I hear this a lot: "Your goal as a writer is to create a rich, visual experience for your reader."

Whenever I hear this, I know that the person giving this advice knows very little about what actually makes writing good. In fact, too many visual details can actually make a reader have to concentrate far too hard, thus making their experience a lot less enjoyable. 

Don’t believe me? Notice how much you have to really focus in order to get through this text:

She was seated cross legged on the velvet couch, her brow furrowed as she leaned forward and placed her chin on her open palms. Sunlight poured through the tall windows and illuminated a locket around Marjorie’s neck. It was gleaming gold with an antique engraving, swirls in an ampersand shape curling across the face of the locket, the thick chain contrasting with Marjorie’s delicate neck. 

Her father strolled in at an agitated pace, holding a whiskey with three ice cubes in one hand, running his other hand through his carefully trimmed beard with the other, a nervous habit of his. His stern expression was a contrast to his outfit: khaki shorts, a striped T-shirt in navy blue and green and tennis shoes that were still perfectly white.

When I read this back, sure, I visualize everything, but here is the thing: Was this fun to read? Did you feel how you had to slow down your reading to concentrate on the images I was describing? I only gave you five sentences there. Now imagine a whole book written this way and how much work that would be to get through! 

When you read writing that is overly focused on making you see everything, the author has neglected to focus on what books are supposed to do in the first place: make you   fee l everything.

One of the most incredible tools you are working with in your book is prose, and it’s a tool that isn’t available to screenwriters, who truly do have to write so that a reader visualizes everything. Prose in memoir (and novel writing) allows you to use words to stir up a reader’s emotions, and it might actually be my favorite thing about writing books.

Nevertheless, time and time again, I come across advice online about how prose should offer a visual experience, that a writer must show, not tell. But the end result is prose that is cold, flat and uninteresting. In fact, when I read writing like the sample I gave you above, it sounds like the prose I find in cheap romance novels, the kind of books with bare-chested men with six-pack abs on the cover. 

I get furious when I come across this tip in particular because it seems as if the person who wrote it has never read a memoir or work of literary fiction in their lives. If so, they’d see immediately that this tip doesn’t hold up in real life. 

To prove my point, let me open up one of the memoirs on my shelf. Here is a sample from Sanctuary, a critically acclaimed memoir by Emily Rapp Black. I’m not going to give you any context or tell you what this book is about. But just feel how this tiny excerpt pulls you in immediately and how it transports you in a way the previous sample didn’t:

Feeling like a witness to some great destruction appealed to me. I stretched my arms farther and let them dangle, helped by gravity, until my fingertips began to tingle, and until the noise and chatter of people walking past began to dissipate and then disappear. I was lost in the promise of this emptiness, the sound of it, which was the absence of sound apart from a small rock loosening from the steep bank to tumble into the dry brush, rolling down down down until it disappeared from view. I closed my eyes and heard whomp whomp whomp like an invitation: Yes. Jump. Do it. The space below was hollow, magnetic, literally an opening. A mouth to fall into, as deep as any desire. 

There are very few visual details there. The narrator stretches her arm. A rock rolls down the bank. The narrator stares at a hollow space below. We need these details to understand the story. But there is no detailed description of what the weather is like, what the narrator is wearing, or even where exactly the narrator is standing. Why? Because we don’t need to visualize everything. Including too many visual details is actually boring. And writers who do include lots of visual details never find their own distinct narrative voice, which is one of the key components in writing a great memoir or novel.​

Your goal as a writer is not to create a movie in your reader’s head. What are you trying to do? Your goal, first and foremost, is to affect your reader emotionally.

I'll get off my soapbox now. I hope you have a wonderful writing day.

I used to struggle with how to skip over long time periods in my writing. How could I jump forward in time without confusing my reader?  

Over the years, I’ve developed three tricks that you can use to advance through time in a seamless way in your memoir.

Trick 1 — Take advantage of chapter breaks

The end of a chapter offers a great opportunity to skip long periods of time. You can start a new chapter in a different time and location and your reader will be able to follow your story.

Take Anthony Bourdain’s memoir, Kitchen Confidential. In chapter one, he's living in France during elementary school. The next chapter starts after he graduates from high school, and he heads to Vassar College in New York.

He doesn’t offer an explanation of what happens between fourth grade and college. The chapter break enables him to launch into a new story without losing his reader.

This is how he ends chapter one:

“I'd sit in the garden among the tomatoes and the lizards and eat my oysters and drink Kronenbourgs (France was wonderful for underage drinkers), happily reading Modesty Blaze and the Katzenjammer kids and the lovely hard-bound bandes dessinees in French, until the picture swam in front of my eyes smoking the occasional pilfered Gitane. And I still associate the taste of oysters with those heady wonderful days of illicit late afternoon buzzes. The smell of French cigarettes, the taste of beer, that unforgettable feeling of doing something I shouldn't be doing. 

“I had, as yet, no plans to cook professionally. But I frequently look back at my life, searching for that fork in the road, trying to figure out where exactly, I went bad and became a thrill-seeking pleasure-hungry centralist, always trying to shock, amuse, terrify and manipulate. Seeking to fill that empty spot in my soul was something new. I like to think it was Monsieur Saint Jour’s fault. But of course, it was me all along.” 

And this is how Bourdain begins chapter two:

“In 1973, unhappily in love, I graduated from high school a year early, so I could chase the object of my desire to Vassar College - the less said about that part of my life, the better, believe me. But suffice it to say that by age 18, I was a thoroughly undisciplined young man, blithely flunking or fading out of college (I couldn't be bothered to attend classes). I was angry at myself and everyone else. Essentially, I treated the world as my ashtray. I spent most of my waking hours drinking, smoking, pot scheming and doing my best to amuse, outrage, impress and penetrate anyone silly enough to find me entertaining.” 

In chapter two, he just launches into a new story, offering the reader no explanation as to what happened between fourth grade and the end of high school. It's just a new story. And sometimes you can really do this with a chapter break. 

Trick 2 — Use an events paragraph​

An events paragraph is a wonderful device that will get you through a period of time, whether it’s large or small. An events paragraph gives your reader the sensation that they have lived through this period of time with you without taking up much space in your book. 

To create an events paragraph, make a point in your first sentence. Then, in every sentence that follows, you mention an event related to this point. ​

I’ll give you a short example of how this works in Tara Westover’s book, Educated. First, she makes a point in the first sentence of her paragraph:

“Months passed in this way, mother leaving the house at all hours and coming home trembling, relieved to her core that it was over.” 

There's the point. So now each sentence that follows is going to mention an event related to this point.

“By the time the leaves started to fall, she had helped with a dozen births. By the end of winter, several deaths. In the spring, she told my father she'd had enough that she could deliver a baby if she had to, if it was the end of the world. Now she could stop.” 

Trick 3 - Use an idea to get through time

My final trick for jumping through time is to use an idea. This concept is a bit more complicated, but I’ll do my best to explain it. 

What do I mean by using an idea? 

An example of how this works can be found in Daisy Hernandez’s memoir, A Cup of Water Under My Bed.  In her book, she uses the idea of wanting to be a writer to skip  through time. In one paragraph, she goes from being a high school student to her post-high school years.

“In high school, I tape a picture of an electric typewriter to the refrigerator and he buys it for me, the exact model. He grins watching me type my paper about Oscar Wilde. My father observes me for a few seconds bending over the electronic typewriter, then retreats to the kitchen for a can of Budweiser.”

That's where her scene ends, and she’s in high school. Now, in a single sentence, she jumps way ahead in time to her professional years. This is how she does it. 

“I enter the book publishing industry after college in the late nineties. I open mail for book editors, write rejection letters, and proofread, flap copy. I spend day after day immersed in manuscripts. And at the end of every two weeks, I am paid on time.” 

Because both of these passages are about the narrator being a writer, she is able to skip through a huge period of time in just a few sentences.

A reader doesn’t expect to know everything you did throughout your life. If you tell them the story about you becoming a writer, they only expect scenes related to this. So set up what your chapter is about and only pick the periods in time that cover this idea. 

I hope these three tricks help you to seamlessly skip time in your memoir.  Wishing you happy writing!

Just about every memoir writer I've ever worked with doubts themselves at some point. 

"Why will anyone care about my book? My life is so boring."

These questions usually take me by surprise, because they often come from my most talented writers. I'm going to tell you a secret about writing. 

People love memoirs, not because they tell a fascinating story that is filled with plot twists and turns. They love a memoir because it speaks to the truth about the human experience. There are so many successful memoirs about everyday subjects. 

Let me give you some examples of books that did well both critically and commercially that have simple plot lines.

“A girl grows up in a small town in Southeast Texas, where people are plagued by mental health issues and alcoholism.” Does that sound like a fascinating book? It’s the description of The Liars’ Club by Mary Karr, considered a classic in its genre. 

Let me give you another example.  “A boy grows up poor in Ireland.” This is the famous book by Frank McCourt called   Angela’s Ashes.​

Despite their seemingly mundane plot lines, some memoirs are so successful they are made into movies. Think about Marley and Me, which was essentially about adopting a Labrador Retriever. Is there a topic any more commonplace than that? 

Then there's a movie about a woman who wanted to make the recipes of Julia Child for a year, Julia & Julia. She's cooking. What could be more boring than that really?​

The bottom line — the great majority of memoirs don’t have an amazing plot. So how can you make people care about your book? 

Let me tell you a secret: If you affect your readers emotionally, they will never be bored. You don’t have to worry about plot twists and turns. Instead, you should make sure that your book is filled with subjective writing.

What is subjective writing?

Subjective writing goes beyond what you saw and heard. Instead, it puts your reader inside your head. Tell us your thoughts so we’re right there with you.  Don’t describe a room in detail with every painting, fabric texture and furniture. Instead, tell us what you were thinking when you were inside that room. It doesn't matter if you're writing a book about your golden retriever, or your divorce, or your trip to Thailand.

The point is, if you make people care about you, they will care about your book. And the way to make someone care about you is through subjective writing.

If you want to know more about how to use subjective writing in your book, go to my video on this topic. 

Readers don't stick with a book because of the plot. They stick with it because they're affected by it. People read books to have an emotional experience. 


Be subjective, and you will give your reader what they're looking for. Doubting yourself is part of the process, but don't give into it. Keep writing!

From a reader’s point of view, reading a memoir should feel just like reading a novel. Both genres follow the same rules. You want to tell the story in the same way. 

The challenge for memoir writers is that you need to write a story that feels like a novel, without making anything up. It needs to have a beginning, a middle, and an end and there needs to be a quest. 

With that in mind, I want to talk a little bit about how creating a plot works in novels, so that you can apply these same principles to your memoir. 

Let’s take a look at Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen. Here's a quick summary of the first four scenes. 

1. Mrs. Bennett tells her husband that Mr. Bingley, a wealthy and attractive bachelor, is moving into town. She asks her husband to go visit him, hoping that Mr. Bingley will be interested in marrying one of their five daughters. Mr. Bennett says he has no desire to do any such thing.

2. Mr. Bennett surprises his wife and daughter with the news that he paid a visit to Mr. Bingley. 

3. Mr. Bingley invites the Bennets to a ball where the family meets Mr. Darcy. They all decide that Mr. Darcy is arrogant and awful when he insults Elizabeth (one of the Bennet daughters), calling her “tolerable but not handsome enough to tempt me.” 

4. The Bennetts get together with their neighbors, The Lucases, to gossip about the ball. Everyone agrees that Mr. Bingley was very taken with their eldest Jane, and also Mr. Darcy is proud and disagreeable. 

What I want you to notice here is how all of these scenes are connected. Austen uses causality to create her plot, which means that one event brings about the next one. There is a causal relationship between her scenes.

What is the plot here? Basically, an attractive bachelor moves to town. Mr. Bennett visits the new arrival. The bachelor invites the Bennetts to a ball. The Bennetts get together to gossip about the ball.

None of these events could have occurred on its own. It needed the event before it to happen first. In other words, Mr. Bennett wouldn’t have been able to visit the new arrival had he not moved to the town in the first place. The Bennetts wouldn't be gossiping about the ball had they not been invited earlier on.

Causality isn’t the only way to create the plot in your memoir, but it is a really effective way. If you can think like a novelist and connect the scenes in your book so that one brings about the next one, you’ll never have structural problems.


Think like a novelist, and you’ll have a book that keeps a reader turning the pages. Wishing you lots of happy writing!

​As a writer, one of your goals is to help your reader visualize your characters. At the same time, you don't want to stereotype someone because of their race. Sometimes simply mentioning a character's race can upset some readers. After all, aren't we not supposed to see color? How do you balance all of these things while still letting your reader feel like they know the characters in your book? This video includes six tips for writing about race without being offensive.

A lot of the writers I work with think of using a diary-style structure to tell their story. In this video, I explain why this is actually incredibly difficult to do. I also give some tips on how to actually structure your memoir when you're starting with a list of disconnected events. ​