from the website of Sandra Scofield a novelist and author of Occasions of Sin: A Memoir “[I]n memoir you’re stuck with a story your history gives you. You don’t have the license to invent in the old, fictional way: you can’t leap to making up things to fill the holes or change the shape of an event. You don’t alter chronology to make a dramatic arc tighter. At least I don’t think you do. What you do instead is dig …
I have a guest post on Brevity’s blog discussing the narrative and structural choices I made in my essay “Kathy,” published recently by Brevity. I first analyzed the piece here, and so with the Brevity blog exegesis—not to mention this notice—I have now written more words about the essay than are in the essay itself. I could go on. Which gives me the notion that writers might begin the practice of publishing essays that comment on their essays, books that …
In the About section of this blog devoted to narrative, I used to fret that narrative seems to inhibit reflection, or at least is in tension with other ways of exploring meaning: I’d noticed in writing a memoir the pressure of the constant “and then” of the story. But a friend questioned what I meant and I couldn’t defend my tentative insight. So it was exciting to see a writer boldly go there—in fact he mounted a sustained attack on …
Distilled from an essay of more than twenty pages and part of another of that length, my essay “Kathy” appears in the May 2009 edition of Brevity, a journal of concise nonfiction. Essays for Brevity may not exceed 750 words and are compressed wonders, caught moments, life’s puzzles, shining nuggets fetched tumbling from a brook. I’m proud to have work in this company! “Right before her high school senior photo, Kathy took her mother’s sewing scissors and sawed off her …
from “Visions and Revisions: Writing On Writing Well and keeping it up-to-date for 35 years,” in The American Scholar, Spring 2009 “It now occurs to me that I didn’t really find my style until I wrote On Writing Well, at the late age of 52. Until then my style more probably reflected who I wanted to be perceived as—the urbane columnist and humorist and critic. Only when I started writing as a teacher and had no agenda except to be …
Lois at her blog Narrative Nonfiction alerts writers to an experiment at Creative Nonfiction in which the editors have published, on the journal’s web site, the before and after versions of some essays in the current print issue. The revisions essentially involve massive cuts to the essays’ openings; the web page with the essays showing the changes using contrasting type colors includes a forum for reactions from readers, who can weigh in, pro and con and mixed. Creative Nonfiction’s editorial …
The late novelist and journalist was interviewed by Becky Bradway for Creating Nonfiction: A Guide and Anthology by Bradway and Doug Hesse: “The reader’s pre-suspension of disbelief gives nonfiction a particular kind of power, but it also seems to encumber the nonfiction with a kind of moral obligation fiction doesn’t have. If a piece of fiction is markedly implausible or ‘untrue’ in some way, the reader feels a certain bored distaste, or maybe disappointment. If a piece of nonfiction, though, …