Authors Electric

Image source: International Writers' Collective   Every term, my students at the International Writers' Collective ask: how do you develop a writing practice? If you’re taking one of our core writing workshops, you already have a rhythm. It might be the last minute sprint to finish your exercise in time for the deadline. Any schedule is better than none. Try to hold onto it, even after the term is over. Need a hard deadline? Set yourself a realistic goal. Need a spanking when you miss your deadline? Find a writing buddy. Do what works for you. I have it easy. Writing is my work. This is what my daily practice looks like. 08.00 Wake up. 08.05 Make coffee. Unless you’re the novelist Jennifer Egan , in which case you reach for your journal and start to write. She doesn’t mind that her handwriting is illegible, even to her. She wants to surprise herself. There are monsters and plot points and character arcs to be found in the grey space betw...

Memoir is hot these days. At least, it was last year around this time when Michelle Obama’s Belonging was at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Educated , a memoir written by Tara Westover, followed close behind. Soon thereafter, I sat in on a memoir writing class. Not because I wanted to write my life’s story but to cheer on the teacher, Ellen Keith, a fellow faculty member at the International Writers’ Collective . Memoir belongs to the genre of creative nonfiction , a broad tent that holds many circus animals: personal essay, travel narrative, memoir, blog, and autobiography. Unlike autobiography, which generally spans an entire lifetime, memoir is more thematic, focusing on a particular phase. It uses the same building blocks as fiction: a strong narrative voice and a story told in scenes. It made me wonder: where does memoir end and fiction begin? Then Ellen distracted me with a hermit crab exercise. Hermit crab essays adopt already existing forms as ...

Nonfiction isn’t high on my reading list. I’ll read it when I have to do research for my Shanghai Quartet. Or when my sons decide there’s something I need to know. But I prefer fiction that transports me to someplace I don’t know. Like Nigeria during the Biafran War or 1980s India . But now I’ve discovered creative nonfiction. It’s a big tent for all kinds of circus animals: journalism, essays, research papers, memoir. Even this blog post is creative nonfiction, at least, that’s what I hope to achieve. So what exactly is creative nonfiction? true stories, well told To start with, the term has been in use for several decades now. This is odd because most people who write creative nonfiction hate the term. Dinty Moore thinks it should be up to the reader to decide whether a work is creative or not. And the term nonfiction is an attempt to define the genre by what it is not . Quite a number of alternatives have already bitten the dust. Literary nonfiction (too pre...