I’m fascinated by the way we writers can use something as abstract as prose to capture something as concrete and tangible as lived human experience.

It’s an interesting process. When I’m writing fiction, first, I imagine a character doing and/or feeling something, or in memoir, I remember an experience of my own. Then I put words on the page to recreate that experience for my readers, who ultimately feel their own tangible emotional response to that description of that character’s lived experience. There’s a kind of triangulation that happens between author, character, and reader, where each plays their own part in bringing the story to life.

This fascination cross-germinates for me in my theater and film background. Before I was a writer, my primary creative outlet from age ten to thirty was theater, including work as a stage manager, director, choreographer, and producer. I love to mine the ways in which these performance-driven disciplines can inform my writing process.

Which is not to say that the two are thoroughly analogous. Performing arts have a visual component—a way of showing, versus telling—that prose doesn’t have. Prose, in turn, can take us inside a character’s head in a way that theater and film performances can’t.

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But anywhere I can borrow from one discipline to inform the other, I want to know about it. For instance, I’d say that developing scenes, whether for the page or the stage, often revolves around the same questions:

What does my character want, and how can I best show that to the audience?

Or, put another way: How do I externalize the character’s internal experience?

All of this brings to mind a conversation I once had with a writer. She was struggling with plot, and specifically, the sense that it had lagged in the middle of her story and that nothing was happening. It’s a common issue for writers. I started my response with that most basic question:

Me: What does your character want?

Writer: She wants to be at peace.

Me: Yes, and…that’s fairly abstract. What, more specifically, does she want?

Writer: She wants to stop hurting.

Me: Yes, and…that’s what she doesn’t want. What is something that she does want?

Writer: She wants to ride at liberty. [This refers to a kind of saddle-free horseback riding, which figured into the plot of this writer’s story.]

Me: There it is.

Without refuting any of what this writer knew about her character — everything she said was true — I was prompting her toward something external that she could write toward; a desire for her character to act on as she was also pursuing those other, more abstract wants: to stop hurting, to be at peace.

From the perspective of plot, the “on camera” story here was the character’s pursuit of riding at liberty. That’s not to dismiss the importance (and necessity) of the character’s internal life, but it’s that externally focused desire, and plot, and action, through which the intangibles of character arc and theme are often communicated.

For me, the most frequent aha moments about how to externalize the internal in my writing have come from hearing my work read out loud by others and talking through those desires and actions.

That’s exactly what we do during my Theater Camp for Writers workshops. The bulk of our time is spent on scene work. Writers submit excerpts from their work in progress, and other workshop participants play the parts of the characters and narrators from those pages. It can offer a unique lens on the revision process, putting everyone directly inside the story and gaining insights from the readers who are living out those scenes in our workshop. It’s also informative for many writers to work on others’ submissions in this way as much as on their own.

Ready to Try it Out? Join us for Theater Camp for Memoir Writers on Saturday, June 27. Only 10 seats available. No theater experience required!

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A photography professor of mine said that writing and photography are opposite forms of creation. The writer starts with the blank page and strives to create something out of nothing. The photographer starts with everything, the entire world around them, and decides to focus on one small aspect of it. How we observe can be one of the most important decisions we make on a daily basis—and it is something we do less and less of these days.

Indeed, most of us walk through our daily routine on autopilot. We scroll while we meander to the subway. We barely take notice of people while we rush to the office. Modern life seems to make it harder and harder to be present in the moment.

Street photography is the art of observation. It requires awareness. To see things with fresh eyes. To capture moments both intimate and mundane. It requires us to notice. To see the colors, the textures, the movement of life all around. And it asks us to think about how we fit into this world. Why do I choose to focus on certain things and not others? What details have greater meaning for us? What do interactions between people, no matter how subtle, tell us about the time in which we live?

The act of taking pictures in public is a practice of mindfulness—of quieting our assumptions and trying to look with fresh eyes.

As with all art, understanding how some of the greats went about composing their images is essential, and always open to interpretation.

In the Street Photography Workshop, we will look at some of those greats’ art with fresh eyes. We will see how each of us interprets the same environment differently. We’ll discuss why we captured what we did. And why we chose to frame the world in such a way.

Yes, street photography is a lesson in technical precision: how to best use light, how to create the right depth of field, and how to quickly frame an image. But most importantly, it is a lesson on how to be in the moment. How to really see and think more deeply about your relationship between observer and observed.

Ready to get out there?

The Street Photography Workshop starts June 1. Award-winning photojournalist Ben Fractenberg has shot for The New York Times, Daily News and THE CITY, among other outlets. In this three-session hands-on workshop held in New York City, you’ll spend time out in the city shooting, then come back together to review, refine, and push your work further. Whether you’re brand new to street photography or looking to get more intentional about your practice, this class is about learning to see—and capture—the moments most people miss.

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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 June 7 to June 28. 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 recently went to see read from her new novel, The Fountain (shout out to The Common Good in Ellenville!), and it got me thinking about that time when interviewed Casey for the site. The interview is all about how Casey and her husband decided to open up a “bed and bar,” Spruceton Inn, where they host a yearly artist residency, as a way to pay the bills while also supporting their creative ambitions. Casey talks about how the free residency was part of her vision from the beginning, why she wanted to separate her financial well-being from her art, and some advice on how you can start your own artist residency. (There’s even a mention in this interview of The Fountain back when all we could read of it was its Publishers Marketplace announcement!) So, check out this inspiring interview below and next, Casey’s excellent book. —Jesse Sposato, executive editor

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In my heart, I know that’s not true. But here’s the thing. Sometimes I do write something that comes out immaculate at first go. But that’s not the rule. Lately I’ve been pondering: How can we appreciate—and know—our unique inner editorial voices in helping us strengthen our work?

I have come to think of editing my own work as a conglomeration of multiple editorial voices. And I believe we all have at least three, a trifecta council on whom our editorial skills rest:

• a “knowing” voice

• a “diagnostic” voice

• a “worker bee” voice

Together, they lovingly work in tandem to co-create our strongest work by relinquishing judgment and doubt. The key is figuring out how to let these three voic…

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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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