ready. We’ve tried to shake things up and open our minds. We want to get back in there, but… where to begin?

In my own work, I often start by taking a closer look at verbs. Even in a quiet story or literary realist prose, we still need plot, and verbs are the only part of speech that imply action. More often than not, my verbs will either fall flat or ignite my curiosity. If it’s the former, I treat the verb as an invitation to think more precisely about the subtext and main text I’m trying to evoke. If it’s the latter, I understand that I may be onto something, and I should reflect further on what this verb could be telling me about the direction in which a particular piece wants to go.

And that’s just one technique I use for line-level deep revision! There are boatloads more, including techniques for thematic revision and structural revision.

Just as we work with our minds and bodies, we need to work with the words and clues we’ve left ourselves on the page. This is why I also like to teach the practical, technical and playful techniques of deep revision alongside these more conceptual ones. When we use all of these tools together, we end up with the strongest version of the work we set out to create.

In The Fine Art of Deep Revision, I’ll be teaching three of the most essential craft tools for deep revision, providing writers with concrete tools for big-picture developmental edits, sentence-level revision, and studying the structural components of your prose. I hope you’ll join me!

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Katey Schultz is the author of Flashes of War, which The Daily Beast praised as an “ambitious and fearless” collection, and Still Come Home, a novel. She has taught all over the country — at Interlochen College of Creative Arts, Fishtrap, 49 Alaska Writing Center, StoryStudio Chicago, and her own organization, Maximum Impact, among others.

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This past fall, I taught our first-ever Personal Essay Incubator class, which was a huge success and an absolute joy. Going into it, I knew I wanted to share some of the valuable advice I’d learned about pitching after doing it for many years myself. Rather than select a few piecemeal anecdotes along the way, I figured, Why not put together a whole comprehensive guide? As we’re about to enter into the holidays, during which many of us will have some time to work on our own writing, I thought I’d share that guide with all of you in hopes that it’ll give you just the boost you need to get your ideas out there.

I’m also teaching the Personal Essay Incubator class again starting in January, on Thursdays from 12-1 p.m. ET, in case you’re looking for a little more focus and attention on the craft of personal essay writing, including critiques of your own pieces! (Caroline Rothstein is teaching a version of this incubator, too, on Tuesdays from 7-8 p.m. ET if evening classes are more your thing.) Keep reading for my guide and start pitching away!

Writers are full of story ideas. We come to them when we have a tale we’re dying to get out, something we’re trying to make sense of, an argument we’d like to present. Often, we’re approaching our ideas with a sense of urgency or after a lot of thought, so this may be the easy part. What can be arguably harder to do is figure out how to distill these ideas down into shareable nuggets that an editor might want to buy — often before you’ve even written them. In hopes of making that part a little less intimidating, I’ve put together some tips I’ve cobbled together after years of doing this work (and being one of the few people who actually enjoys it?) so you can pitch your next big idea with confidence.

1. Once you have your idea or draft, read the publication you’re thinking of pitching to make sure your story is a good fit.

I know this may seem like low-hanging fruit, but you’d be surprised by how many people skip this step. Check out at least one story, but preferably several in case one happens to be an outlier. And if you really like one of the pieces you read, mention that in your pitch. Editors like to know that you’ve made the effort, you’re taking this seriously and you know what you’re talking about.

2. Next, imagine someone is asking you what your story is about and write that out in about two paragraphs (200-300ish words).

Be as concise and clear as you can. Yes, you want to show an editor what you can do, so feel free to be a bit writerly, but make sure your idea is all-the-way there and easy to follow. A good rule of thumb is to try and answer the 5Ws/1H here: who, what, when, where, why and how. If it starts to get long and you realize you’re flat-out writing the full essay, stop yourself and save that writing in a separate doc for when you do sit down to write the thing. Then, go back to the pitch.

3. Make sure what you have is a story idea, not just a topic you want to write about or “explore.”

A story about a man who likes to travel a lot is interesting (maybe), but it becomes a story you need to tell once you add that he was one of the only people with a good-for-life, go-anywhere pass from a major airline, which one day got revoked and nearly destroyed him.

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With the 2025 Narratively Memoir Prize underway (and the December 7 deadline fast approaching!), we thought now was a good time to share this story, in which several writing luminaries were kind enough to offer their advice on how exactly they carved out successful essays — sometimes several — from their own books. Read on, give it a try yourself and submit your excerpt for the prize. Happy carving!

Last month, I received an email from nonfiction book coach Joelle Hann sharing the one question she gets a lot from clients: “How do I shape a part of my book for publication as a standalone essay?” She wondered if Narratively had a resource that spoke to this. We didn’t — yet. We’ve also had a lot of writers reach out to ask if they can submit an excerpt from their book to the Narratively Memoir Prize. The answer is yes! But the question remains: how to craft the very best excerpt from a book-length work? 

I attempted to write an essay from my in-progress memoir a few years ago but felt like the first draft didn’t quite work. The way I’d constructed it left too many questions, which I wasn’t sure how to answer without the piece ballooning into something much longer. I put it in a drawer for another day. But faced with the question head-on now, I wanted to know, too. So, I decided to pick the brains of four nonfiction writers who have written excerpts I love — and successfully placed them in The New York Times, The New Yorker and Narratively — to see how exactly they did it. 

Robert Kerbeck

Book: Ruse: Lying the American Dream from Hollywood to Wall Street
Excerpt: Narratively: “My High-Flying Life as a Corporate Spy Who Lied His Way to the Top”

After Narratively published this excerpt, it became one of their most popular stories of the year so far, and catapulted Ruse into the top 10 in numerous categories on Amazon. While I’d like to take credit, if it weren’t for the unique approach of editor Brendan Spiegel, I know that wouldn’t have been the case. Brendan’s idea was to excerpt Ruse the way Hollywood makes movie trailers. We never expect to see a full scene or even a significant portion of one in a trailer, right? Instead, we get a series of highlights to entice us to go see the movie. Indeed, when Ruse was first released, an excerpt was printed exactly as it was in a prestigious online magazine, but that excerpt resulted in few sales. Instead, Brendan went with a “Greatest Hits” approach, selecting a series of smaller excerpts from throughout the book that he thought readers would most respond to, then tying them together to give an overall sense of the narrative without giving everything away. Brendan’s “movie trailer” approach was so successful that last week Ruse inked a deal with a major Hollywood production company to develop a TV series inspired by the book. 

Having an outside editor was invaluable, as authors are often too close to their project to really know what sections might best sell their book. Because the first excerpt from Ruse was largely unsuccessful, I was particularly open to Brendan’s suggestions as to what to include. His word count, though, for the initial excerpt was close to 10,000 words. I worried that readers might not buy my book since they would’ve read over a tenth of it for free. Brendan and I worked together (along with Noah Rosenberg who came in toward the end, as well) to edit the excerpt to a more manageable length. We got it down to around 7,500 words and then even created a few new sentences to string the passages together a bit better. That’s right, I wrote new material for an excerpt! Much to my amazement, the resulting excerpt made Ruse seem like a must-read (or a must-make-into-a-TV-series). Of course, it was still the same book I’d written but, by highlighting some of the best parts, the excerpt drove readers to want to know more about my story — which is exactly what an excerpt is supposed to do. 

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Do you ever feel like “voice” is one of those writerly terms you’re never totally sure you’re following or that you’ve nailed? If yes, this Craft Classic from Creative Nonfiction by writer Sonya Huber, in which she feels liberated by discovering that she doesn’t have to be beholden to only one voice, should help.

When you’re inside a piece of writing that hums and crackles and sparks, when a real person is talking to you from the page, you’ve encountered a voice. “Voice” is what writing feels like. It sets off sympathetic vibrations in readers. It gives us a sense of connection to another live human presence, creating a real and complex moment of communication. As the poet Adrienne Rich put it, words written with voice have “the sheer heft / of our living behind” them.

We already have voices, so the guidance to “find” one’s voice is often confusing for writers. If you’ve read about voice, you might have encountered the idea that it is a singular essence that animates writing, made up of craft and style choices and tone, and that it is somehow connected to our “real self.” As a young writer, I heard this advice suggesting that I had one “authentic” voice, the “real me,” with the rest of my expression somehow impure or fake. I knew that I had a certain style, a set of phrases and an underlying grammar that united much of my writing, but when I thought about my voice, I felt self-conscious. That “one voice” concept made me feel like I couldn’t stray far from my roots, like I had one crayon to color with. Following that idea, it seemed like I’d somehow have to incorporate all of my being and influences into one mode of expression so that, no matter what, I’d always sound a little like a Midwesterner stuck in the 1980s, and my true style was a kind of anchor or tether, one I’d always circle around, with a limited range. Worse, I couldn’t even tell you much about my “singular voice” beyond a list of words I chose regularly, a few bad habits of sentence construction, and some influences of region and era.

Throughout my years of teaching writing, I have tended to skip the question of voice because it didn’t seem to help my students. Instead, I gave them writing prompts and asked them to inhabit various perspectives, real and imagined, past, present, and future. As these writers exercised and stretched and explored these different selves, they began to feel something flow that had been frozen. They began to inhabit their writing, and that comfort on the page often transferred far outside the world of memoir or the personal essay and enlivened their academic writing. But I didn’t yet have a theory about why this worked.

As Janet Burroway writes, “Begin by knowing, and exploring, the fact that you already have a number of different voices.” You can borrow voices, learn to listen to your own, exercise them so they grow stronger, trade them, try others on for size. And you get as many as you want. When you use one, two more appear. And yet they are all connected and shifting. Every voice we develop is an interface or cognitive tool to help us interact with a specific slice of the world in a specific time and place. We move along throughout our lives, and we discard some of our old voices, or they are used to make new ones. Once you appreciate all the voices you have to work with, you can mine them, and discover others, for writing in all genres. Your web of voices is you—but it’s also other people’s impact on you, what you’ve read, and what you’ve experienced. As Walt Whitman wrote, you “contain multitudes.” And as Felicia Rose Chavez writes, “How we speak is as abundant as we are.”

I stumbled into my own experiments with voice when I began literally to stumble with an autoimmune disease. Chronic pain affected my joints, but it also affected my energy, my thinking, and my writing voice. Before I got sick, the writer voice only needed coffee to get started. I’d sit down at the screen, and words would appear. I didn’t always know what would appear on the page or how good it would be or where it would go, but I always knew that words would appear. But after I got sick, I felt like I couldn’t think, couldn’t zip along and fling handfuls of words at the keyboard. Instead, I pecked one letter at a time, my thoughts unspooling very slowly. I scrawled panicked and sad journal entries between naps, doctors’ visits, and angry attempts to wash dishes and do chores with hands that didn’t seem to work. I had to switch gears constantly to become the assistant professor doing all of her jobs well and calmly. Without that assistant professor role, there would have been no health insurance for me or my five-year-old son, and no food. But going to work used almost all the energy I had.

I fought against this change. I forced myself to write the way I’d always written, escalating a terrible battle between my mind and my body. I got depressed because my writing had always been the one thing about my life that I could control. At the root of this was a lot of anger toward myself and the world and a lot of fear about what my future might bring. I did not want to be where I was, and I didn’t want to have to give up writing.

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Memoir seems like it should be the easiest form of writing, right? No reporting, no research, just writing down what you already know. Yeah… not so much. Anyone who’s ever sat down to write a memoir can tell you that getting those thoughts out of your own head and onto paper (in a clear and relatable way) can be a lot harder than it sounds. Every story is different because every life is different and so is every writer, but after editing and publishing more than 700 memoir pieces over the past 12 years, our team at Narratively put together this guide to six steps that will help you get that memoir story from idea in your head to perfection on the page. If you’re thinking about submitting to the 2025 Narratively Memoir Prize and need a push to jumpstart your creativity, this post is for you!

1. Write From Your Own Point of View

This one might sound obvious, but it needs to be said. The most revealing and impactful memoir comes when you write about something you yourself have experienced — rather than something you witnessed, or that happened to someone you know. We see a lot of pitches that are about something the writer was perhaps a small part of, but they weren’t the central character. If your story could be retitled “The Most Exciting Thing My Mom Ever Did” or “How I Came to Terms with My Cousin’s Sexuality,” that’s not really your memoir (unless your mom or cousin impacted you in such an undeniably profound way that you surprised yourself and everyone around you and changed as a result — in which case we’d need headlines that are more about you for both those examples! You get the point…). Memoir is explicitly about you, and you’re the only one who can tell us how that unique experience truly made you feel, which is what makes it so engaging. If you’re wondering what memoir story you should write, it’s worth starting by asking yourself the question: What’s the one story I alone can tell?

2. Don’t Hide Behind Pretty Words

We all love a beautiful turn of phrase, but when it comes to memoir, what you tell us is actually more important than how you tell it. Like a good therapy session, the best memoir pieces are the ones in which the writer finds the courage to tell us exactly what happened, and exactly how they feel about it, no holds barred. One thing we see over and over again, even in some of the strongest drafts, is that when the writer gets to the pivotal point in the story, they duck out of telling us exactly what happened, and instead of giving us the full facts, they give us a sentence or two that *sounds* great but where the meaning isn’t clear. That might work in poetry, but it doesn’t work in memoir. Just tell us what happened. That may sound simple, but it isn’t always so easy. The best, most important parts of any memoir are often the parts that are the most painful, or most embarrassing, or that you’re afraid will anger someone you love. That’s when the urge to hide behind pretty words kicks in. If you can fight that urge, and instead be as clear and honest and vulnerable as possible in those pivotal moments, that’s what makes a memoir great. 

And it can also be the most rewarding. In discussing how writers should approach memoir, the writer Finlay Games told us in his Narratively Storyteller Spotlight: “For me, sharing intimately about my past has helped me to feel less ashamed for things that I had no business feeling ashamed about in the first place. It also helped my difficult past to feel like a gift rather than a burden, as I know that my sharing has helped people to feel less alone or inspired to make changes.” None of that happens until you can be as honest as possible on the page.

3. Tell Us a Full Story

A good memoir doesn’t have to cover your entire life story. Some of the best memoir stories we’ve read are primarily about just one year, one week, or even one day in a life. As long as the events of that time span are a dramatic, compelling and important slice of your life, then it’s possible to make any of those work. But each standalone memoir piece does need to be a full story, meaning there’s a clear beginning, middle and end; you take the reader on a journey from start to finish; and by the end something major changes in your own outlook on life, and the reader understands why. Dena Landon does a great job of this in her Narratively memoir piece, “I Was Taught to Hate My Lesbian Neighbors. They Took Me In Anyway.” The story is almost exclusively about one year in Dena’s childhood, but she makes it work by 1) writing vivid, dramatic scenes about the pivotal moments in that year, and 2) briefly giving us the context of what happened before and after, and how that one experience helped shape the rest of her life.

4. Step Away and Come Back

We all like to think we have the instincts to get things right on the first go, but when it comes to writing, your first draft is never, ever, ever going to be your final. This is definitely true with memoir. As writer (and proud parent) Kern Carter told us: “The biggest connection [between writing and parenting] is patience, which is the hardest part of being a parent or a writer. For me, being patient with my writing — extending scenes, giving more details — is just now sinking in.” Getting an essay into shape is honestly a lot like raising a kid: It is not gonna do what you want it to on your first try and you are gonna have to repeat yourself. When you’ve been consumed by writing something and you think you finally have that solid draft with all the necessary details included, take a break. Go for a walk, or step away for a few days, and try to think about something else. Nine times out of 10, when you’re taking that break, that’s when it’s gonna hit you — that one new thing you hadn’t considered yet, but that you absolutely have to include in the final piece.

5. Interrogate Your Memories

OK, remember when we said memoir sounds easy because there’s no reporting? Well, that’s not really true. You should be the central character in your own memoir, but you’re not the only one. Your story almost certainly involves interactions with other people, be they family, friends, frenemies, teammates, co-workers, teachers, neighbors, etc… Once you have your first draft down on paper, it’s usually worth calling some of the other people involved and asking: Do you remember these events the same way? Looking back, do you feel the same way about it that I do? If not, why? It’s not so much that you can’t remember all the facts yourself—although if you can’t, calling a friend is always a good idea! — it’s that when you’ve been stewing over something in your head for years, you develop a particular perspective that may not be inclusive of all viewpoints. The best writers are always rethinking whether what they think they know is really the full truth. As Candace Opper told us in her Storyteller Spotlight, “I find the idea of closure — at least, the widely accepted meaning of that concept — to be pretty bogus. As a writer, I’m constantly foraging around my past for inspiration and truth and insight, so I value being able to tap into the raw emotions around my experiences. I understand the emotional practicality of ‘moving on,’ but I think I find more value in being sort of a living, evolving sum of those experiences.” Often, when a writer talks to someone about their story and finds out their friend or loved one views the events differently, that can blow open a whole new line of thought to explore in the piece, and one that can be invaluable.

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6. Read Memoir!

The best way to improve as a writer is to read lots and lots and lots of writing — particularly the type of writing you’re working on and aspire to publish. So if you want to write memoir, read memoir. And if you’re interested in publishing your memoir, keep in mind that every outlet approaches things a little differently. Just because your piece is great doesn’t mean it will be right for every publication. If there’s a particular place you want to write for, the best thing you can do is read a lot of stories they have published. If you’re thinking of entering the 2025 Narratively Memoir Prize, start by reading a few of our all-time favorite stories, below, to get an idea of what we’re interested in. 

• My Childhood in an Apocalyptic Cult

• The Adventures of a Pakistani in Texas

• My Bizarre Reign as New York’s King of “Virgin Russian Hair”

• I Was Taught to Hate My Lesbian Neighbors. They Took Me In Anyway.

• Diary of a Bachelor Who Suddenly Became a Solo Dad to a Teenage Girl

• My Secret Life Tracking Down Debtors

• How I Wrote Myself into a Real-life Romantic Comedy — That Turned into a Survivalist Thriller

• My Coming Out Story, Starring a Priest, an Animal Sacrifice and Ricky Martin

And just remember — writing a memoir is hard and can be incredibly emotional, but we think it’s also one of the most powerful and rewarding ways to reflect on yourself and your life. The process can offer so much meaning, inspiration and joy (for you and your readers, and for editors like us, too!). So, don’t beat yourself up if it takes a while to get there, and be proud that you’re taking a chance and putting yourself out in the world.

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Brendan Spiegel is the co-founder of Narratively and currently leads Narratively Academy, the site’s education wing.

When I first started writing, coming from a blue-collar family and the D.I.Y. punk world, many things about the publishing business confused me — especially that business part. Now, as a creative nonfiction teacher, I mostly focus on the craft of writing, but when students are all done with their manuscripts, they often ask, “What’s next?” In many cases, the “what’s next” is: You need to write your book proposal. If you want to get your book published, the proposal is an essential tool for convincing editors that they should give your book a chance. Yet, when the idea of a proposal comes up, many writers freak out, preferring to tinker with the final-ish draft of their books instead.

I have written proposals for my own books and have also guided dozens of other writers through crafting their own contract-winning proposals. Here’s what I’ve learned about why, if you want to sell your book, you really should get going on that proposal…

1. Book proposals speak the language of the gatekeepers.

Have you ever started your own business, or do you know any entrepreneurs who have? Most likely their investors wanted to see a business proposal. The same is true of books. If you want a publisher to invest in publishing your book, they need to know why it’s a good investment for them. Book proposals are sales tools. Yeah, your book is your precious baby, but it is also a product (cuz… capitalism). You will want people to buy it. Welcome to the Land of Publishing. Here we speak not only in words but also in numbers and imagination. Publishers are businesses with bottom lines to worry about. Agents get paid a percentage of any publishing deal they make for you. And even if you circumvent the agent route by aiming for a mid-sized indie publisher, most will want to see a book proposal, which helps them to see whether you are a good bet for them (or not).

2. A book proposal shows you where your book fits into the market.

By the time you are done with your book proposal, you will know exactly which section, shelf or categories your book will be filed under in bookstores. Your audience cannot be “everybody.” All of the research you will do for your book proposal will clarify for agents and book buyers where your book fits into the literary marketplace. It also helps you to think about like-minded fellow authors or organizations you might team up with to reach readers, casting your net even wider than you could alone. For example, with my own memoir’s debut, I organized a reading at the Hollywood Public Library with another local author for Banned Books Week, an event called “I’m With the Banned!” since her book was about growing up in the punk music scene in L.A., and mine, about working as a dominatrix, had been nominated for an IPPY (Independent Publisher Book Award) in the “most likely to be banned” category. Between my mailing list, hers and the library’s, we tripled the size of our normal audience. The snappy title got it picked up in local media calendars, too. Thinking about the “market” for your book can help you get it published, and help you promote it down the road.

3. Book proposals can serve as a roadmap for what happens after publication.

On that note, yes, you will have to promote your own book. Publishers will get your book to distributors, but their publicity departments (if they have them) will only do so much for you. Authors are expected to do a lot of the selling and marketing on their own these days. Most press outlets have a three-month lead time while bookstores and venues tend to book out their spaces four to six months in advance. Social media influencers (reviewers) tend to stack content ahead of time, too. This means that waiting until your book is at the printer is too late. Seriously thinking about marketing, promotion and platform (ick, I know) in the proposal stages — way before you have an ARC (advance reader copy) on hand — will help you to get the ball rolling.

4. Your book proposal will help you to better understand your own story.

By the time you finish your book proposal, you should have a crystallized written and verbal pitch for your book. I have worked with writers who, after spending months refining the 30 or so pages of their proposal, realize their book is not actually about what they thought it was about. I have also seen writers finish the work of a book proposal only to decide that this is not the book they want to put into the world just yet, for a variety of reasons. The proposal process can also help you zero in on what you do want to publish. One such author is my former client Marni Battista, who first wrote a beautiful memoir about family and the grief of losing her father — then after shopping her proposal around and getting the same feedback from several agents, decided to write more of a self-help book (and book proposal) which shared the same message. That resulted in her forthcoming book, Your Radical Living Challenge: 7 Questions for Leading a Meaningful Life (Penguin Random House/Hay House).

Overall, a book proposal helps you and others understand the book that you’ve been living with for so long, that you might not be able see the forest for the trees, so to speak. In most cases, it helps you step back from your story enough to appreciate the bigger picture — and to define that bigger picture for agents and publishers, so you can sell your book and get it out into the world.

Ready to get writing? Sign up to join Shawna in How to Write a Nonfiction Book Proposal That Sells, a four-week workshop starting Wednesday, November 6.

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The next session of one of our most popular classes—Audrey Clare Farley’s The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel—is just around the corner, starting October 29. Today, we’re sharing Audrey’s StoryCraft article about how to get started with ensuring your nonfiction scenes are just as exciting as anything a fiction writer can dream up.

In his craft book, A Swim in a Pond in the Rain, the acclaimed novelist and short story writer offers this advice: “Always be escalating.” He goes on, “That’s all a story is, really: a continual system of escalation. A swath of prose earns its place in the story to the extent that it contributes to our sense that the story is (still) escalating.”

Saunders is writing for fellow make-believers, and this insight comes from studying a particularly narrow genre of fiction, the Russian short story. Nevertheless, his words are instructive for many of us who write narrative nonfiction. We, too, have to craft compelling storylines. We, too, know that we’re competing against social media for readers’ attention — and that many literary agents and editors are on the hunt for the most page-turning projects. 

But how exactly does one “escalate” in nonfiction? What literary devices help to build momentum in a story that’s also, or even primarily, meant to inform or persuade?

These are questions I think about a lot in my own writing, and that I cover in my classes. I tend to tell fellow nonfiction writers that we can draw on almost anything from the playbooks of novelists, including devices like foreshadowing and dramatic irony. Further, even our takeaways or “morals of the story,” can benefit from Saunders’s “always be escalating” rule. There are so many ways to do this. Here’s a brief look at some of my favorite approaches — and some nonfiction books that use these devices to great effect.     

Give Readers a Hint

When readers suspect but don’t know something, or when they have knowledge that exceeds certain characters’, they’re inclined to keep reading. They want to see their hunches proved right, know how action unfolds or learn how characters are changed by an event. This means narrative nonfiction writers may have to scrap the academic rubric, which requires them to show their hand in the opening pages, for more crafty scaffolding. 

This doesn’t mean to obscure the truth or imply something that isn’t true. But by revealing some of the details early on, without giving away everything, you get readers thinking about what the full story might be — and that makes them want to read on to learn it all.

A prologue could establish what happened — building suspense by showing us the general events with color and excitement, but leaving some mystery as to all the details — while subsequent chapters reveal how, why, by whom, or to what effect. 

Play With Time

A history textbook tells nonfiction stories in straightforward, chronological order, but a narrative nonfiction book doesn’t have to. Playing with timelines is difficult to execute, but when done well can be very effective in terms of building momentum.

One character or storyline might move forward in time, while another moves backward. This is loosely the structure of Cristina Rivera Garza’s award-winning Liliana’s Invincible Summer. Sifting through archival records and plumbing her own memories, the author goes back in time to understand her sister’s life leading up to her murder; she also reproduces unedited letters and notes to enable her dead sister to speak, unmediated, to readers in the present. 

Follow a Change

It helps to remember that, for Saunders, escalation means “advancing the story in a non-trivial way.” No matter what heavy lifting chapters do to educate or entertain, each one should also change the whole somehow. 

Think about what changes from start to finish in your book. Remember that it might be less about the events than the characters themselves.

Change might entail a character’s transformation or that of the writer. Some of the most propulsive true-crime books find momentum not from can’t-look-away crimes, but from the teller’s trials. Think of Michelle McNamara’s I’ll Be Gone in the Dark, which describes the late author’s psychological descent while pursuing the Golden State Killer. Or Alex Marzano-Lesnevich’s The Fact of a Body, which explores the author’s childhood sexual trauma alongside a murder case. 

Make Your Point Incrementally

In academia, writers are often told to introduce their argument early on, using the opening pages to spell out a thesis. But in narrative nonfiction, the most effective theses tend to be laid out incrementally and only as narrative events permit. When I read a book that patiently makes its claims (I’m thinking of Clint Smith’s How the Word Is Passed, on slavery and national memory), it feels as if I am the one turning on the light bulbs in my head. I’m coming to the author’s conclusions with him, in real time. 

It can be daunting to think one must “always be escalating.” But thinking in terms of escalation can save writers from spending time on scenes or sections that aren’t needed. Any of the books I mentioned above are great places to start if you’re working on a nonfiction book and want inspiration about how to build momentum from start to finish. Also keep in mind that escalation can come naturally through revision. In many cases, it’s only after putting words on the page that we can make connections and see causality. Far from applying a formula to a story, then, escalation is often the work of surprise. When we allow language, characters and ideas to get away from us, we find our stride. 

Want to learn more about how to write engaging and suspenseful nonfiction? Grab one of the last seats in Audrey’s upcoming Narratively Academy class, The Art of Writing a Nonfiction Book That Reads Like a Novel. If you’re aiming to get that big nonfiction or memoir book project moving this fall, this one’s for you.

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Keeping a journal means writing down vulnerable insights about yourself. This practice is often accompanied by fear. Fear that you will open up painful things you’ve been avoiding. Fear that someone else might violate your privacy and read your sacred ponderings. Or fear that when you die, someone will find and publish your journals, then turn your life story into a blockbuster hit, showcasing your most embarrassing and humiliating reactions to life. (OK, maybe some of us secretly want that posthumous movie part to happen.) Yet despite all these things to fear, maintaining a personal journal is such a vital process because you discover and re-discover aspects — many often hidden, even from you — about yourself. By keeping a journal, you can return to and refresh your memories. Journaling becomes a personal archive that — if organized in a productive way — can be incredibly helpful for memoir writers.

Thirty-five years had elapsed when I came across my journals from my days in the military. At the time, I’d just returned to my home base following a stint in the Gulf War and the humanitarian effort that followed, Operation Provide Comfort. I was devastated and destroyed. Back then, I would’ve eaten those journals before allowing anyone else to read them.

But as I reread my entries, I chuckled and imagined hugging my 20-something-year-old self. These reflections became a major basis for the memoir I recently completed, Navigation, which details the time period when I weaved my way out of war and suicidal ideation, into a sense of self-acceptance.

What I realized when reading my journals is that each of us carries our own psychological blueprint — and staying true to our emotional narrative arc by memory alone would be impossible. Personal journals offer a map of how you feel and respond at a given moment in time and across time, much like a narrative arc of a story. A journal offers you a guide, a blueprint to who you were in a given moment. Much as the narrator of a novel may interject and retell details of the story with enhanced perspective, a journal allows you to dialogue with the younger you — perhaps with even more compassion and peace than you gave yourself at the time.

Today, I’m grateful that I did not burn those journals or throw them away. I’m even more grateful that I tried to sort through my challenges via writing. These journals bore witness to my life. At one point, I worried that I did not have sufficient documentation to write about one particularly crucial event that took place during the war, but the journals had so many details and stories I had locked away since then (along with citations and awards from the military), offering the “proof” that I felt I needed to tell my story in full.

Whether your journals are from 35 years or 35 minutes ago, revisiting them with perspective can be such a vital tool for memoir writing.

I’m super excited to be teaching From Journal to Memoir: How to Turn Your Side Scrawls Into Literary Gold at Narratively Academy in a few weeks. This is an intensive four-week online seminar with classes held via Zoom on Sundays, from October 19 through November 9. We’ll explore easy, doable techniques for how to pull ideas from your journals to utilize in your memoir and personal essays — while preserving your voice, your feelings and your ideas. The course also covers concepts for how to notate and maintain multiple journals so that you can resource them for a variety of projects and processes in the future.

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I’m a multi-hyphenate writer-artist-poet-performer-filmmaker, which means the possibilities for what I choose to do with an idea generally feel expansive, but also sometimes daunting. Over time, I’ve found that my creative ideas that want to be personal essays are the stories and experiences that make me desperate to—pardon my French here—work my shit out on the page.

Poetry tends to be where I go to process my feelings or wonders of my soul. Journalism? Where I process my relationship to other people the rest of the world. Theater? Where I explore interpersonal dynamics. Film is for humor. Fiction—the snarky voice I’m too timid to use IRL.

And personal essay? It’s where I turn when I need the space to let the page reflect back to me who I am, and what it means to have experienced that which I have— personally—experienced.

I also use the personal essay as a place to really, truly, gut-wrenchingly slow down a moment, and allow it space to air out and breathe—like hang-dry laundry, contending with the wind.

Personal essay writing might be something entirely different for you. Maybe it’s the only writing craft within which you work. Maybe you’ve never tried it before whatsoever, and you’re curious to give it a whirl. But that’s the point of the class I’m teaching this fall: Deeply Personal: Writing First-Person Essays on Raw and Difficult Topics.

Our goal will be to—in community—discover who we are as writers. To hone our own inner writing—and intuitive—antenna. To listen to our deepest selves. To cultivate and strengthen our abilities to write and say what it is we both want and need to explore.

Whether or not you’re thinking about joining the class, I’m excited to share this exercise I like to use to help writers start listening to their inner selves and identify exactly what they want to write about. If you want to get some personal essay writing done this fall but are struggling on where to begin, start here.

First, I invite you to take a deep breathe (or three) with me, to whatever extent that feels comfortable.

Next, grab a pen and some paper, or open up a document in which to write (whatever helps you feel most comfortable in crafting anew).

Cool. Now I invite you to make a list of three to five topics about which you feel like you most consistently or typically write. Especially ones where you’re like — seriously, self?! That again?!

For me, that list is:

• Mental health, mental illness, and body image

• Grief, loss, and death

• Consent and sexual assault survival

• Social identity, systemic oppression, and collective liberation

• Sex, romance, and relationships

Got your own micro list? (It probably actually feels more macro than micro, perhaps?!) Great.

Now I invite you to take a look at that list. Item by item. And ask yourself these three questions as you do a little accounting and thoughtful interrogating of each of the three to five things:

1. Where does this topic feel expansive?

2. Where does this topic feel stagnant, stale or stuck (if at all)?

If this topic feels stagnant, stale or stuck, why do I think that’s the case?

3. What am I still not saying that I want to say about this topic/theme/thing?

Here’s how I rocked out #3 for my above list, to peel the curtain back a bit. (This is actually a scary exercise, and I always say—and honor—in workshops and classes I facilitate that anything I’m asking participants to do, I’m doing too. Buckle up!)

All right, so per #3:

The answer to all of them for me is: JOY! LOL. I know it’s not the cheeriest list (UNDERSTATEMENT TIMES INFINITY), but in doing this exercise myself, I realized that there are moments of joy and abundance in every category that I could amplify and center far more often than not. And yes, I tend to write about resilience in all of these five arenas, but I’m curious what might come out if I started from a place of joy, rather than resilience.

OK. That may have taken a few minutes. Cool beans. Take whatever time you need.

And once you’re finished with that exercise, I invite you to now ask yourself this:

What am I not writing about that I wish I would and/or could write about?

Make a list of two to three things.

Once you’ve got that list, ask yourself—for each item on the list: Why?

Why am I not writing about this thing?

So, for me, it was:

• Fear of how it might impact my career

• Fear of how it might impact other people I love

• Fear of getting “canceled”

Anyone else? Anyone? Bueller?! And listen. I get it. If your “whys” look like mine—or whatever they look like—they are ridiculously legit. What I do when my “whys” look like that is some deep soul searching around what’s real versus what’s imagined, especially with my fear of “getting canceled.” And then when it comes to impacting people I love—which is important for me in my own work, since so much of the work I publish is extremely personal—I have conversations with people I love about the thing I want to write and I learn what their boundaries and limits are, so I can honor them.

OK. I’m taking a bunch of deep breaths now again myself, if you’d like to join me.

Inhale for four. Exhale out for four, as well. And again, however feels good and right for you.

So now you have two very important things: the “what am I not writing about” and the “why.”

For me, making a list like this helped me get moving on my own personal essay series, where I’ve written about what it looks like to breach my own consent needs'; my thoughts and feelings about Netflix’s first season of Nobody Wants This (that might seem silly that this was a vulnerable stretch for me, but I loathe writing commentary and reviews, so…); my feelings about reconciliation and boycotting artists we previously loved; thoughts about anti-carceral feminism and disembodiment; and the both/and-ness I find inherent in Jewish identity.

To name a few.

And while some of these topics ARE things I often write about, these were all pieces where I pushed myself to go deeper. Where I genuinely ushered myself to get below my usual ish.

What did this exercise do for you? Sound off in the comments?

My Deeply Personal class is about helping each writer build a set of tools and options that provide you with as many containers, formats and techniques as possible to ensure that each idea, experience, story or moment you want to explore through personal essay has a way to find itself a home.

With your words. With your writing. On the page.

Because I believe what keeps us from getting to the raw, what keeps us from ushering ourselves to write that which feels difficult, is not a lack of craft, or desire, but a lack of tangible pathways.

Together, through lessons, readings, in-class activities and exercises, supportive peer feedback, and perhaps most importantly, by doing it all in co-create community, we’ll dive extra deep.

I’d love for you to join us.

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Happy writing, whoever and wherever you are, and however you choose to swim in your craft.

Interested in joining but can’t afford the full price? We are happy to offer sliding scale, income-based scholarships, which you can apply for here.

P.S. If you want to take a (deeper!) look at how I navigate some of this myself, here’s my own essay series.

The folks at the Spruceton Inn recently wrapped applications for their 2026 writers and artists residencies — and it got us dreaming about starting our own. Thinking about giving it a go yourself? Read on to learn how to do it…

Any artist will tell you there’s no one way, no linear approach to doing the things we dream of doing. Accepting that might be the truest act of creative freedom we can give ourselves as artists. Casey Scieszka, owner of the Spruceton Inn, a minimalist motel (“bed and bar”) tucked away in the Catskill Mountains that’s known for its annual artist residency, is an artist herself — a writer, to be exact. So when she set out to open a reimagined B&B, one that could in turn offer other artists the time and space to get away and work on their craft at no cost, many of those closest to her worried that she was giving up on her own artistic pursuits. But Casey was merely out to take a more creative approach to her ambitions.

Leaving the city for a quiet, rural landscape isn’t what typically comes to mind when thinking of ways to expand your creative network. But after traveling abroad with her now-husband for many years, Casey returned to Brooklyn (where she was born and raised) and quickly knew it wasn’t the right location for what she was looking to do. The Catskills, being one of the most accessible escapes for city dwellers — Casey included — eventually came to mind and when she saw an old motel-style bed and breakfast once previously owned by Arnold Schwarzenegger’s relatives and ripe for renovation, everything fell into place. 

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In the 10 years since Casey has opened up the Spruceton Inn with her husband, author and illustrator Steven Weinberg, their artist residency has attracted many notable creative professionals such as Stephanie Danler, Carmen Maria Machado, Sari Botton, Ariel Aberg-Riger and many others. As a dear friend of mine, I often joke with Casey and say, “Who knew you would end up with so many talented, admirable writers and artists shuffling through your own backyard?!” But as it turns out, she’s always known. Read on to learn about how Casey built generosity into her business model and ended up producing space for her own creative work to flourish. 

Ashley: Tell me about the first time you had an immersive experience with a group of artists, and whether that was a part of what inspired you to start an artist residency. 

Casey: I went to pretty artsy schools all throughout my education in different places, so I had the opportunity to be in creative writing classes early on. Workshops were my first experience, which funnily enough, as much as I did like those, it was not at all what I wanted to do with the residency. What I was more interested in was what happens when you get out of your daily life experiences and you open up your mind and artistic eye differently.

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