Most people think their memoir will be more interesting if they include lots and lots of things happening. They think that keeping the action moving is the key to a successful plot.

The reality is that too many events in rapid succession will usually bore your reader.  I know this is counterintuitive, so let me give you an example of writing that has tons of stuff happening.

“That summer I moved to North Carolina. Nick came into the picture soon after that. When we were married, I promised at this time I would make it work. Three months later, I learned I was pregnant. Jonah came into our lives that year on Christmas Day. By the time he started preschool, I was starting to feel the first warning signs of depression. I went to a therapist, and three years later, I finally started to feel some relief.”

So many of the student assignments I get read like this. So what is the problem with this kind of writing? 

You're telling me lots of stuff that happened. But I’m not living through any of these events with you. If you quickly rush through a number of events, you will lose your reader. 

THE FIX​

The solution is to take one or two of these events, and really develop them fully for your reader. For the sake of example, I'm going to pick the sentence, “Three months later I learned I was pregnant.”

Let me show you how I rewrote this entire paragraph around that single idea:

“Learning I was pregnant brought up mixed feelings for me. On one hand, I was thrilled to have a mini version of Nick growing inside of me. I hoped that this baby would be exactly like him, empathetic and kind and always there with a hug when I was having a bad day. On the other hand, I was worried that the baby might get too many of the bad genes, such as my mother's mental illness. How much of Nick would my baby inherit? And how much would come from me?” 

This paragraph is about the same length as the original version, but less is happening. Don't you find it more interesting? Don't you feel like you're living through this with the narrator and that you understand what it's like when she gets pregnant? 
In the first version, I covered lots of events, and many writers think that's better because so much is happening. But the opposite is really true. 

If I can give you just one tip to slow your writing down, it is this: 

Make a single point per paragraph. 

Start your paragraph with a topic sentence and spend the rest of your paragraph expanding on that idea. If you do this, your book will usually be moving along at the right speed.

This one tip will do wonders to really overhaul your prose. 


Wishing you happy writing!

Writing dialogue – either you love it or hate it.  No matter how you feel about it, I wanted to give you a super quick hack to make your scenes with dialogue read better.

What's this trick? Get rid of the attributions.

Dialogue attributions are things like “he said,” “she said,” “I remarked,” “the man explained.” Using a lot of attributions bogs your text down. 

Let me first give you an example of what not to do. 

“Are you going to order the extra spicy?” I asked. 
“I'm thinking about it,” Milton said.
“Last time it gave you acid reflux,” I added.
“Yeah, but I hadn't eaten all day,” he explained. 
“I just don't want to hear you complain about how much your stomach is hurting you,” I remarked. 

I asked. Milton said. I added. He explained.  I find reading all of those attributions a bit annoying. 

However, simply getting rid of them isn’t the answer either. How will your reader know who is saying what? Below are three fixes that allow you to remove most of all of your attributions that still let your reader understand who is speaking.

TIP NUMBER ONE: Only put in attributions in the first line of dialogue for each character.

In the dialogue below, I really only need the attributions once. After that, it’s easy to figure out who is speaking.

“Are you going to order the extra spicy?” I asked. 
“I'm thinking about it.” Milton said.
“Last time it gave you acid reflux.”
“Yeah, but I hadn't eaten all day.”

TIP NUMBER TWO: Use the character’s name in the line of dialogue. If there are only two characters in your scene, it immediately becomes obvious who is speaking.

“Are you going to order the extra spicy, Milton?” 
“I'm thinking about it, Marge.” 
“Last time it gave you acid reflux”.
“Yeah, but I hadn't eaten all day.”

TIP NUMBER THREE: My favorite way of getting rid of attributions is to replace them with an insight about the character or yourself.

Let's take this first line of dialogue:

“Are you going to order the extra spicy?” I asked.

Now replace “I asked” with something like “I tried to make my questions sound casual, not like I was nagging. Milton hated it when I started telling him what to do.”

It's very obvious who’s speaking because the line of dialogue is followed by a sentence that starts with the word “I,” so I am the one speaking. 

Here is an example of how to do this with the second line of dialogue:

BEFORE: “I'm thinking about it,” Milton said.

AFTER: “I’m thinking about it.” Milton looked at the menu more intently now, but I could tell he was just pretending. He already knew what he planned on ordering.

It's obvious who’s speaking. We know it's Milton because I followed the line of dialogue with a sentence about what the character is doing at that moment. So now, not only is it clear who is speaking, we are now getting information that serves to make the scene richer.


Hope this helps! Wishing you happy writing.

When I hear the phrase “Show, Don’t Tell,” I honestly want to scream. I’ve seen more people get their books off track by following this advice than any other.

To know how misguided this advice is, all you have to do is open up any award-winning novel or memoir. What will you find in there? A whole lot of telling.

In fact, telling information in your book is often richer and more emotionally affecting than showing. Let me give you a very short sample from the memoir Honestly, She Doesn't Live Here Anymore, written by Pamela Wick, a former student of mine. (This memoir comes out next year.) Here are just two paragraphs of good writing that do no showing: 


Though I remain calm on the exterior for the most part, inside I am a hurricane. I am turbulent and unsteady. At times when I am unable to remain calm on the exterior, my polite, agreeable persona gets invaded by physical manifestations of fear, and I have a panic attack. Right in the middle of my day. I break out in a sweat, my heart beats like a jazz drum, and thoughts of ‘what if people notice me’ race through my mind. I want to escape, but it’s impossible.


Now that Robin and I are divorcing, panic attacks are normal. I am fear-filled. It feels as though my sadness has morphed into a kind of despair. An emotional changing of the guard. I’ve never lived alone before. Will I meet someone else? Should I get a dog? With my fear, there remains, though, a residue of sorrow, so it gives it an extra dimension, as if plain old fear weren’t enough. 

In this sample, Pamela does lots of telling. And what is the end result? A chunk of emotionally affecting prose that is a pleasure to read.



I strongly suggest you start looking at the prose of literary novelists and memoirists. They are not following the advice “Show, don’t tell” the way it is explained in so many articles and blogs. Writing “experts” are so often giving suggestions that simply don’t hold up in the real world. They are repeating what they’ve heard without any question or analysis and are completely misinterpreting what “Show, don’t tell” really means.


Almost everyone takes this advice out of context and applies it to all aspects of writing, to the extent that this incredibly misunderstood tip is now applied to make otherwise good writing much worse.



In the event that you want to understand the very specific circumstance in which this advice holds true, it is this: “Don’t tell your events. Show them in the form of a scene.”



Here is a sample of text in which this advice should be applied because the writer is describing a lot of things happening:


I went out for a jog and near the lake, I ran into my ex, which stirred up a lot of old feelings. Two days later, he called me but it was a bad time because I was on a call with my boss. We met up three days later at a restaurant where he confessed that he was married. I was devastated and decided I’d block him from all my social media accounts. A week later, I ran into another friend from high school who told me that his mother died from lung cancer.


Did you get a sense of the story being rushed? You might have even felt like you were left out of what was going on. What was the writer doing there? Basically telling me a bunch of stuff that happened. 



Instead, whenever something happens in your book, you want your reader to live through the event fully. In other words, show your events. Create a scene whenever something is happening in your book. 



However, it’s fine to tell me your ideas or come right out and give me information. Take a look at this short text, taken from the forthcoming memoir What Would Philip Roth Do? by Matthew Check, another former student of mine, and feel how it affects you differently than the previous one:


When they are done fine-tuning the mapping of the human genome, I hope they take the time to look into the banjo gene — there has to be one. Who takes the time to play something over and over and over again that makes no sense initially and that sounds awful? There was an exhausting despair in playing the banjo in the beginning when my rolls would descend into failure (like a child attempting to ride his bike without training wheels who crashes into some bush only to create scrapes and abrasions). And yet, I kept dusting myself off and getting back to work because there were also moments (and in the beginning it really was momentary) when the index finger followed the thumb, which followed the middle finger, and vice versa, and forward and backward and in and out, and it would miraculously form into something rhythmic and sequential that was for me nothing short of spotting a unicorn. 


There is a rabbinic parable that rang true for me in moments like those. When we are born our souls are split in two and our life’s mission is to always find our other half: the beshert.  In the moments that I was able to play the roll patterns, I felt as if I had been cosmically reunited with something that I had been separated from at birth, and now that I had found it, I was never going to let it go. 

Here the author basically is telling us how much the banjo means to him. What many writing guides would suggest he do instead would be to get this information across by showing us this information, by describing the smile on his face after playing his first few notes, by having him race outside with a joyous leap in the wake of this early success. However, would that really be more effective than the telling that the writer is doing here? 


Don’t feel the need to show if telling will do a much better job of getting your point across. Oh, and never bring up this phrase in my presence unless you want to see me get riled up. 🤣




Happy writing!

My students often ask me, “How long should my chapters be? Where should I put my chapter breaks?” I have two different answers to these questions, depending on where in the writing process a student happens to be.

I have my students think about how long their chapters will be at two different points.

The first time is at the beginning of the process, to help them create structure. I tell them that chapters are the containers for their scenes and, with this in mind, they should have between eight and sixteen chapters in order to create a rich story.

Why are chapters the containers for your scenes? Basically, it's at the chapter level that you’ll be connecting scenes to create a story. Fewer than eight chapters means you’ll have very long chapters with tons of scenes to connect. If you include more than sixteen chapters, your chapters will have so few scenes that you won’t have enough scenes to tell a story. (I’ll talk about why scenes are the building blocks of plot in a different posting.)

Most of my students stick with between eight and sixteen chapters for the rest of their book. However, some of them feel that shorter chapters are more engaging to a reader. So, once they have completed the writing process, I tell them it’s fine to put in new chapter breaks more frequently if they like.

If it feels like a natural place to pause, that’s where you could place a chapter break. 

To prove to you that you really can have as many chapters as you'd like in your book, let me give you some examples of published memoirs.

• Wave by Sonali Deraniyagala has 9 chapters and 208 pages.
• Wild by Cheryl Strayed has 19 chapters in a 311-page book.
• The Tender Bar by J.R. Moehringer has 44 chapters and 414 pages. 
• Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert has 108 chapters and 352 pages.

Mary Puppins is thinking about a different kind of break today.

Some authors like shorter chapters, because they think it will be easier to read their memoir that way. Other authors like longer chapters, because they don’t want their story to be interrupted as frequently. 

When it comes to structuring your book, think in terms of eight to sixteen chapters. However, your final breaks could look very different from this. 


So, how long should your chapters be? The choice is up to you. 

Happy writing!

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.