What makes one a successful writer? I was forced to contemplate that question yesterday morning while having brunch with friends from out of town. One of their daughters is a freshman at a prestigious liberal-arts college. She has no idea what she wishes to major in, but knows she loves to write. So she asked …
Continue reading Three Fundamentals to a Successful Writing Career
"Writing a novel is like having a baby," writes National Book Award finalist Kim Addonizio in Bukowski in a Sundress: Confessions from a Writing Life. I have never personally given birth, but I am a father of two. With both pregnancies my wife and I refrained for some time before sharing the news with others. There's that …
Continue reading Meet 3 Impressive Fiction Writers Inspiring Me to Return to Writing
So I'm having a bit of fun with the title of this post, but it accurately captures the emotions I felt while writing Committed: A Memoir of the Artist's Road. Longtime readers of this blog will know I wrestled with writing about others, both the artists I interviewed on the cross-country road trip depicted in the …
Continue reading Writing About People in Your Life: Terrifying or Disastrous?
A memoirist always runs the risk of offending the living when capturing them in prose. But he also runs the risk of offending them by omission. In Part One of this series I discussed how I have reduced my manuscript of Committed: A Memoir of the Artist's Road over the course of the last year, in anticipation …
Continue reading Road to Publication: Killing Your Babies Part Two
So it's official. I've signed with an enterprising independent publisher and my memoir--four years after I first started working on it--will be published this October. So many readers of The Artist's Road have traveled with me as I've chronicled this pursuit. I've shared my highs and my lows, and there were a fair number of …
Continue reading The Artist’s Road Memoir will be Published this Fall
Have you ever, in your line of work, had someone threaten to throw you off a balcony? That happened to a New York City television reporter the other night, and the one doing the threatening was a U.S. congressman. The episode itself--and the congressman's first attempt at an "apology"--demonstrates a phenomenal misunderstanding of the critical role …
Readers are embracing creative nonfiction like never before, even if they may not know that what they are reading is defined as such. That is forgivable, as writers, editors and instructors in the creative nonfiction space are still struggling with defining creative nonfiction, or CNF. Perhaps more accurately, they are struggling to define its boundaries …
Continue reading Rebecca Skloot on Producing Creative Nonfiction
I found myself in the middle of chaos on September 11th, 2001, covering an impromptu evacuation of the U.S. Capitol as a Washington, D.C., based reporter. That emotional trauma came as I was struggling with an adjustment to life as a divorced father of two children. When the 10th anniversary of 9/11 came in 2011 …
My mission: Reduce a 384-page first-draft memoir manuscript to 300 pages. Why? Because I know a tighter book will be a more pleasurable read, and because I know it will be easier to sell a shorter book to a publisher than a longer one. I've spent the last two months revising the memoir I wrote …
Continue reading 4 Steps To Slashing that Manuscript in Revision
I remain obsessed with "truthiness" in memoirs. I know I'm not alone; my March post on the subject generated 187 comments. I believe I have arrived at three key principles for writing a memoir that is worth reading without truthiness. It is as follows: 1. Believe in your story. 2. Rely on your writing to …
Continue reading What Drives Some Memoirists from Truth to Fiction?
The Artist's Road 