I Gave Up Creative Writing for a Decade

It was the best thing I could ever have done

By Anna Rollins

The summer after graduating with my Master’s in English, I made myself a promise: I was going to write.

During my course of study, I’d begun a collection of essays about characters at my Appalachian fundamentalist Christian school and had been told the work had potential. I didn’t know what the collection was about necessarily, but I was determined to figure that out in process. My teaching job did not begin until the fall, I had no children or pets, and my husband’s salary covered our bills, giving me the luxury of both time and resources.

I was going to spend the summer writing my book.

I started by creating a schedule. My entire day would revolve around writing, with hour-long mental breaks to, say, clean the bathrooms, go for a run, read, or prepare dinner.

And I stuck to this schedule. The days were a dream—everything wonderful except for, well, the writing. When the clock said it was time to sit down and work, I froze. I struggled to form sentences. The ones I did compose were meandering, uncertain. I’d re-read my paragraphs and become distracted midway through. I was bored—and my words were boring! I tried to push through the haze by writing in new locations, or by alternating between my laptop and a journal, but each day, the work was drab and without tension.  

What lit me up was reading. I devoured mental health essays by Lauren Slater, new journalism by Truman Capote, and autofiction by Tim O’Brien. As the weeks passed, I gave myself permission to consider reading part of my daily regimen. Reading good literature, I reasoned, would make me a better writer. But I soon found myself dreaming up ways to incorporate these texts into my fall classes. Eventually, I stopped writing my own creative work and instead turned my attention to composing lesson plans. 

By this time, it was halfway through the summer, and I had come to a conclusion: look how much excellent work is already out there. I don’t need to add to the noise with my own mediocrity. Especially if I am hating every moment of it.

At the time (and even still), I did not find the sentiment defeatist. It was inspiration in reverse. The idea felt revelatory: if I’m not enjoying writing, I don’t have to write. No one was forcing me. There were so many great stories out there already, and despite what social media memes parroted, the world did not necessarily need mine.

And so I extended my permission-giving once again. I will stop writing. The decision was complete relief.

But I continued to read voraciously. Nothing excited me more than a perfect sentence, a compelling idea, a brave admission.

“It’s weird,” my husband said one evening as he observed me finishing my third book that week. “You read compulsively. More than anyone I’ve ever met. Don’t you want to create something too?”

“I have nothing to say that hasn’t already been said by someone else probably more talented than me,” I replied defensively.

Five years later, after my first son was born, I began to write creatively again. My life had contracted to the four walls of my home, making it harder to explore the world. I felt a desire to explore ideas on the page. Each morning, I wrote for ten minutes in a journal, whatever I wanted, whatever popped into my head. I wrote without the intention of publishing. This small practice was just my opportunity to play on the page, something fun to do in a day filled with domestic duty.

When my second son was born, I began to write more. It certainly was not because I had more time. It was because I had to—I finally had something to express, and writing felt even more necessary. I didn’t need accountability or a schedule. I’d reached a point in my life where the page was one of the only places I wanted to be.

Ten years after receiving my Master’s in English, I finally became serious about publishing my creative writing. I pitched essays to popular outlets and within two years’ time, published nearly fifty of them. I got an agent and a book deal. It appeared to happen fast. But all my work had been simmering for over a decade.

Taking those years off was not a waste. Those years of compulsive reading were necessary. I needed to read great literature, to live, and to discover what I had to say.

As for the essays I began in graduate school? Only a few of those sentences made it into my forthcoming memoir. But I needed to write that entire collection before I could compose the work I’m publishing today.

___

Anna Rollins’ work has appeared in the New York Times, Slate, Salon, Electric Literature, Joyland Magazine, and other outlets. Her forthcoming memoir, Famished, (Eerdmans, 2025) challenges scripts that encourage women to take up less space and not trust their own bodies, messages that are common in diet and purity culture. She is a faculty member in the English department at Marshall University. She is running a free monthly series called “Path to Publication” where she shares pitches for work she has placed in popular outlets. Follow her on Substack and Instagram @annajrollins.

Chasing Narrative Arc—One Writer’s Path to Totality

By Andrea A. Firth

As we drive to the airport to catch an early flight, I see a sliver of moon, the waning crescent, in the morning sky. I look at the weather app on my phone and report the five-day forecast for our destination: “Hot and sunny for two days, clouds over the weekend, and on Monday a 45% chance of rain starting at noon.”

“Doesn’t sound like eclipse watching weather,” says my husband.

The classic, chronological construction of a story has five elements: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action and resolution. The narrative arc follows the trajectory of an upside checkmark with an on ramp and off ramp. A personal essay can follow this path.

We are flying from the Bay Area to Austin to join thousands of visitors heading to the path of totality—to see the Moon totally block the Sun. Totality will happen on Monday, April 8^th at 1:37 pm and last one minute and 44 seconds. How did we become eclipse chasers? Well, my husband has a bucket list, things he wants to do before it’s too late. See a Formula 1 race. Ride in a hot-air balloon. Watch a rocket launch. I’m not sure that I need or want a bucket list. But I’ve never experienced a total solar eclipse and decide that the first item on my list will be to see, hear, and feel totality.

Narratives start with exposition to introduce the characters and setting or drop the reader directly into the story, aka starting in medias res. In personal essay, I want the beginning to hook my reader, create tension, and establish what the essay is about, what will be explored.

We spend two days in the Texas Hill Country. It’s sunny, hot, and humid. We hike up a massive pink granite dome called Enchanted Rock and wander the quaint town of Wimberley. I check my weather app obsessively. The forecast stays stuck on clouds and rain. On Saturday, we drive back to Austin with the windshield wipers on; the state is under complete cloud cover. I Google alternate return flights to see if we can connect through Indianapolis and catch the eclipse there. The timing won’t work. I’m beginning to regret this chase and wonder how I’ll feel if my first bucket list item is a flop.

Rising action. Build narrative tension. Keep the reader reading.

I picked Austin for our eclipse adventure because of Maria Popova and The Universe in Verse, an annual literary festival that celebrates science through poetry and prose. This year, it coincides with the eclipse. The stellar lineup of readers includes the poets Marie Howe and Ellen Bass, the writers Roxane Gay and Rebecca Solnit, among others.

When I enter the Moody Amphitheater in Waterloo Park on Sunday evening, the sky is overcast but my weather anxiety has disappeared. I can barely contain my excitement for the literary rockstars I’m about to hear. Between readers, Popova narrates the evening. She tells us the last solar eclipse that passed over Austin was in 1397; the next one will be in 2343. Monday will be a once-in-a-lifetime event. I feel the pressure to witness the eclipse heighten. Popova describes how the Moon is slipping away from the Earth. Eclipses are moving toward extinction. I’m sad and frightened when I think about this future even though it will take billions of years.

Climax is the highest point of tension in your story. In an essay it’s when the personal experience intersects with the theme explored, the question asked.

Monday, we return to Waterloo Park to watch the sky, now pale blue and streaked with wispy, white clouds. The band Vampire Weekend has been scheduled to play during the solar eclipse. I think there must be a metaphor in that pairing, but I haven’t quite pinpointed it.

We see the “first bite” when the Moon darkens the edge of Sun’s disk and watch for an hour as it gradually expands. The band stops playing as Totality approaches and the city goes quiet. The sky turns dark blue, the temperature drops, and the Moon covers the Sun leaving a tiny halo of fuzzy white light. I hear a collective gasp and then hooting from the audience in the amphitheater. I feel unsettled and satisfied, sad and hopeful. It feels like both an ending and a beginning.

Falling action.

The clouds congregate. We do not see the Moon pass the rest of the way across the Sun. Darkness lifts, the band plays on, and we head to the airport. I think back on the day. I saw, heard, and felt totality—I’m sure. And it pushed me to think about the end–what I need and want to get done before it all disappears, before I disappear. But I’m left unsure about how I feel about having a bucket list.

Resolution isn’t always complete or tidy. I’ve read that the ending of an essay should leave the door open for the writer to look through.

Maybe there’s more to this experience, more to be discovered. The next total solar eclipse viewable in the U.S. will be in 2045. The path of totality will cross north of San Francisco, a short drive from our home. I’ll be 83 years old and hope to experience totality again, if I haven’t already kicked the…

__________

Andrea A. Firth is an editor for the Brevity Blog. She’s leading a six-week course, The Essay Workshop, in May and June. Details here.

Stitch by Stitch and Word by Word

By Carolyn Roy-Bornstein

When my foster daughter recently got a job as an assistant veterinary technician at a local animal hospital, she bought a brand-new pair of scrubs. Because she is petite, they needed to be shortened. Janine climbed onto a stool at our kitchen counter and turned in a slow circle while I measured and basted, some of the common pins in my mouth rusty from lack of use.

After everyone had left for work, I sat down on the couch to hem. I hadn’t done any hand-sewing in some time and found my eyesight not quite up to the task. Just to thread the needle, I had to move my head closer to, then farther from my work, then squint my eyes to peer through my lashes, then close one eye altogether. I pricked my fingertip with a pin as I forced it through the thick fabric of the seam. I burned another digit while ironing the edge of the material that would be folded into the hem.

I’ve been sewing by machine for years, but I grew up hand sewing at my grandmother’s knee—whip stitches edging felt purses with yarn handles, buttonhole stitches on tiny doll clothes. That muscle memory gradually took over, my catch stitches now neatly overlapping Vs like a tiny mountain range along the bottom of each pant leg.

After I’d pressed the pants and hung them in the closet, I picked up the notebook and pen I was using to draft the next chapter of my work-in-progress. No muscle memory needed here. I’ve always written first drafts by hand. Old school. The long way, as I will later have to enter all those written-out words into the computer. The hard way, since I sometimes struggle to decipher my own scribbles. It’s not that I have poor penmanship (although I am a retired physician, and we are notoriously indecipherable in our writing). It’s that when I am excited—when words and ideas are coming fast—my hand moves in sync with my emotions, flying like a toddler struggling to keep up with a sibling on a bike. The result can be a bit of a mess.

Still, there is something basic—something grounding and affirming—about doing things by hand. Something that connects my body to my mind in a way my computer keyboard or my electric sewing machine just doesn’t. I can look back at the stars and circles and empty checklist boxes and know just where my “rabbit holes” are. Where I need to return and expand my thoughts. I can see my cross-outs, too, and know which rabbits I’ve already pursued down those holes unfruitfully.

I recently read a study demonstrating that when people write by hand, their brains grow more neural networks than people who tap away on a computer. As an artist, I like the idea of my visual and motor and sensory cortexes lighting up with connection, alive with dendritic growth.

As I work on the scrubs, I can see the progress of my stitching, hesitant and awkward as my fingers remember what they’re doing; even and neat by the end of the second leg. Writing, too, falls into place the longer I keep my pen moving across the page. As the furious pace of new ideas and nascent concepts develops into more cogent themes, my pen slows down. I relax into the project. I know where I’m going and I’m legible again.

Working by hand also leaves something of an aide-mémoire. Even though my sewing room is littered with pincushions and thread and scraps of lopped-off extra cloth, in the closet hang the fresh-pressed finished outcome. Likewise, my notebooks stacked in piles on closet shelves are physical mnemonics of where I was when I wrote each paragraph. I dashed out the ending to that dementia story after driving home in a wicked rainstorm. I had to hold the throughline of that retirement piece in my mind until I could get off my paddleboard and get it onto the page. My fingers have their own after-effects. Pricks and burns from sewing. Dents on the left side of my index finger and the right side of my thumb from writing.

Even though I hadn’t sewn by hand in years, I had fallen into a rhythm hemming those scrubs. What felt like a painful task ultimately flowed into a rewarding cadence. Stitch by stitch, the fruits of my labor now await Janine’s first day of work. Meanwhile, a version of this essay will always exist in a notebook with stars and arrows and x-ed-out paragraphs. As I wrote, I trusted that a more pristine version would eventually sit neatly formatted on a screen—that word by word, my messy pages would become a coherent thesis out in the world, the result of hands and head working together, my brain a veritable fireworks display of happy connection.

___

Carolyn Roy-Bornstein is a retired pediatrician and the writer-in-residence at the Lawrence Family Medicine Residency program. Her work has appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, the Boston Globe, JAMA, Poets & Writers, The Writer magazine, and many other venues. Her latest book Writing Through Burnout: How to Thrive While Working in Healthcare is forthcoming.

The Joys of Writing to Wordcount

By Olga Mecking

“On the test, you will have to write an essay of around 200 words,” my English teacher said.

I first encountered the idea of wordcount in EFL classes and was taken aback. Where I come from, long essays written in flowery style are the norm, especially in school. Teachers said, “Write for as long as you need to include all the necessary information,” but their preference was clearly on the longer side. Lacking any other guidelines, I submitted one-page assignments and was shocked when I got low grades. “But I already said everything I wanted to say,” I argued.

With time, I challenged myself to puff up my essays. Could I add more description here? Expand on this argument? Write at least three pages instead of one? I did everything I could to make my work grow in bulk and my grades improved immediately. But along the way, so did my writing, and I discovered the joy of expressing myself in the written form.

So when my English teacher set wordcount limits, I believed it would stifle the creativity I had just discovered in myself. Writing longer pieces allowed me to consider points of view I may have otherwise ignored, and find a more nuanced way to present my arguments. Now I became the devil’s advocate: how could I write a full essay in just 200 words?

But during the exam, I would stop for a moment and count what I’d already written, then look at the time. Knowing how many words I had left allowed me to plan my essay better. Did I have space to add another argument or should I move towards the finish line? Having so much control over my writing was incredibly powerful—and turned me into a wordcount convert.

When I started writing professionally, I was happy to find wordcounts are also used in journalism. Wordcount is one of the first things I check when preparing to write a story or even before that, during the querying stage. When I write, “I’m thinking between 1000 and 1200 words for this story, I’m letting the editor know that I am familiar with their publication. Shorter doesn’t necessarily mean less work, of course. At times, I’ve done a lot of reporting for 1000-word stories. But wordcounts provide important information. Not just how long the story should be, but also how much detail I can go into, how many sources can I interview, or where I should put the tension points. Since these usually happen at one-quarter, midway and at three-quarters of the story, I knew how many words I could spend on each part and how quickly I should get there. The longer the article, the deeper I can go, but when writing shorter pieces, I have to be very focused on only the most necessary bits. Knowing how long a story will be allows me to gauge the time a piece takes to write and how much I’ll get paid with a per-word rate.

Wordcount was one of the first things I worried about when writing my nonfiction book, Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing. Coming up with enough content for a full-length book was daunting, but dividing it into chapters and sub-chapters made it seem doable. Nothing felt as good as having a calculable goal: knowing the book would be finished at some point, and knowing where that point would be. I approached fiction with the same mindset: I wasn’t writing a novel. I was writing 52 scenes of 1200-1500 words each.

Often, shortening my pieces only made them better.

I once wrote an essay of about 3000 words about the disorienting experience of being a mother abroad. Various literary magazines rejected it. In a moment of brilliance, I cut it down to 1000 words and sent it to the New York Times where it was accepted almost immediately.

Now, when I sit down to write, I get the necessary amount of words out and then edit them, adding scenes, arguments or quotes (depending on the kind of writing), and cutting unnecessary information until I reach that wordcount again. Along the way, I make sure that the whole piece is well-written and properly structured. Quotes from sources and experts fill the wordcount quickly, which is why I rarely write memoir, preferring reported essays and features instead. Sometimes, I treat writing like a game: how close can I come to the desired length?

But the best thing about wordcount is the sense of accomplishment I get when I’m done. It’s like being given a sturdy wooden box to fill with my story. It makes me feel safe.

Constraints don’t kill creativity. They give it space.

(NB from the Brevity Blog editors: this essay came in at 889 words. Now it’s 782.)

_______

Olga Mecking is a Polish writer living in the Netherlands. Her work has appeared in The New York Times, The BBC, The Guardian and many others. She is also the author of Niksen: Embracing the Dutch Art of Doing Nothing, out in the US with HarperCollins.

The One Topic I’ve Struggled to Write About

by Rachel Kramer Bussel

Over the past 35 years, I’ve written about everything from my sex life, hoarding, and binge eating, to declaring bankruptcy, dropping out of law school, being an obsessive worrier, and more. If you’d asked me a year ago, I’d have told you there was nothing I was afraid to write about. That was true, until last summer, when pretty much overnight I became the sole caregiver for my mother, who’s in the early stages of dementia.

At first, I was so overwhelmed with the myriad tasks involved in her care that I didn’t have time to do anything more with words than the tasks required for my steady freelance gigs. Gradually, as my mom’s life got more settled, I started to open up some time and space to make sense of my life via the written word. Still, I held off on putting my mom’s issues—and my related ones—down on paper.

It’s only in recent weeks that I’ve started to address in my writing how this change in responsibility and identity has impacted me. I’ve always been an open book, but my mom is much more private, and no amount of “I” statements I can use that will make writing about this shift in status solely about me. She’s as much a character in my current life as I am, which puts me in the tricky position of trying to respect her privacy while being true to my need to connect with others via my writing.

When I was in college, I wrote about how my father’s alcoholism impacted me for PARADE magazine, the supplement found in many Sunday newspapers. I received dozens of handwritten letters from other children of alcoholics, teaching me in a visceral way that even our scariest personal stories can offer a beacon of light to others in similar circumstances, even if the impulse to bare all is primarily self-interested.

That principle has guided me every time I’ve debated whether or how to write about others in my life. I know in my bones that there’s camaraderie to be found in sharing the most humorous and heartbreaking aspects of being a caregiver. As a reader, I found Dr. Sandeep Jauhar’s memoir My Father’s Brain, about his dad’s experience with Alzheimer’s disease—and how that impacted him and his siblings—enlightening precisely because he didn’t hide his father’s worst behaviors, or how troubled and angered they often made Jauhar feel.

But Jauhar’s book came out after his father had died. My mother is still alive, and aware enough to be hurt should I reveal some of her darkest moments. There are many I will hold off on publicly writing about while she’s able to comprehend them, but others I feel the desire to share now, while they’re still fresh, when I know that the act of writing them down and releasing them from the confines of my mind will be cathartic, whether I ever receive any direct feedback or not.

Maybe it’s a sign of maturity that I haven’t rushed to document the ways this abrupt change has altered not just my day-to-day life but how I conceive of myself as a daughter and human being. I’ve given myself time to carefully consider what and how I write, and to process some of the most challenging moments I’ve faced thus far.

I don’t know what the future holds for my mom, or me, but I do know that simply acknowledging the fact that our roles have largely reversed feels freeing. It’s still scary, not only because I worry about what my mother will think if she were to read the things I’m writing, but also because I worry about how they reflect on me. Will I sound mean, ungrateful, incompetent? By which I’m really asking: Am I mean, ungrateful, incompetent?

In her craft guide Writing Is My Drink, Theo Pauline Nestor offers this writing prompt: “How have you kept silent or limited your writing because you feel that somehow you owe this silence or limited articulation to another family member?” She goes on to ask, “Has that same family member ever actually been the impetus in some way for your writing? How can you credit them for their contribution to your eagerness to write?”

For me, this is a complicated series of questions, but I don’t want to simply brush aside my urge to write because it doesn’t come as easily to me as some of my past topics. I want to grapple with the complexities, to find solace and humor and empathy for myself and possibly also offer those to others in a similar position.

It’s much easier to brush off potential naysayers when I’m writing about my own flaws and failures, the ones that haunt my waking hours and my dreams. Writing about being a caregiver, much like the act of caregiving itself, feels like walking on a sheet of ice that may crack beneath me at any moment. But the only way I’ll know whether that’s the case is by taking the first step.
___

Rachel Kramer Bussel has written essays and articles for a wide range of publications, including The New York Times, The Washington Post, Salon, and The Village Voice. She’s the editor of personal essay publication Open Secrets, and is the author of craft guide How to Write Erotica, short story collection Lap Dance Lust, and has edited over 70 anthologies.

Writing as Real Life

By Olga Katsovskiy

I avoid disclosing anything about my life to my students, nor do I ask them to share any facts about their personal lives when we first meet. My teaching philosophy is to let the writing do most of the talking.

In my Adult Education classes, we get acquainted by examining published essays and flash fiction I’ve selected to demonstrate a point. We talk openly about our emotional responses, then dissect the craft. Sometimes someone doesn’t like an essay I assign for “homework” or bring to class. It takes a certain level of trust to be able to say you don’t like something in a room full of people saying it’s the best thing since sliced bread. I probe and guide, getting students to look deeper into why something moves or stirs them. We begin to articulate why a particular literary device works or doesn’t, and how that is often subjective.

There is an exceptional essay from Memoir Magazine, examining the writer’s lifelong consequences of keeping a shameful secret, that I like to bring in the early sessions of my six-week nonfiction course. Most of the time, everyone gets teary-eyed, and we talk about everything that works in terms of craft. For the first time one student admitted they were not impressed, and I love what we all learned that day—it wasn’t about craft but the likability of the narrator which didn’t sit well with them. The narrator doesn’t have to be likable after-all, but someone with whom the reader can empathize in some way. Being able to respectfully disagree about nonfiction in a classroom is beautiful and paves the way to workshopping without fear.

As a writing instructor, I think of myself not as a conductor of an orchestra but a fellow musician leading an improvisation. Students try to emulate the styles of pieces they were exposed to in class to try to find their own voice. A workshop is a space to try out different instruments and tune the one we choose to play, again and again. Unlike a college credit course, where students tend to cater to an audience of one to get a good grade, I teach writers at leisure who just want to get better at writing.

I set the stage for workshop by acknowledging we are in dialogue with three selves: the narrator of the essay, the critic looking at craft, and the writer. The truth is the writer in the room is largely irrelevant in workshop because the voice on the page embodies a former or imagined future self. Nonfiction leads itself to be taken personally, but a successful nonfiction writing workshop is not group therapy and does a disservice to a piece if we start tiptoeing around the writer’s trauma. Sometimes students begin by saying “I’m sorry that happened to you” to acknowledge the subject matter and transition to feedback. We need to draw an invisible line between the very real and human writer locking eyes with us across the room, and the narrator on the page.

Wrapping up the closing session of my last class, we chatted briefly about our lives and one of my students asked: “What do you do in real life?” There was a pause in the shuffle and the sound of zipping bags and jackets momentarily seized. We all grew quiet and stared briefly at one another. “Is this not real?” I teased, and everyone laughed.

What’s real life? I wondered. Earning money to pay bills, mortgage, health insurance. The grown-up stuff. It is also being in a room full of people willing to live it twice.
__

Olga Katsovskiy is a writer, editor, and educator living in Boston, MA. She works in a healthcare organization during the day and moonlights as a writing instructor at the Cambridge Center for Adult Education, a non-profit providing multidisciplinary classes in the heart of Harvard Square. She is a Creative Nonfiction Editor at Minerva Rising Press, Associate Creative Nonfiction Editor at JMWW, and nonfiction reader for Reckon Review. Her essays appear in Atticus Review: The Attic, Barzakh Magazine, Gone Lawn Journal, Pithead Chapel, and elsewhere. For more visit: theweightofaletter.com

My Poetry Background Helped Save My Memoir—But Not Before It Nearly Did It In

By Ona Gritz

“Things take the time they take,” Mary Oliver says in a poem kindly titled, “Don’t Worry.” My memoir took ten years to complete. No one who knows my painful, complicated story is surprised by this. The book centers on my sister Angie who, twenty-five and pregnant, was brutally murdered with her husband and infant son.

As the youngest in an insular, secretive family, there was a lot I didn’t know about my beloved sister’s life. When I finally began to write about her thirty years after her death, I knew little more than I had as a child. I had to acquire school and court records, track down estranged relatives, scroll through microfilm in the city where she’d last lived.

Sometimes I had to step away from this work because nearly every detail I discovered broke my heart. But the main reason my son grew from a middle-schooler to a college graduate by the time I finished my manuscript is that I wrote it like the poet I am, pausing to perfect every sentence before moving on to the next.

Open almost any craft book and it will tell you that polishing as you go is a bad idea. Don’t judge that first draft. Just get it down. But playing with words and prettying sentences is my favorite part of the job. And in attempting to write a layered, complex family memoir, fussing with the language was the only part of the process I actually knew how to do.

I tend to write short poems, so my bad habit of burnishing while drafting never cost me all that much time. But my talent at concision flew out the window with this project. I understood that, unlike autobiography, memoir’s lens should focus on one small aspect of a life. Yet I had so few memories of my brief life with Angie, I assumed every one belonged in the book.

My manuscript ended up nearly 400 pages long. When I asked for feedback on this tome from my trusted cohort of literary-minded friends, including an editor and an agent, they read my many labored-over sentences and believed along with me that the whole was better than it was.

The book went out and the rejections came in, the first so generous with its praise, I could have used it as a blurb. Instead, it became a life preserver as I began to receive brusque replies, generic ones, and often no reply at all.

Finally, one editor told me the harsh, unadorned truth. While my writing was lovely, the story was too disjointed. Actually, there were too many stories, making it unclear what the book was about.

After a few sleepless nights and more than a few tears, I took a deep breath and sat at my desk, recalling Barack Obama’s phrase about using a scalpel rather than a hatchet. It was hatchet-time for my memoir, though, and I went at it ruthlessly, hacking off every inessential detail and scene. It felt awful to recognize myself as a living cautionary tale against spending years perfecting what was ultimately an early draft. It also felt good as hints of an actual story began to emerge.

I brought the outline of this scaled-down version to an online course, Creating a Narrative Arc Out of a Messy Life. There, under Lilly Dancyger’s brilliant guidance, I began to find my story’s structure: a weaving of timelines that allowed my adult self, the impassioned investigator of our troubled family, to drive the through-line of the book.

Afterwards, I asked Lilly for a developmental edit. I sent her my manuscript and awaited her notes, sure they’d contain a few insightful tweaks to my structure and then I’d be done.

Lilly did offer good advice on the structure, but she also said this: “My biggest note is that I wanted WAY more reflection, on pretty much every page. I wanted to hear what you think and feel about every new piece of information that’s presented.”

I read that note several times before I understood. I’d left myself out of my own memoir! How had I done that? Or rather, how had I done that without noticing?

Again, the answer could be found in my training as a poet. In poetry, restraint is an asset. Don’t tell the reader what you think and feel. Not overtly. Let the moments and images speak. Trust the reader to make meaning from them.

This, I finally learned, is among the greatest differences between the two genres. The job of the memoirist is to show herself erring, thinking, feeling, learning, and evolving. Right there, out loud, on the page.

In truth, I found this prospect terrifying. I didn’t want to look at my role in Angie’s story. I’d been our parents’ favorite. The one who could do no wrong while she could do no right. And I’d hurt her. Less severely than they had, but enough that it pained me to go there. I didn’t even know where to begin.

Then poetry gave me the answer. During a weekend workshop, I wrote a poem where I spoke to Angie directly. The direct address is common in poetry, and I’d used it often. Only this time, I thought, Of course!

In my final revision, I switched the narrative from first to second person, so the book now read like a letter to my sister. I told her how it felt to be me in our family, confiding my misgivings, reflecting on my discoveries, and uncovering my grief. This allowed me to feel close to her again. It also proved to be a path to self-discovery and to writing that wasn’t just pretty, but probing, intimate, and true.

___

Ona Gritz‘s new memoir, Everywhere I Look, is about sisterhood, longing, true crime, and family secrets. Her nonfiction has appeared in The New York Times, The Guardian, The Utne Reader, Brevity, The Rumpus, and River Teeth, and been named Notable in The Best American Essays and best of the year in Salon.

Truth Is the Arrow: Steve Almond on Comedy, Tragedy, and Forgiveness

In his newly-released craft book, Truth Is The Arrow, Mercy Is The Bow, subtitled “A DIY Manual for the Construction of Stories,” Steve Almond offers essential lessons on the basic building blocks of storytelling such as plot, character, and tone, alongside less technical essentials like mystery, intuition, bravery, and authenticity. He offers this advice with his signature clarity, and often wit, alongside specific examples from books and writers he has learned from along the way.

Brevity editor Dinty W. Moore recently interviewed Almond about his latest book and that “magical, elusive state” all writers hope to achieve.
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DINTY: My initial reaction when reading Truth Is The Arrow was to think, “Oh my, I wish someone had offered me clear and valuable advice like this when I was a very new writer.” The effectiveness of direct characterization, for instance, and avoiding the passive protagonist. But my second response was, “I probably wouldn’t have listened.”  Would you have taken the advice you offer in this book when you were a beginning writer, or do we all, inevitably, have to struggle through the same mistakes?

STEVE: There is no way I would have taken my own advice as a beginning writer. I would have told myself to toss off. And I still struggle to take my own advice, after 30 years of stepping on narrative rakes. That’s just the nature of the endeavor. This is why I wrote the book, as much as I could, from the perspective of a writer surveying his own failures, rather than a know-it-all professor. You have to fail enough to accept your fundamental idiocy. This humility, combined with persistence, allows you to get better. 

DINTY: I certainly learn more from my mistakes on the page than my successes. When I write myself into a corner, when I’m forced to abandon a project because it just isn’t going to work, I remember what I did wrong, because it stings so badly. Back to your good advice, though. I love that you remind memoirists to perceive younger versions of themselves “as a separate entity.” This is an area where so many memoirists struggle. How do I make myself into a character? It just feels so odd. But it is not “you” who is the character, even if you are writing events just months old. It is “you” back then. Knowing this allows for distance, for discovery, and as you put it, “unflinching self appraisal.” Is that what you mean by “truth is the arrow?” The need to be unflinching, even if the truth hurts?

STEVE: Absolutely. But you only travel into truth as far as your mercy will allow. That’s why “mercy is the bow.” The two are inextricably linked! Because you have to be to forgive that idiot, Dinty, who painted himself into a corner and had to abandon a project that had once flushed his heart with the joy of possibility. Or, in the case of your students, that younger version of themselves that screwed up in various ways and who is now, as an older, slightly wiser person, trying to reckon with all that. The mercy must extend, by the way, to all the people who contributed to your pain and confusion, or even authored it. You can only tell the whole truth, especially as a memoirist, if your final goal is understand and forgive. Because your readers deserve more than just your defensive emotions. Your job is to strip those away—to get at the grief beneath your grievance, the thwarted desire beneath your alienation, the sorrow beneath your rage.

DINTY: So beautiful, and so true: “the grief beneath your grievance, the thwarted desire beneath your alienation, the sorrow beneath your rage.“ Yet this book on the craft of writing is also quite funny in places, which any Steve Almond fan might expect, and you have an entire chapter devoted to the comic impulse.  So how do these connect, the “grief” and “sorrow” and, for lack of a better term, the funny bone?

STEVE: Ok, just think about Dinty W. Moore, the Adolescent. Think about how miserable and self-conscious Dinty was, and how much he hated his family. Think about how he survived those years? If Dinty was anything like me, he survived by making jokes, by converting negative feelings (shame, dread, disappointment, heartbreak, rage) into shit talk. We develop a sense of humor as a means of making less the grief. Comedy isn’t the opposite of tragedy. It’s the answer to tragedy. You can see this in any great standup comic (Richard Pryor, Amy Schumer, etc.). Their routines are really just public confessions of their darkest fears and feelings. The audience laughs because they recognize—with relief—that they’re not alone in their crazy.

It’s not some coincidence that the two best American novels to emerge from the atrocity of World War II are comedies (Catch-22, Slaughterhouse Five). If you take a giant step backwards, humans are uniquely burdened species. We have a conscience that keeps us from acting on our worst impulses, even makes us feel ashamed of them. We also know we’re going to die, and that we may lose those around us. The comic impulse is what allows us to step back and laugh at the absurd notion that we can control any of it. It should arise unconsciously in our work, as a way of confronting dark truths, not charming the reader. In other words, it’s a bio-evolutionary adaptation, not a literary tool.

DINTY: I’m having some trouble coming up with a final question, which is, I suppose, just another instance of writer’s block.  Any advice?

STEVE: Set the bar as low as possible. That’s what I tell myself, and my students, as often as necessary. Every bad decision I’ve made at the keyboard arises from the same source: insecurity. I feel, in some primal, unshakable manner that I’m not telling the story (or, in your case, asking the question) well enough. So I start performing: flogging the language, leaping into scenes without context, reaching for cleverness. My attention drifts away from the story I came to tell—the one about my doubts and confusions, my hopes and vulnerabilities—and toward a kind of ego need. (How am I doing, reader? Am I smart/sensitive/talented enough to make you love me? Or at least hear me out?) This loss of faith—which, when it becomes debilitating, we call “Writer’s Block”—is, in fact, a natural part of the process. You can’t make it go away via willpower. It’s just the opposite: you have to find ways to be kinder to yourself—more humble before the enormity of the task, more curious and patient.

We do better, as writers, when we stop punishing ourselves for getting blocked and instead focus on the merits of getting stuck. For me, it’s been a gift more than a curse. Because I stop asking what story I should be writing and I start to ask a much more useful question: What story do I want to tell? The dream isn’t to write a bestseller, or to win the National Book Award. The dream (for me, and for you too, Mr. Dinty) is to reach that magical, elusive state where you become more interested in the story you’re telling than how you’re telling it.

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Steve Almond  is the author of twelve books of fiction and nonfiction, including the New York Times bestsellers Candyfreak and Against Football. His novel, All the Secrets of the World, is being adapted for television by 20^th Century Fox. His essays have been published in venues ranging from the New York Times Magazine to Poets & Writers, and his short fiction has appeared in Best American Short Stories, The Pushcart Prize, Best American Mysteries, and Best American Erotica. He cohosted the Dear Sugars podcast with his pal Cheryl Strayed for four years, and teaches Creative Writing at the Neiman Fellowship at Harvard and Wesleyan. He lives in Arlington, Massachusetts, with his family and his anxiety.

Writing a Book Proposal: The Panic is Real

By Jocelyn Jane Cox

The initial draft of my memoir Motion Dazzle went swimmingly. I got deep into a flow state with ethereal music while munching on unsalted almonds and non-GMO kale chips. I was buzzing off my undeniable literary genius. Sometimes I’d even pat myself on the back while yelling “I’m doing it!”

Of course, when I read through that first draft, I realized there was still a lot of work to do, so I tore the manuscript apart then tinkered with it for at least another ten drafts. But I enjoyed that too.

I did not, however, love the idea of writing a book proposal. I avoided that odious document by querying only agents and presses that did not require one. Once I realized I needed a proposal in order to increase my submission opportunities, I kicked and screamed like a toddler forced to wear socks and complained ad nauseam. My apologies to everyone who had to endure me during that difficult time.

I’m not the only one who hates the book proposal stage, certainly. If writing a proposal also feels daunting to you, here are a few (semi-)useful tips.

1. First, take 425 classes on how to write a proposal and read 370 articles that contradict each other. This is not procrastination: it’s research. Follow this up with a deep clean of your entire house and watch every television show ever produced. After you’ve banged your head against exactly 42 different walls and bitten off every fingernail, you’re ready to get started. If, instead, you’d prefer to skip all the anxiety and distractions, I suppose that’s also a valid approach.

2. Use colorful fonts! And photos! And exclamations after every sentence to make it seem fun! Then: Find-and-replace all exclamations except, maybe leave one, if it makes sense for you. Pretty much all the advice I found suggested that you use your style and voice in the proposal, and (especially for memoirs) match it to the voice in your book. If that happens to include lots of asides (who me?) or overly-emphatic punctuation, then, to thine own voice be true. 

3. Fuel thyself: I suggest lots of carbs. Perhaps one donut per sentence or…word. Because I could not bear to sully my home – my sanctuary – with this unsavory undertaking, I slogged through my entire proposal hunched into a booth at a local Panera. I could not even open my laptop without first ordering something called [shameless product placement] a Pecan Braid. 54 stars out of 10. If the proposal is also challenging for you, or even painful, acknowledge this, and give yourself whatever treats, breaks, and trophies you need along the way. 

4. Organize your document into sections with meaningful titles. Instead of calling them, as I did, I Hate This or The Book Was So Much Easier Than This, try to be more positive. How about: Trust Me – My Book is Good and I Swear I Can Sell It or Trust Me – I’m Pretty Amazing. No matter what you call them, go ahead and tackle one section at a time. Think Anne Lamott with her birds. There are many free resources out there, like Jane Friedman’s excellent template.  If working in chronological order isn’t your thing, bounce around that outline frenetically, all hopped up on anger and refills of hazelnut coffee. Just move through this crisis however you can.

5. Pretend you are someone else. Role-play. Wear a hat and a hoodie. Perhaps a superhero cape and dress shoes. Remember that no matter how much you are trying to harness your authentic voice and how much of yourself you have to pour into this process, you are not your writing, you are not your book, and you are definitely not your book proposal. Underneath that handsome chicken suit and all those sparkling words, you are YOU. And struggling with the proposal doesn’t mean you are an incompetent writer, it probably just means you don’t have a background in marketing. If you need to write one of these things, chances are pretty high that you can figure out how to do it. After all, I somehow managed to. 

Note that I received offers of publication on my book from two independent presses and neither press saw my proposal. My book, as I had always wanted, was ultimately assessed on the writing, not on my promotional prowess or lack thereof. If you think I’m livid that I lost four precious months of my life to this endeavor, given that I didn’t end up “needing” it, you’d be (mostly) wrong. As painstaking as this project was, I am glad I pushed myself through it. As a result, I now have a more solid plan for how to market my book and I know how to write one if I need to in the future, as long as the wonderful people in my life…let me. 
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Jocelyn Jane Cox’s book, Motion Dazzle: A Memoir of Motherhood, Loss, and Skating on Thin Ice, will be released by Vine Leaves Press in September, 2025. Her nonfiction has appeared or is forthcoming from The Offing, HAD, Slate, Five Minute Lit, LEON Literary Review, Oldster, The New York Times, and the Awakenings anthology from ELJ Editions. Her humor has appeared in Belladonna Comedy, Slackjaw, and Greener Pastures. She lives in the Hudson Valley of New York with her husband and son.

The Wisdom of ‘We‘re Going on a Bear Hunt’

By Cathy Alter

I recently broke my ankle, and even though surgeons have rebuilt the joint, crutching around with grace, sleeping on my side, or taking a shower without the combination of my husband and a wobbly plastic stool still feels like a pipe dream. So, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking. Mostly about hunting bears.

Example: the night before getting a billion stitches removed, a procedure that would have me writhing like a worm on hot cement, I comforted myself by repeating a line from the 1989 children’s book, We‘re Going on a Bear Hunt. It begins, “We can’t go over it” and ends with, “We‘ve got to go through it.”

For those who don’t have children of their own, the story, by Michael Rosen with illustrations by Helen Oxenbury, recounts the day in the life of three young children and their parents, who decide one morning to head out, dressed in their white ankle socks and sensible brogues, and catch a bear. “A big one.”

Whatever obstacle that comes their way—including swishy swashy grass, a splash splosh river, or thick, oozy mud—the family can’t shortcut their way around the geography. “Oh no!” goes the book’s refrain. “We‘ve got to go through it!”

I discovered the book, when, at age 46, I became a mother for the first time. (I guess you could say that having a child at 46 is certainly a way to go through it.) Along with a future of endless diaper changes and a perpetual state of jet lag, I also envisioned myself reading a parade of stories to Leo, tracing my finger along a hair whorl, and describing worlds where a duck named Little Quack never wants to go to sleep on time.

It didn’t take long before Bear Hunt was on heavy rotation. We never tired of it. The silly words that approached onomatopoeia, the sing-song recitation of a live performance, the lightning round of the family retracing their steps back home and under their bedcovers. We could easily perform it by heart.

And while my son Leo, now 12, vaguely remembers the story (“I think there was a part about mud,” he recalled), its message about facing adversity head on has been entirely lost to time.

For Leo, at least. For me, the idea that the only way to get over a hard time is to go through it, whether bravely or reluctantly, is profound. As a High Holidays-only Jew, I don’t really have a strong doctrine to carry me through life. “We’ve got to go through it” has become my North Star.  The saying works for every situation. Laundry, divorce, office Christmas parties, the pacemaker my dad needed last year. And worse. And worst.

I began to wonder if We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, like “Pee Wee’s Playhouse,” is more for grownups than children. I wondered too if Michael Rosen had more card-carrying AARP members as fans, if he considered himself the Neil Diamond of nursery rhymes.

When I found Rosen’s website, the first thing I did was listen to his rendition of his book. I was surprised to hear a British accent. The story itself seems so American in its bootstrap sensibility, I had imagined the book was in homage to Teddy Roosevelt.

Rosen’s reading of his own book puts mine to shame. Looking more like a proper BBC announcer about to introduce a documentary about, say, the cats of Egypt, Rosen really swings for the rafters. His performance, all hands and eyes, is practically operatic (it’s no surprise he’s also the author of Little Rabbit Foo Foo, another story where “jazz hands” are part of the act).

In an email whose subject was WOULD YOU MIND ANSWERING SOME ADULT QUESTIONS ABOUT BEAR HUNT, I told Rosen about my ankle, taking solace in his book’s refrain, and asked if I might email with a few “big picture” questions for an essay.

Rosen replied immediately. “Can I just point out that Bear Hunt with my name on it and with Helen Oxenbury’s pictures is just one version of the rhyme or chant,” he began. “It started out life, as far as anyone can work out, as a rhyme that was and still is performed in the girls’ youth group, we call in the UK the ‘Brownies’. Their version is a ‘Lion Hunt’. There is also a version that circulated round US summer camps in the 60s and 70s, but the rhyme involves guns.”

He concluded his note with, “Please feel free to write me some questions, but I can’t promise I’ll be able to answer them!”

And so, I asked. “After readings, do parents come up and give their own thanks to you? And tell you stories like mine? That the simple message of Bear Hunt carries them through life’s challenges and hardships as adults?”

While I waited for his answers, a friend received a breast cancer diagnosis. Another learned that hers has returned. I got orthotics.

A week went by, then another. I resent the email with an addition of “in case this is currently languishing in your spam folder.” The weeks piled up, and I checked The Guardian’s obituaries. “I hope no one in your family is sick,” I emailed him. “Or that you are not bound and gagged in a closet.” It was obvious: I was Going on a Michael Rosen Hunt.

The weeks turned into months. I graduated from a splint to a cast to a boot. My father’s best friend went into a memory care unit. My son had his first Hebrew lesson. And I gave up on ever hearing back from Rosen.

Just yesterday my orthopedist told me to lose the boot, sending me and my 13 screws on our way. I went home and did four loads of laundry. I hope that Michael Rosen has made it through his own weeds.
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Cathy Alter’s articles and essays have appeared in O, the Oprah Magazine, The Cut, WIRED, and The Washington Post, among others. She is the author of Virgin Territory: Stories From the Road to Womanhood, the memoir, Up for Renewal: What Magazines Taught Me About Love, Sex, and Starting Over, and CRUSH: Writers Reflect on Love, Longing, and the Lasting Power of Their First Celebrity Crush. She lives in Washington, DC.