How to Let the Funny In
July 17, 2026 § 5 Comments
By Yahia Lababidi
Lately I have been wondering how to let more of my lighthearted self creep into my writing.
Though, maybe humor does not need to be added to serious writing, the way one adds a side dish to a meal already complete. Added humor can resemble the guest who arrives clapping for himself. It announces itself, and the announcing is what makes it embarrassing: for the guest, for the host, for everyone standing nearby holding a drink.
The better humor is already in the room before the official sentence arrives wearing a tie. It is the sideways metaphor, the raised eyebrow, the small sting tucked under the courtesy. Joke-funny often dies on contact with print, the way a fish dies on contact with air, gasping for the room it just left. Image-funny is sturdier. It is the mind caught mid-stare.
The solemn essayist in the corner keeps saying, “Brother, not in front of the journals.” He is usually right, which is the most annoying thing about him. Still, not always. A little irreverence can be its own form of truthfulness. It admits that the writer is still bodily present, even while doing his best to be solemn. Some small creature remains at the back of the mind, rolling his eyes at the furniture of existence: the chair that is always the wrong height.
Strangely, the formal side of me thinks it’s somehow disrespectful to address an unknown reader too informally. So I button up my casual side, at the risk of becoming the sort of man who irons his socks. Part of the difficulty, I suspect, is that part of me mistakes excessive seriousness for manners before the injured. One lowers the voice around certain subjects. Palestine, prayer, exile, the dead: these are not rooms into which a man wishes to enter doing finger guns. But the opposite danger is real too. Reverence, over-policed, begins checking the guest list like a nervous bouncer. It refuses entry to the very human being who came to bear witness.
I think of a New Year’s party I once gave in Cairo, a small gathering that, through the usual multiplication of friends bringing friends, became a large one. At some point I no longer recognized half the people dancing in my own living room. Oscar Wilde has a line about this, something to the effect that he doesn’t know half the people who come to his house, and from what he hears of them, he wouldn’t care to. I let the not-knowing pass. Host duties were calling.
Everyone was dancing or talking, paired off into the small electricities of a party, except one young man sitting by the dance floor in plain view, carrying the specific weight of someone who has just been informed, personally, that the night is going badly for him. I went over and asked the question I almost never permit myself, being the most tedious question available to strangers: so what do you do?
He said, “I’m a clown.”
I looked at him again. Nothing in his face had been told. Not wanting to be rude, I asked whether it was hard, on the days he wasn’t feeling lighthearted, to be funny for a living.
“No,” he said. “Comedy is like working at a bank. You’re handling millions, but none of it is yours. You push it from one place to another, and at the end of the day you don’t keep any of it.”
I have turned that sentence over for years. There was no bitterness in how he said it, only the plain accounting of a man who had made peace with his ledger. It may be the truest thing a stranger has told me about the distance between performing funny and being funny.
The trick, in writing, is to stay no lighter than one actually is. Borrowed lightness shows its borrowing. The trick is to let in one or two of the things one might actually say, before professional caution walks the sentence to the door and straightens its collar.
The clown spends other people’s laughter all day and keeps none of it. The essayist, if careful, keeps a little. The laugh was never his to keep either. What he keeps is the noticing that produced it, and that part of the transaction, no one can repossess.
___
Yahia Lababidi is the author of sixteen books of poetry, essays, and aphorisms, most recently If You Cannot Say GENOCIDE: Essays on Conscience and Witnessfrom New Village Press. Lababidi’s writing has appeared in The New Statesman, Liberties, Salmagundi, World Literature Today, The Threepenny Review, AGNI, The New Arab, NPR, PBS, and On Being. He is also the author of Learning to Pray, a collection of spiritual aphorisms and poems.
I’m Ready for My Close-Up: Using the metaphor of cinema to focus our writing lenses
July 16, 2026 § 9 Comments
By Ethan Gilsdorf
I spent the formative years of my childhood with a Super 8 movie camera and, later in high school, in the clunky medium of ¾ inch video, creating DIY claymation monster movies and MTV-inspired mini-dramas.
I never became the George Lucas / Steven Spielberg of my dreams. College turned me into a written tale-spinner, and grad school turned me into a poet. (I did become, briefly, a film critic.) But those early lessons in setting up a camera to grab a particular angle, composing the frame, and editing a variety of shots—close-up, medium, and long—into sequences to build narrative scenes, have served me well as a writer of memoir and CNF.
Judith Barrington, author of Writing the Memoir, uses this same language of film for how we might craft personal narrative. She likens summary voice to “the long shot—the one that pulls back to a great distance, embracing first the whole house, then the street, then the neighborhood,” or even an aerial shot of the whole city and surrounding landscape, where details are “seen from a distance, none apparently more important than another.”
But the scene, Barrington writes, resembles a close-up shot: “the camera zooming in through the kitchen window, picking out the two figures talking at the table and going up really close to the face of first one speaker then the other while the audience hears each one speak.” Not every detail of the kitchen is visible, and some fade into the blurry background. Only the details crucial to the drama are in sharp focus: a facial expression of worry, a dying house plant by the sink, the protagonist’s deep and audible sigh.
By varying the camera lens of our writing, we can frame what we want our readers to pay attention to, and when. These close-up details can amplify the stakes of high drama, and make the reader feel the world of our story in granular detail. Readers hang their emotions on the sensory, the physical, the concrete, not the vague, cliched or abstract. As my writing colleague Jennifer Murvin says, be “groundy before going floaty”—meaning, ground the reader in details before launching into the stratosphere of big ideas and feelings.
For example, before Virginia Woolf begins her rigorous exploration of mortality and agency in her oft-anthologized essay “The Death of Moth,” she frames the view outside: the fields, the plough, the “far-off smoke of houses.” She zeroes in on a key detail: rooks who are “keeping one of their annual festivities; soaring round the tree tops until it looked as if a vast net with thousands of black knots in it had been cast up into the air; which, after a few moments sank slowly down upon the trees until every twig seemed to have a knot at the end of it.”
This vibrant world outside her “room of one’s own” is then enclosed by the window frame, which grounds the smaller drama she sets out to describe—a moth “with his narrow hay-coloured wings, fringed with a tassel of the same colour…fluttering from side to side of his square of the window-pane.” Contemplating helping the poor guy, she zooms in with increasing intensity on her role in the scene:
After perhaps a seventh attempt he slipped from the wooden ledge and fell, fluttering his wings, on to his back on the window sill. The helplessness of his attitude roused me. It flashed upon me that he was in difficulties; he could no longer raise himself; his legs struggled vainly. But, as I stretched out a pencil, meaning to help him to right himself, it came over me that the failure and awkwardness were the approach of death. I laid the pencil down again.
In this way, we come to understand Woolf’s meditations on mortality in a magnificent and magnified fashion. (She would take her own life one year before the essay was published in 1942.)
We can also use the cinematic effects to create a montage of close-up shots. In Scott Russell Sander’s essay about coming to terms with his alcoholic father, “Under the Influence,” he projects a kind of slideshow of images of the father drunk and stumbling as he exits the car, over seasons and years:
He climbs out, grinning dangerously, unsteady on his legs, and we children interrupt our game of catch, our building of snow forts, our picking of plums, to watch in silence as he weaves past us into the house, where he drops into his overstuffed chair and falls asleep.
Framing, zooming in, cutting between angles and shots: By choosing particular and precise language, sensory and singular images, and unexpected details, you can manipulate your scenic lens to focus with intention and bring your writing to life.
Are you ready for your close-up?
__________
Ready to explore how to use your writerly “lens” to focus on the solitary, cinematic details and use close-up technique in your own work? Join Ethan for a CRAFT TALKS webinar, The Art of the Cinematic Close-Up, Thursday, July 23, 3-4:30pm ET ($20/$30). Find out more/register now…
Ethan Gilsdorf is the author of the Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geeks. His work has appeared in the New York Times, Esquire, Wired, Salon, Huffington Post, Brevity, Electric Literature, Witness, Poetry, The Southern Review, among other publications, and named “Notable” by The Best American Essays. He teaches at GrubStreet in Boston, where he leads the Essay Incubator program, and is also on the faculty of the Solstice MFA Program at Lasell University.
Mentor Texts: What Writers Read When They Write
July 15, 2026 § 20 Comments
By Erin Van Rheenen
Immersing yourself in another author’s work might not seem like the way to develop and celebrate your own individual style. In fact, some writers believe that if you read other published writers’ work while you’re actively writing, you’ll lose your voice and take on someone else’s.
But for those of us who’ve been writing for a while, the bigger problem can be sounding too much like ourselves, complete with blind spots and bad habits. We all have words we habitually overuse (for me, it’s home, bruise, and water), favored methods of concluding an essay or chapter, and ways we narrow our scope and ambition without even realizing it. So how do we change that up?
During the last year of writing and editing my novel, You Could Be Happy Here, I kept a few books—both nonfiction and fiction—close at hand. None were “how to write” books, though I have plenty of those. And they had little or no connection to the plot of my novel, in which a California science teacher heads to Costa Rica to track down her biological father.
My companion books offered me something else. Each was different from the others, and each was, in my estimation, brilliant enough to serve as a mentor text: a work you don’t just read, but study, with the goal of both improving and expanding your frame of reference
Some of the guidance was of the nuts-and-bolts variety. If I got stuck on how to end a chapter, for instance, I’d page through the books to see how different authors solved that problem. What I found were chapter closings ranging from cliffhanger to crescendo to the feel of a quiet sigh. All of which I could consider when writing the end of my own chapters. Not copy. Consider.
What I learned from my mentor books went deeper.
Reading Ed Yong’s narrative nonfiction book, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us inspired me to think beyond our culture’s reductive assumptions about the natural world. As I edited my novel, I heeded Yong’s warning that our sensory world “is all we know, and so we easily mistake it for all there is to know.” I applied that caveat to my portrayal of Costa Rica’s ecosystem, reminding myself that every living creature is the star of its own show, navigating a world shaped by its special skills and deficits. Bats, for instance, have very poor eyesight but excellent echolocation skills: they bounce sound off objects to create a mind map of their surroundings. Applying the “every creature is its own world” insight to human beings, I felt more empathy for all of my characters as I edited, even the ones whose tunnel vision makes them stumble around in the dark.
Jennifer Ackerman’s science and nature book, The Bird Way, was another mentor text that helped shape my novel. Ackerman reveals how birds parent, play, steal, and even hold grudges, and how their behavior both parallels and diverges from human behavior. Ackerman’s discoveries influenced how my main character looks to the natural world—especially birds and insects—for insight into human behavior.
Janet Fitch’s coming of age novel, White Oleander, inspired me to embrace and deepen the central opposition in my protagonist’s character. Finch’s main character—a girl named Astrid whose mother is in jail for murder and who bounces around the foster care system—is both wise beyond her years and utterly clueless. That tension—between knowing and not knowing—spoke to me. My novel’s main character has that same dynamic. Sensitive and observant, Lucy Gale also has huge blind spots, about herself and the world.
British writer Zoë Heller, author of Notes on a Scandal, a Booker-Prize-winning psychological novel, has acknowledged in interviews that she knows some writers avoid reading other people’s work when writing their own, “for fear of adulterating their prose style with unconscious borrowings.” But, she adds, she’s “not entirely convinced that having another author’s style rub off on mine would be such a terrible thing.”
Austin Kleon, author of a series of highly regarded illustrated books about creativity, goes even further. Recently he posted a graphic with his latest book, Don’t Call It Art, at the center of six other books that have served as his mentor texts, from John Holt’s How Children Learn to Lynda Barry’s Making Comics. The graphic’s headline? Books Are Made of Books.
If books are indeed made of books, then it follows that writers are made of other writers. But, says Kleon, artists must honor, study, and transform other artists’ work, rather than degrade, skim, and imitate. A healthy relationship with a mentor text is one in which the mentee has no desire to become the mentor; instead, she wants to integrate the mentor’s insights into her own world view and style. It seems that one of the ironies of identity—as writers, and as human beings—is that we need others to become more fully ourselves.
__________
Erin Van Rheenen is a science, travel, and fiction writer with work in publications like BBC Travel, Bellevue Literary Review, and Afar. She is the author of Living Abroad in Costa Rica and has contributed to many travel guides. Recently she published her first novel (set in California and Costa Rica), You Could Be Happy Here. Find her on Instagram, Facebook, and Substack.
.
But What Do They Want?!? Write Publishable Essays by Analyzing Published Essays
July 14, 2026 § 15 Comments
By Allison K Williams
A writer friend had an essay rejected fourteen times. It dealt beautifully with the journey of her abusive father’s dementia, and recognizing that her now-caring relationship was with a different person. Gorgeous sentences. Weep-worthy ending with a powerful image. Also: 3,200 words, braided lyric essay, submitted to parenting and lifestyle websites that run 900-word pieces with a clear cultural hook in paragraph one and a tidy takeaway ending. She’s an amazing writer, but she was showing up at a potluck with a fifteen-course seasonal tasting menu.
Great food, wrong crowd.
Many of us want to publish short pieces—to build platform, maybe get an agent’s attention; to support a forthcoming memoir; for the pure pleasure of writing about something we truly care about, and yes, sometimes, for a check. (Not a living, but a decent side hustle.) And we all know we have to keep submitting—that rejection isn’t feedback.
But “keep submitting” isn’t strategy, it’s stamina. And often, we get caught in the knowing: we know it’s a good piece, our teacher/writing buddy/editor told us so! So how come it’s not published yet? And what the heck do these magazines and literary journals want, anyway?
Beyond strong writing and developing our craft, writers need research: figuring out exactly what a publication wants, then writing something wholly our own that fits their audience, their tone, and (the part we usually miss) their shape.
Find that shape—and steal that stencil—to write not just the essay you’re pulled to create, but one you love that also gets published.
Read for fun, then read like a writer. Not skimming three articles the hour before you hit “submit,” but reading the publication regularly. (And if you don’t enjoy it enough to do that, is it really the place you want your work?) Even subscription venues have free articles available, and save some writer money for subscriptions, too. Ask yourself:
- What’s the average word count? (copy-paste into a doc)
- Where does each piece start: in the middle of a scene, with dialogue already happening, or with a beat of reflection first?
- Is there one clear turning point, a sentence where the writer’s understanding visibly shifts—or does the piece build more like a wave, cumulative, no single hinge?
- Does every essay land somewhere hopeful, with a takeaway and/or suggested action for the reader; does this venue want endings that breathe, letting the reader sit with an image and draw their own conclusions; or is it somewhere in between?
Print two or three pieces and mark them up like a diagram. Get a pen. Circle every scene: dialogue, action, sensory detail, a specific moment happening in real time. Underline stretches of reflection or analysis. You’ll start to see the ratio: this magazine runs 70% scene to 30% reflection; that one flips it. This journal’s essays often use one image that shifts through the essay. That newspaper column always opens mid-scene, then circles back. Whether or not the publication tends to publish a particular pattern, you’ll get used to seeing patterns, and using them deliberately in your own work. Marking up one of your own pieces can show whether you’ve got three pages of reflection with no action or vice versa, and then you can decide if that works for the piece you want to write.
Use an existing piece as an actual stencil. Take a published essay in your target venue and, paragraph by paragraph, shape your material into its structure. Their opening paragraph is a scene-in-action? Make yours, too—even if your instinct was to start with a memory of your mother’s voice. Their third paragraph pulls back to state the theme in one clean sentence? Find yours. When your material doesn’t fit the mold, don’t panic, and don’t necessarily abandon the exercise—get curious. Why is this resisting the shape? Sometimes that tells you your story wants a different venue. Sometimes it tells you exactly where your draft is being vague, dodging its own point, or delaying the scene it actually needs. After trying the exercise, revisit your draft: where is your own shape more powerful, and where can you adjust from a lesson learned?
This stencil exercise works particularly well for OpEds, which often follow the same pattern within a particular publication. For example, many New York Times editorials have a title that states the problem, a first paragraph that expands on that statement, and a second paragraph that shows the problem in action in specific places or incidents. (Here’s an example, gift link, and warning, it’s political)
This exercise isn’t about diluting your voice, or being generic. Once you know the shape a publication is looking for, you can decide whether your best stories fit that shape, or save yourself a rejection by finding a journal that wants what you love to create. Plus, exploring other structures can further define and refine the structures that feel right as the container for your own material.
Pick a piece you love from a place you’d love to be published. Print it out and get a pen. Discover the bones underneath the power, then go build the body that holds your story, the one only you can tell, inside a structure the editors already trust.
________
Allison K Williams is Managing Editor of The Brevity Blog. Her essays have appeared in The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, The Kenyon Review Online and McSweeney’s. The authors she works with have published in The New Yorker, Time, Newsweek, HuffPost, The Guardian and many more.
Ready to get your essay into the world? Join Allison & Jane Friedman tomorrow, July 15, for Pitch, Publish, Get Paid. Find out more/register now ($35).
Looking for a Writing Partner? You May Already Have One
July 13, 2026 § 13 Comments
By Rachel Weinhaus
I met my first writing partner in film school: Andy and I were in the screenwriting program at USC, and we were the perfect match. We both had a healthy dose of self-loathing, we were intensely driven to succeed, and, best of all, we shared the same sense of humor. He was a welcome ally in a cutthroat industry. No one could make me laugh harder than Andy, even on the days I wanted to cry.
By writing partner, I don’t mean Andy and I co-wrote screenplays. In fact, we never collaborated on a project. Instead, we met every day at a small coffee shop in West Los Angeles after our respective day jobs—Andy did freelance editing while I was a first-grade teaching assistant. For two hours every afternoon, we sat at a corner table and pitched our own projects, helped each other work out story problems, took writing breaks by reenacting our favorite parts of The Office (the British version), or sometimes spent one hundred and twenty minutes not talking at all.
Andy and I were never attracted to each other. But I did fantasize about marrying another writer. I had idyllic daydreams about workshopping pages over Sunday morning coffee or staying up late under the covers, brainstorming clever names for our future production company.
That’s when I met Yaacov, an IT manager who was kind, handsome, and laughed at all my jokes.
Our first big fight was over my writing. Well, over the fact that he hadn’t read any of it. I was venturing away from screenplays and had finished a middle grade reader. I was excited and printed him out a copy. He seemed excited, too, and promised to start reading that night. Three weeks later, he still hadn’t said a word. When I confronted him, he admitted he hadn’t had a chance to look at it yet. I broke down in tears.
Fifteen years of marriage later, I look back on that first fight and know the issue was my husband struggling with his ADD, and not a lack of support. Truly, no one has championed my writing career more, but it took me years to understand that. For a long time, even after Yaacov read something I’d written, I’d put us in a no-win situation. If he said he liked it, I didn’t think he was pushing me enough, or if he didn’t think a piece was quite working, I was frustrated when he couldn’t help me pinpoint why.
I took my own negativity out on him and found myself fantasizing again: if only I had married a writer, someone who spoke my language, life could be so much easier.
Luckily, we have an amazing marriage therapist who helped me realize I may not have married a writer, but I did marry a writing partner. When I’m deep in a project, Yaacov helps more with the kids, allowing me the time and quiet I need to work. Yaacov is also the chef in our family, and while he prepares dinner, he loves for me to read aloud. I can look at a sentence or line of dialogue a hundred times and still not know if it works, but hearing it out loud, I can easily locate the trouble spots. And recently, I’ve started teaching memoir writing workshops. Yaacov always bakes tasty treats, and I don’t know if I get repeat participants because of the content or because word of his lemon bars has spread.
I don’t seek feedback from Yaacov in the way I did before, but instead accept his love and support and try to believe in myself the way he believes in me.
Over the years, Andy and I have also stayed close. He owns a successful bed and breakfast now, but whenever I have a completed manuscript, he’s still my first call. And when he was coming up with a new name and logo idea for his inn, he reached out for feedback. We will always consider each other writing partners.
So, for those of you who think you’ve never had a writing partner, I beg to differ. Look around you. Who in your life supports you as a writer? It could be a spouse, a teacher, a friend, a therapist, or a fellow writer. If you’re lucky like me, you’ll have more than one writing partner, even if you’ve never written a single word together. And maybe you’ll take comfort in knowing you’re not alone.
___
Rachel Weinhaus is a screenwriter, memoirist, and flash fiction writer. She earned an MFA in screenwriting from the University of Southern California’s School of Cinema-Television. She has been published in The New York Times, Newsweek, Huffington Post, Insider, The Today Show, Kveller, and The Brevity Blog. Her work has appeared in Trampset, Necessary Fiction, MoonPark Review, Moon City Press, Frigg Magazine, ELJ, and others. She teaches memoir writing workshops.
A Conversation Between Immigrant Writers on Shame, Fear, and Responsibility
July 10, 2026 § 7 Comments
By Rebecca Morrison
I left Iran in 1979, and wrote a novel, The Blue Dress, based on my childhood as an Iranian immigrant struggling with body image, and a complicated mother-daughter relationship.
Hamid Ran fled Iran as an adult after facing threats because of his work as a journalist. He spent years navigating the refugee process in Turkey before coming to America in 2010, and publishing his memoir, Before the West: First Light on Unknown Lands this year.
Beyond the country of our birth, our experiences couldn’t be farther apart. But in the first minutes of our discussion, I saw how much we had in common as writers and immigrants. How we struggled with fear, shame, and responsibility as we wrote our stories, and the ways we navigated how much to reveal, knowing that the people we love may be hurt by it.
Rebecca: When writing your memoir, did you think about leaving certain things out because you worried they might reinforce stereotypes about Iran or Iranian culture? Were there things you were scared of saying because of your family?
Hamid: Yes. My niece translated my book into Farsi so my family could read it. After they read it, they were crying for two weeks. They kept saying, “Oh my God, we didn’t know you went through all of this.”
My family is traditional and religious, and I talk in the book about being an atheist. I wanted to be honest, but scared about what would happen to my family since they still live in Iran. I went back and forth about whether I should include it. In the end, I decided that the only way forward was to be honest. Other times it wasn’t my family, but other people in the Iranian community. I worried, ‘My Iranian readers are going to be upset’ about sharing the details of where I grew up, and the struggles we had. But I couldn’t make things up. I wanted to write the truth. And I felt a responsibility to tell this story because many people have opinions about refugees without ever hearing directly from one.
One thing that wasn’t scary exactly, but was shameful, was my smoking. I never told my family that I smoked cigarettes! When my niece was translating the book, I told her maybe she should delete those parts. She said, “No, Uncle. It’s okay.”
Hamid: Your book is fiction, were some of the pressures the same? Did you feel a responsibility when writing about Iran and Iranian culture, especially knowing American readers might not know much about it?
Rebecca: Absolutely. People sometimes assume writing a novel and a memoir are completely different processes, but I struggled with the same questions you did.
When you’re an immigrant writing about your culture and your family, there can be such a heaviness to that responsibility. Iran has been defined in the media by so many stereotypes. When you’re writing into that space, you know for some readers, this may be the first Iranian story they’ve ever read. That creates a lot of pressure. I wanted to be truthful about my experience, and I wanted to write about the beautiful parts of Persian culture but I also wanted to be honest about some of the harder things I saw growing up, especially for girls and women. I worried Iranian readers might think I was reinforcing stereotypes. Or think I was criticizing my culture. But I kept coming back to the same thing you mentioned: Our responsibility is to tell our stories as we experienced them. I tried not to think about making Iranians look good or bad. The goal was to write something meaningful and true.
Rebecca: When you were writing a memoir, there’s an expectation that you’re being as accurate as possible. But memory is complicated. Did you ever hesitate because you weren’t sure of your memories’ accuracy?
Hamid: I decided that if I wasn’t sure about something, I wouldn’t write it. If a memory felt hazy, I left it out, even if it might have made the story stronger. For me, it was more important to stay with what I truly remembered. Sometimes that meant leaving gaps, and I was okay with that because it let me stay faithful to the story as I truly remembered it.
Rebecca: People sometimes assume that because I wrote a novel, I invented whatever I wanted. And of course, I did for certain parts. But so much of the book came from my life, and I wanted those parts to feel as authentic as possible. I avoided the fuzzier memories. I didn’t want to force memories that weren’t there. I didn’t want to make up details I couldn’t really see in my mind. I concentrated on the scenes I remembered, the rooms, the scenes, the colors, the feeling I had in those moments. Then I built the story around those truths.
Reading your memoir, Hamid, I could see your story vividly. It felt alive and real. I trusted you as the storyteller. Whether we’re writing memoir or fiction, readers can tell when a scene comes from a place of emotional truth.
Hamid: I agree. Readers know when something feels real.
Rebecca: That’s something that surprised me most about our conversation. I expected us to spend our time discussing the differences between a refugee memoir and a novel inspired by an immigrant’s childhood. Instead, we kept coming back to the same things: The balance between telling the truth without hurting the people we love. The struggle to honor our culture without leaning into the stereotypes. And the ways we hold fear as we write our authentic experiences, knowing that it could come with hard consequences.
That’s what writers, especially immigrant writers, struggle with, to write about ourselves, our families, our countries, knowing that the outcome can bring us both joy and pain. And that we have a responsibility to tell the truest story we can, and hope others might see themselves, or connect with another culture in a way that shows them a world they didn’t know before.
________
Rebecca Morrison is the author of The Blue Dress, a novel based on her childhood struggles with body image, a strained mother-daughter relationship, and finding belonging as an Iranian immigrant. You can find her at rebeccakmorrison.com.
Hamid Ran is a writer and visual storyteller whose work is shaped by lived experience across Iran and Türkiye. His memoir, Before the West: First Light on Unknown Lands, reflects his personal journey through uncertainty, displacement, and survival.
Yes, Writing Is for the “Faint of Heart”
July 9, 2026 § 17 Comments
By Ellen Notbohm
Posts declaring that “Being an author isn’t for the faint of heart” crossed my desk twice today, so it’s time to say something, to anyone who’s been subjected to that misguided sentiment.
I just did an internet search and got almost 500,000 hits for what “isn’t for the faint of heart”: parenting, marriage, teaching, aging, love, being beautiful, advocacy work, breastfeeding, history, healing, therapy, politics, pole dancing, farming, giant hamburgers, and yes, writing. And that’s only in the first hundred hits. Throw in cousin disses like “isn’t for the weak” and “isn’t for wimps/sissies/crybabies,” and the hits soar to well over a million.
That lets out quite a lot of the human experience, doesn’t it? It demands the question: What is for the so-called faint of heart? Who is this amorphous group, and what traits or lack thereof makes them so? If such people actually exist, shouldn’t we be extending a compassionate ear and helping hand rather than mocking them? As writers, we’re supposed to be observers and recorders of life around us and within us. Writing off large swaths of the human condition with unkind cliches doesn’t plumb to much depth.
The several online dictionaries I consulted agree on a definition of “faint of heart” as being timid, or lacking in courage or stamina. By this definition, I myself am “faint of heart” in more ways than I’d like to be. But not as many as I used to be.
No one ever told me that writing “isn’t for the faint of heart.” Instead, my mentors and editors told me that I should expect writing to be challenging, intense, maybe risky emotionally, but also liberating, exhilarating, mind-expanding, and just plain fun. There’s nothing “strong” about shoving aside those who want to write but haven’t had the benefit of good guidance, opportunities or just plain good fortune.
Building stamina, resilience, flexibility, broad perspective and humility in my writing and in all the areas of my life that contribute to my writing, has been a lifelong WIP. How exciting is that! I feel it incumbent on me to pay it forward. Writing is very much for the so-called faint of heart, with a little help from friends.
How “faint of heart” was I before I picked up that first pencil? Let me count the ways.
–What if I can’t finish what I start?
–What if I truly have no skill—and I don’t even know it?
–What if my work is never published?
–What if my work is published—and panned?
–Worse, what if no one cares what I have to say?
–What if my book/essay makes my family angry?
Is there a writer breathing today who didn’t start out with at least some of these fears?
It’s mandatory that we look inward and examine what we may blithely define as “faint of heart.” Still waters often run deep, and those whom we define as “faint” may in fact be possessors of profound knowledge and wisdom, survivors of stories untold because the stories are too painful to tell, or because the survivor believes no one cares. The Desiderata advises us to “listen to others, even the dull and the ignorant; they too have their story.” In that listening, we shouldn’t be surprised when “dull and ignorant” sometimes turns out to be contextual, not factual, and that “faint of heart” just might sometimes be our own failure of perspective.
I welcome cautious hearts to my writing circle because that’s what it is—a circle, each of us teacher and learner both. An aspiring writer without knowledge, experience, and support is a person who most needs the empathy and guidance of those who are farther down the road. To me, they are tomorrow’s potential advocates, change-bringers and thought-provokers. They’re an opportunity to help someone grow, explore, and discover, which furthers the same in me as a writer.
All variations of heart are welcome in my literary world because we all came from that initial moment when we had to decide if we were going to put our first word to the page. We’re writers today because we all had that moment of wondering who to turn to, who would understand what we wanted to say and why, who could point the way. Some of us, myself included, lean heavily on those who know more than we do. With their help, we rise to our calling. The courage to begin writing and the fortitude to stick with it grows from desire, determination, and butt-in-chair perseverance. Having these qualities inherently is enviable, but lack of them doesn’t mean they’re unattainable, nor that they’re the only requirements for being an author. We’re so often told as writers that we have to learn to handle rejection. So let’s start by rejecting meaningless labels like “faint of heart.”
To all you so-called faint hearts yearning to be storytellers, hear this: it’s not cowardly to be fearful. If everyone were born all-knowing and fearless, we’d miss out on the process of character-building, one of the most gratifying and expansive aspects of the human odyssey. We’d miss that freeing moment when we realize that being fearless isn’t the same as being courageous, that any fool can be fearless by simply avoiding the person in the mirror. It takes courage to confront one’s fears, and take them on. We heed Thoreau’s timeless advice: “What people say you cannot do, you try and find that you can.
___
Ellen Notbohm’s work touches millions in more than 25 languages. She is author of the nonfiction classic Ten Things Every Child with Autism Wishes You Knew, the acclaimed novel The River by Starlight, and short prose appearing literary journals and anthologies worldwide. Her books and short works have won more than 40 awards. Lean more on Ellen’s writing website or on her Facebook page at Ellen Notbohm, Author.
The Letter H and a List—How I Connected the Stories in My Memoir
July 8, 2026 § 21 Comments
By Wanda S. Duncan
My memoir was ten years in the making. I didn’t know I was writing a book when I started. My small hometown in Florida, that I happily escaped at eighteen, emerged with a deep pull on my middle-aged self, catching me off guard. The tug began in my senses. The balmy smell of a riverside town, moss-covered live oaks casting deep, cooling shade across ancient brick streets, the relaxed and easy speech of the locals. Things I did not appreciate when I was younger. On visits back, I began writing: the scenes, the people, the place of my home. Then two things happened, changing my life and the direction of my writing.
First, my mother was diagnosed with dementia. I traveled back and forth from my home five hundred miles away in North Carolina every four to six weeks to help with her care. On these visits, my exposure to my hometown deepened, and an entirely new subject area for my essays opened up—the complexities, frustrations, and heartbreak of caring for my mother as her mind slipped away.
Then my husband died unexpectedly, and I simply stopped writing. Staying with my mother became my grounding point, a place to let myself heal, to gain distance from what felt like a fishbowl existence of sudden widowhood back in North Carolina.
After my mother died, I began writing again. Friends were supportive to the point of insisting that everything I was writing, and had written, could come together as a memoir. There were stories about the town’s history, my ancestors, and anecdotes about living with a dementia patient. Then there were stories about the quirks of the town, the strange characters, the graveyards, the monster movie filmed there decades ago, even stories about paranormal activity— things about the town that whispered gothic. And finally, there was my personal grief journey through all of this.
Themes, chapter topics, outline notes, jotted on dozens of index cards, were often scattered across my kitchen table. I would shuffle them around like a blackjack dealer. How does this fit with that? What type of transition will it take to get from here to there? I struggled with how to, or whether to, incorporate them all into my memoir. I confessed to a writer friend that it was like having a bowl full of beautiful beads, but I couldn’t figure out how to string them together into a coherent story.
In addition to the challenge of trying to connect all the disparate stories, I had one problematic page of notes that I could not wrangle into a satisfying form. It started as a Google search for a Latin word origin, and before I knew it, I went down a rabbit hole that led me to constellations, latitude lines, bizarre supernatural stories, and ultimately back to my hometown. All I had was a chronological list of websites and a few notes I had taken, but it seemed important.
At the same time, I had resumed my graduate studies, and in one of my courses we read To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. My daughter, also having read it in a college course, pointed out that the book’s narrative arc is shaped like the capital letter H, with a center point that transitions to the second “book” of the novel. She wondered if Woolf’s “H structure” could help me.
I returned to my index cards. I grouped the history and family stories together to form the first half of my book. That left essays about the mysterious and gothic aspects of the town and the more introspective and personal pieces for the second half. In between these two sections, I placed the problem child, the list, as a stand-alone chapter. Miraculously, it worked. The list became a stream of consciousness, drawing the reader, step by step, from the stability of stories about my town and family, into the weirdness, the gothic space, and ultimately to a place of healing. It was the transition I needed into the second half of the book. Once I had the book set up with two separate themes and a bridge, I was better able to position the essays within each section. My publisher balked when I described my bullet point list as a chapter, but when he saw it in the full context, he agreed it was perfect.
Using the list and the H-structure cleared my logjam. What had been a collection of mostly unrelated essays finally came together in a way that I felt would make sense to readers. A year after my book was published, I read As I Lay Dying by Faulkner, and I literally squealed out loud when I saw it—one of Faulkner’s chapters is a list. Pay attention, whether you are interacting with the people in your life who are readers and writers, or reading your favorite literary works. Maybe a comment will spark an idea, maybe you will notice a construct or device in a novel that might work in your memoir. You might discover a surprisingly perfect solution for stringing your beads together.
__________
Wanda Suttle Duncan is the author of Cracker Gothic: A Florida Woman’s Memoir published in 2019 by Library Partners Press. She has an MA in Liberal Studies from Wake Forest University. Her nonfiction writing has appeared in Our State Magazine, Early American Music Magazine, and other regional and special interest publications. Wanda lives in Hillsborough, North Carolina.
How a Birthday Book Barn-Raising Helped Me Finish My Memoir
July 7, 2026 § 19 Comments
By Tamiko Nimura
A speech from Deb Haaland as Interior Secretary. A poem by Wendell Berry. A passage from Audre Lorde. A goal-setting workbook. I wasn’t sure how all of these elements— part of an online birthday party —were going to help me finish my book after a decade of effort, but they did.
During the 2020 lockdown, I turned 48 and I was missing my family and friends. My friend Julie had just held a wonderful virtual international birthday gathering, complete with breakout groups, a Padlet for creating group collages, individual messages, and a guest facilitator, and that sparked an idea.
Julie shared with me that part of her inspiration was a book by Priya Parker called The Art of Gathering. I checked out the book from the library—by then, my library had resumed circulation with no-contact holds and pickups—and started reading. In a time when gathering had become its own creative art, it was inspiring and even comforting to read a book about “how we meet and why it matters.”
As writers we often say that our work is a solitary activity. And as a closet introvert, I often need longer times of drinking in the silence, needing only the voice (or voices) in my head to develop on the page. But I had been writing a memoir off and on for over a decade. I had not found an agent yet, much less a publisher. I had enrolled in a yearlong memoir writing incubator, found the lessons and accountability helpful, and had identified one of my themes as the importance of grieving and healing in community. My book challenged me to walk the talk: what about the role of community in my own writing process?
So I decided, with some trepidation, to hold my own virtual birthday party. The purpose of gatherings should not be self-evident, but contestable, Parker instructs. Not every gathering is for every person. I called it a “Birthday Book Barn-Raising.” Barn raisings are meant to make a larger task smaller by the shared work of many hands. And while I was not asking my friends and family to write the book for me, I wanted to remind myself of who I was writing the book for.
I asked my guests to bring as their “gift” something that they thought might help me finish the book. It could be words of their own, it could be a song, it could be a passage or excerpt, it could be something they found inspiring. I asked one of my friends to host the gathering—I only had the free 30-minute version of the software—and we waited for the black boxes to appear and multiply onscreen.
I loved listening to my friends and family. They read poems chosen for me. They offered passages from writers that offered them strength. They cheered, encouraged, even sang. They told me about resources that helped them through difficult times.
Of course, the gathering was not perfect. I did not follow one of Parker’s instructions about hosting and did not keep strict time limits on what people were offering. This undoubtedly led to some minor frustration on the part of some of my guests, particularly as the gathering wore on well past an hour. I would have someone else keep time for me if I ever did it again.
Across time zones and geographies, across the circles of my life, the book barn-raising was delightful and even life-giving for me. It reminded me that though I was writing alone, I was not creating in a vacuum, either. But what I gained from the party was extraordinary. I felt buoyed and connected to this community of readers, some of whom I’d only known for a few months, some of them old and dear friends. I loved the variety of what people “brought” to the party, and it reminded me of the rich ecosystem of interests and connections that I was writing in and that I was writing for.
My book, A Place For What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake, has kept urging me beyond my introvert comfort zone. I completed it, found agents and a publisher for it, and am touring with it now. As I work on book events and gatherings, I am delighted by the communities of interests that have risen up to meet the book at each event. My book continues to remind me of how powerful and crucial community is to my creative process. It is still teaching me how to write in community and how to write for community. And I am a better writer—and more importantly, a better person—for it.
____
Tamiko Nimura is a creative nonfiction writer, community historian, and author of A Place For What We Lose: A Daughter’s Return to Tule Lake (University of Washington Press, 2026). Her work appears in Literary Hub, Electric Literature, Smithsonian Magazine, Discover Nikkei, Seattle’s International Examiner, and the San Francisco Chronicle. Find her on Instagram @tamikonimura.
The Rebound: What a Week in Maine Taught Me About Writing in Company
July 6, 2026 § 20 Comments
By Allison K Williams
Last week I taught a weeklong workshop for Maine Media in Rockport, Maine. Fog rolled off the harbor every morning and burned away by ten, and every morning, eight writers showed up ready to be honest about their pages. By Friday, I’d watched eight transformations.
Two memoirists switched their first-person material to third-person fiction, and their stories transformed from well-written journal entries into powerful, evocative scenes. Three writers navigated form—vignettes, prose braided with poetry, fact shading into fiction—looking for the shape that best held their stories and their messages. Two novelists discovered they’re funny (to everyone’s delight). A mystery short story evolved into a dark satire of academia, now headed for novel length. A rough draft examining 1970s feminism as a reaction to financial hardship is shaping into a rollicking comic novel nobody, including its author, saw coming. A fine art photographer line-edited the essays that accompany her newest work with the same intuitive precision she edits her photos, rearranging paragraphs as if staging a visual scene; cropping sentences as she’d crop a frame.
I taught well, yes. But none of this happened because I handed anyone a formula. It happened because eight people sat in a room together and told each other the truth about what was working.
Self-reflection is necessary. It is also not enough. We can interrogate our own drafts for hours—is this scene doing what I think it’s doing? is this structure holding? is this joke actually a joke?—and still not know, because you’re the only witness. You wrote it. You already believe it. Revising in community gives a second set of eyes that hasn’t been marinating in our intentions, and that’s worth more than another solo read-through ever can be.
One value of this community is confirmation.
Yes, your story is working.
Yes, your idea is coming through, even the tricky part you weren’t sure landed.
Yes, your concept is solid enough to carry a whole book.
Yes, it’s time to explore structure as a frame for the beauty of your short pieces, instead of wondering if they’ll ever add up to anything.
Confirmation from someone who isn’t you, and isn’t obligated to be kind, is a different animal than confidence. It’s evidence.
But the negative confirmations are just as valuable, maybe more.
No, this material isn’t distant enough yet to write as memoir—start with fiction, and give yourself the room fiction allows.
No, you don’t need to explain the idea behind your story; readers are already getting it, clearly, from the scenes themselves.
Nobody wants to hear their draft isn’t there yet. But hearing it now, from a room that’s rooting for you, with time to try again tomorrow with fresh pages, costs less of our writer hearts than hearing it later, from an agent’s form rejection or a reader who quietly stops reading.
Teaching pushes me the same way. Student questions force me to develop ideas I’d otherwise leave nebulous—including, this week, finally figuring out exactly how to apply that beast, Spiral Structure, to a student’s fragmented essay collection in real time, watching it click for her as I explained it. (My own writing group, with their usual cheer, immediately informed me that “spiral” is a misleading name for the shape and could I please rename it. Under advisement.) I don’t develop my best thinking alone at my desk. I develop it in the room, getting pushed by people who need the answer to actually work.
You can write in community with, or without, that reflective element, and both are real. Free weekday co-writing sessions and marathon weekends (open to all Blog readers!)—are just showing up and working alongside other people, no feedback required. That body doubling has value, too: another person’s presence, even silent, even on a screen, keeps you at the desk when you’d otherwise wander off to reorganize a closet. But there’s also value in forming a group, joining a live or virtual retreat, or simply handing your half-formed idea to a non-writing friend who’s willing to just listen and say, Wait, tell me more about that part.
Writing doesn’t all happen inside our heads. We also need the rebound—the moment our ideas and our practice are reflected back to us by somebody else, so we can see what we actually made.
By the end of the week in Rockport, nobody’s manuscript was finished. That was never the point. What each of them left with was sharper: a clear sense of the shape their book wants; permission to be funny; confirmation that the risky thing they tried on page 42 was, in fact, the best thing in the draft. They got that by sharing work in progress, in a room with other people who were paying close, generous attention.
Go find your room.
________
Allison K Williams is Managing Editor of The Brevity Blog and the author of Seven Drafts. Find your room—and your rebound—at an upcoming retreat or intensive.
Join Allison and Tiffany Yates Martin in France for Sentence, Scene and Story, August 1-8 ($1035 plus lodging and meals from $1800).
Join Allison & Dinty W. Moore online July 10-11-12 for the Midsummer Memoir virtual intensive ($445, use code BREVITYBLOG for $50 off).
