We Shall Know Them By Their Words: Writing Characters through Dialogue
June 10, 2026 § 6 Comments
By Margaret Mandell
“Well, aren’t you all dressed up like a Christmas prick?” I exclaim each morning when my professor husband emerges from the bedroom all spiffy in his tailored suit and blue-and-gold tie (off to the college to sleuth out another undergraduate’s moribund attempt to hand in a paper written by ChatGPT).
Christmas prick? Words of my grandmother, long gone but immortalized every time I quote her. Taunting, teasing, taking my full-of-himself grandfather down a notch, hands on her hips, lips in a snarl, twinkle in her eye because of course she adored him. No need to say any of that; it’s in her words.
In memoir we can immortalize, honor, and caress loved ones lost; we can taunt, tease, and flirt with loved ones still present, all through their words, not ours. To write dialogue is an act of love for the characters on the page, because it proves we’ve been observing, remembering, validating, and foregrounding their words. It’s a form of sparse truth-telling, trusting the reader to enter the nuance of the story through voice, tone, and even the irony of talk.
*
I never knew my mother-in-law. She died two years before I met her son. Turns out he fell in love with me because I reminded him of her. He was seventy-five but I’ve always believed that marriages are made in the nursery.
This woman I never met: I know her fierce passion, telling her best friend with terminal cancer she hated that she was dying, a love cloaked in rage; telling her son as her own end drew near that she loved being his mother—all he ever needed to hear, all any child needs to hear. All I needed to hear to know her.
*
We shall know them by their words. We shall render our characters on the page by what they say. We render voice unmediated by commentary and more than that, we render tone. Scene and setting may not be necessary if the dialogue is pitch perfect, when he said, she said simply flows. Whispered words, intimate words, tender words, yelling words. We hear it in the dialogue without being told.
I learned how to do this for my own debut memoir by playing around with dialogue as if writing a play. Hearing my characters in my head, I summoned their words to speak for them.
About-to-die doctor husband, who has just diagnosed his own terminal illness, remembers that fateful day in medical school:
“Today our teacher told us all we needed to know. Listen to the patient—nine times out of ten, you’ve got the diagnosis right there.”
Without saying more, it is suggested that 1) this physician would spend his entire career listening to his patients, and 2) this physician will courageously face his own death.
Another confirmatory quote, from the doctor’s own son in the ICU moments after his father’s EKG monitor flatlined:
“Dad looked death right in the eye.”
It is understood that what has passed between father and son will sustain this young man for the rest of his life. His mother, too.
One year later, his mother (the narrator) has her own brush with death and is saved by emergency abdominal surgery. Mother marvels to her son about the miracle of medicine, and the son, a scientist himself following in his father’s footsteps, says simply:
“We all stand on the shoulders of giants.”
*
There is inherent dialogue in the epistolary form, memoir in letters. In my case it was a conversation, imagined and remembered, between me and my now-deceased physician husband, in which I quote him back to himself and venture a confession that will propel the story forward:
Dying, you said I would find someone else.
I said never.
Today, my third Valentine’s Day alone, I took that first step, testing the waters of online dating. “Silver Singles.” A guy named John. Professor. Age seventy-five. From Princeton.
But I never got to kiss you good-bye.
Enter John. I quote him from his Silver Singles profile:
What makes me laugh? Life’s inevitable humiliations.
My perfect day? Sunday morning on my deck with The New York Times, eating avocado toast.
Two years and dozens of avocado toast breakfasts later, he moves in with me during Covid lockdown. The memoir in letters takes a turn: I write a letter to John, rendering him on the page by quoting him back to himself through our teasing, tentative, insider banter:
“I’m very suspicious of your cheshire cat grin,” you said.
“I’m feeling semi-scathed,” you said.
“I didn’t know we’ve gotten into the chelation stage of our relationship,” you said.
“Why are you looking at me in that tone of voice?” you said.
We shall know him by his words. By the end of the memoir, and because of the memoir, this new husband exclaims:
“I have never felt so seen.”
*
Dialogue is the ultimate love letter. To the mother-in-law I never met. To the grandmother I cannot forget. To the son who achingly misses his father. To the prince of a man who always listened to his patients. To the man who loved me back to life.
________
Margaret Mandell earned her BA, MA, and ABD in History at the University of Pennsylvania. Ten years ago, she became a widow. Her debut memoir, And Always One More Time, tells the story of her next act and new, sustaining love. Her writing has appeared in The Metaworker Literary Magazine, Brevity Blog, Proseterity, NextTribe, Oldster Magazine, and the Daring to Tell podcasts. A believer in the authentic voice of the memoirist, she has narrated her book on Audible.
Stopping for the Unfinished
June 9, 2026 § 12 Comments
by Mike Singleton
I don’t stop to write. I stop because I want to hear what someone sounds like when the performance stops. That’s it. Full stop. I can hear people talking right now and I want to hear it. Most of the time there’s no story in the way people think of stories. No arc. No reveal. No lesson waiting at the end like a fortune folded into the paper. It’s usually just a man leaning on something. A woman mid-sentence. Someone doing a job they didn’t expect to be doing at this point in their life. If you leave them alone long enough, they’ll talk. Not about everything. Not even about the important parts, at least not directly. People don’t carry their reasons around in neat sentences. They circle them. They brush up against them. They mention something sideways and then move on. You can miss it if you’re listening for answers. I used to think I was trying to figure out the why of things. That if I just asked the right question, stayed long enough, I’d get to something clean and final. It doesn’t work that way. Most people don’t know their why in a way they can say out loud. Or if they do, it changes depending on the day. What they do have is a way of being. You hear it in what they don’t argue with anymore. In what they say without emphasis. In the places they don’t go back to. That’s the part I’m listening for now. The work, if there is work, is simple. Don’t interrupt. Don’t improve it. Don’t turn them into something they’re not so the piece feels more complete. You’re not finishing their story. You’re catching them in the middle of it. Like a snapshot. That used to bother me. The incompleteness of it. The sense that I was leaving something out. Now I think that’s the point. You don’t meet people at the end of their lives. You meet them wherever they happen to be that day. Mid-decision. Mid-regret. Mid-acceptance. Mid-something they haven’t named yet. Every now and then, standing there, listening to someone talk about something small, work, family, money, weather, you realize you’re hearing something else underneath it. Not a message. Not a lesson. Just a shape that feels familiar. That’s when it lands. Not in a big way. Not in a way you could explain to someone else without ruining it. Just a quiet recognition. I’ve heard this before. Or maybe more accurately: I’ve felt this before. That’s the part I’m after. Not to solve it. Not to prove anything. Just to know it exists outside my own head. That in the collection of conversations I’ve had, truck stops, parking lots, side yards, places where nobody’s trying to be anything in particular, there are other people moving through the same kind of unfinished space. And if that’s true, then maybe none of us are as alone in it as it feels. That’s enough for me to stop. And enough to write it down before it disappears.
________
Mike Singleton drove an eighteen-wheeler across forty-eight states. Before that, he was in special operations missions in the Air Force and IT for 30 years. He writes about the road, the people on it, and what both of them cost. His work has appeared in Overdrive magazine and Brevity.
My Faith in Lit Mags—Restored
June 8, 2026 § 28 Comments
I Had an Offer with a Glossy, or Did I?
By Regina Landor
My heart flipped over when I saw the email. My highly personal and sensitive piece of writing had been accepted by a new, glossy lit mag with a pop culture vibe. I squeezed together the visuals of super-model glamour next to a piece about my son’s mental health challenges. A bit jarring. But hey, I can make that work!
The editor wrote that she would “definitely love to publish something on this topic” for her magazine. Wait. Something on this topic? Did she mean she would love to publish my piece? Or a piece “on this topic”? I read on. The trouble, she explained, is that it’s too long. Might I shorten it? She’d be happy to give me suggestions on what to edit.
Yes! A working relationship with an editor! I was in, and I replied to let her know I’d be open to her suggestions.
A week passed. Nothing. Then a follow-up email on my part letting her know, again, that I’d love to hear her ideas. Nothing.
A month passed. To hell with it. Why am I waiting for her to send me her editing suggestions? I can edit. I lopped off a thousand words and sent her the revised version.
Three weeks later and her deepest apologies, a confirmation of receipt, and her word that she’d get back to me shortly.
Six weeks later, she got back to me. She loved the piece, and what I’d done with it. We could “certainly offer you a May/June slot.”
It certainly sounded like an offer. (The “May/June” bit sounded less certain. Was the issue published in May? Or June?) The trouble, she elaborated, was the ending.
A week prior, a new ending unfolded before my eyes, as real life does. I said I’d take the offer. I wrote the new ending. What did she think?
Silence.
How about this ending? It’s very similar, I said in an email, but with an important added detail. Any suggestions?
Not a word.
I began telling people anyway that I had an offer. I had an offer! I mean, those were her words. “We could certainly offer you….” But I winced when I too easily imagined the flip side of that offer. We certainly intended to publish your work . . . I told myself I was making stuff up. That hadn’t happened! The editors have impressive credentials!
I considered withdrawing all of my simultaneous submissions.
As the weeks pushed further away from our last email exchange without a word from the editor, I wondered if the home I’d found for my highly personal and sensitive piece was a safe home. Or was my piece at risk of being dumped down the black hole of a garbage chute? I didn’t know. The editor of the magazine was not a communicator.
“Great news,” the email began, from the editor of an excellent literary magazine in Canada. “We’d love to publish your work!” I read on. So it’s true, I thought. Canadians really are friendly.
This got me wondering: Do I owe anything to an editor of a magazine who doesn’t respond to my emails?
I said to a fellow writer, I don’t want to be dishonest or jerk people around. What should I do? She said she thinks we both know who is jerking whom around here.
I consulted my brother. Withdraw from Glossy, he advised. But not yet. Are Canada’s communication skills any better? (Is maple syrup sticky?)
I decided I don’t owe a non-responsive editor anything, especially if it’s something I treasure. Then I told Canada I would accept their offer. I’ve made some revisions, I explained. Was she OK with the new ending? Plus, I’d like to change my title. Did she have any title suggestions? I attached the revised version.
She responded bright and early first thing in the morning like we were heading out to a fishing pond in the Canadian backwaters and she couldn’t wait to get started. She loved the new ending, she was thrilled to publish the piece, she offered several title suggestions, along with a form to fill out with boxes to check, and that all-important bit of assurance—a publication date.
I wrote a couple of sentences to the editor of the first mag to let her know I was going in a different direction, and thanked her for the offer all the same. She replied immediately! She asked to let her know if anything changes, and she wasn’t unkind.
My essays—these are my babies I’m talking about here. I believe that the first mag would probably have published my piece, but the difference between the two was the difference between finding an inviting, warm space for it to settle versus sending it out into the wilderness without shoes or a jacket.
I’m sure the editor of the first mag did not intend disrespect. Maybe her job is a volunteer one. Or she’s overwhelmed and gets too many submissions. Or whatever. I don’t expect to hear back from every literary magazine I submit to.
But if I do hear back, if they tell me they like a piece and want to use it, then we now have a working relationship. Silence, long breaks between emails, and unresponsiveness lessens the credibility of the editor, and my trust.
I figured out my title. I decided to call it On the Brink, because as I said to the Canadian editor, this piece has many brinks—mania, health, and a surprising one at the end.
My northern neighbor rolled out the welcome mat.
_____
Regina Landor is an alum of The Kenyon Review Writers Workshop. Her essays have appeared in Salon, Black Fork Review, The Foreign Service Journal, The Rappahannock Review, Heimat Review, and an essay is forthcoming in Common Ground Review. She and her husband served with USAID for 17 years and raised their two sons in the U.S., Serbia, Bangladesh, and Ethiopia.
Writing Amidst “All This”: Making Mental Space
June 5, 2026 § 26 Comments
By Allison K Williams
We all want more time to write. To explore on the page, to revise, to finish. Another writer tells me, “All I want to do is have other things go away so I can focus on my essay, and day after day, something comes up.”
Our jobs and professional commitments.
Laundry, pets, home repair.
Family, health issues and caregiving.
Political turmoil, national unrest, active war(s) and Major Cultural Issues.
Each thing so important, so critical to our personal sustenance, to those we love, to the communities we’re part of and the the world we live in, that it feels irresponsible to not pay attention, right this minute.
Taking time for art, for craft, when we should be mobilizing fellow voters or making supportive posters or even just separating the recycling (is it Glass Day or Mixed Cardboard?) can feel petty, self-centered, even futile, especially when public validation for our work is fleeting and irregular.
And yet, our writing matters.
It matters that we choose to construct our feelings, and our characters’ feelings, carefully on the page. It matters that we seek readers and ask them to join us in the journey, to see the end of the tunnel with us, to engage their own feelings as they reflect on our stories.
By making art in the face of chaos and uncertainty, we’re saying, art still matters. And we’re helping sustain a world where art does still matter. We’re defining what that world should look like.
One major issue of our time is a disagreement on the nature of reality. Politicians claim multiple truths, and their respective media back them up, while we-the-audience are baffled at how those others can’t see what’s right in front of them. It can feel like a losing battle to assert our truth, to fight for the world we want to live in. But you may have noticed, some people are choosing to live in the world as they wish it to be. Our best defense is to live in the world as we, too, wish it to be.
Acting as if.
On the personal level, acting as if of course my family will respect my writing time, the kids will entertain themselves, my partner will handle dinner, I have a right to create, and my reality includes that time. On the professional level, acting as if of course my workday stops at the time my payment stops, and I am a better contributor when I am rested and ready. And while we have less power to create reality at a national level, or in the political arena, there is value in influencing our neighbors and our communities by demonstrating what reality should look like. Our national mindset is as important as the laws and actions it supports, and each individual assertion of a better mindset is a pebble in the pond, small, yet rippling.
Think of it as a social algorithm, in real life. When I stopped arguing on Facebook, I stopped seeing so many things that made me angry. Partly a mindset shift; partly Facebook noticing what content I did interact with and delivering more of that. Now, I live in a town small enough that I cannot be rude or short or peremptory with anyone, regardless of my mood, because everyone is everyone else’s cousin and I’d like my building permits approved in a timely fashion. Deliberately, consciously adjusting my mindset to “Everyone I meet is nice and I will be nice to them” makes my days better in reality—we’re all rising to the level we’ve set for each other. My town still has racial and political division, my home country is apparently a clown car on fire, the world is at war; I can still smile at strangers, helping both of us live in a world where people are pleasant to each other.
I’m still regularly calling my Congresspeople. I’m still voting, and donating actions and money to causes I believe in. But I’ve budgeted time and space for both my effort and my caring. I value taking one small step over agonizing that I can’t shift everyone else’s reality. I value writing more than I value worrying. And when “Call Congresspeople” is ticked off on the list, I actively stop caring until the next time to call. I focus on my work.
Next week I’m taking a personal writing retreat, with a book I’d like to finish. I’m walking away from my home mid-renovation, trusting my partner will watch over the process. And I’m refusing to feel guilty about it, because the best way to honor my partner’s commitment and self-sacrifice is to make that time count.
Things don’t go away. We have to go away from things.
Maybe you can’t take a week to finish a book. Maybe you can take an hour. Maybe you can write one page, or revise one essay or one scene. And in that time, go into the reality of the world that supports you making art, the world where your words matter, and where your community is people who support your writing and your ideas. Actively let go of “all this” happening around you. Trust that the things you need to change will still be there when you’re done. Trust you’ll be closer to living in a better world, from helping to create it.
________
Allison K Williams is Managing Editor of The Brevity Blog and the author of Seven Drafts. Go away from things with her–and literary agents, best-selling authors and fellow writers–on the Craft and Publishing Voyage this September. Find out more…
Who Am I, You Ask?
June 4, 2026 § 12 Comments
How to create a “Person on the Page” when that person is you
By Dinty W. Moore
I’ve been teaching memoir since dinosaurs roamed the planet (maybe an exaggeration) and one consistent challenge I see writers struggle with is how to make the “I” on the page a living, breathing, fully rounded character.
That last part is no exaggeration. Bringing “I” to life is difficult for all of us, and even more difficult is making that “I” someone the reader will want to spend time with, over ten or, my goodness, 250 pages.
Phillip Lopate points out that writers imagine the ‘I’ we type onto the page “is swarming with background and a lush, sticky past…” We imagine this because in our own brains—naturally—our pasts, our personalities, our attributes, are all vivid.
Instead, Lopate points out, what readers actually see in the letter ‘I’ is “a slender telephone pole standing in the sentence, trying to catch a few signals to send on.”
“I”
I know, I know. In my own early drafts, it is so maddeningly hard to escape my own mindset, one in which I know myself so perfectly, in which the mere thought of myself evokes a complex, swirling, tumbling wealth of memories and associations.
What is needed, however, is to enter the mindset of the reader, someone who knows virtually nothing about me. To that anonymous reader, I am just some stranger in a Starbucks who wanders up to their table and begins explaining his positive traits, unjust obstacles, and charming little idiosyncrasies.
The natural reaction to the fellow in the coffee shop is to think, “Sure buddy, I’ll believe it when I see it.”
Readers are no different.
We can’t just wander up to their table at Starbucks in the first pages of our book and tell readers who we are, expecting them to believe us. Why should a reader believe you, of all people?
Show them. Show actions, moments, scenes. Let us see you navigate the world of your past, or present, or maybe even a Starbucks, and let us form our own impressions, judge for ourselves.
Imagine if the word ”I” on the page of your memoir was “swarming with background and a lush, sticky past…” for the reader, just as vivid and rounded as it is for you.
Imagine that, and then get to work making it happen.
_____
Dinty W. Moore has been teaching memoir writing since dinosaurs roamed the planet (maybe he is still exaggerating a bit.) But he has been teaching a long time, is founder of Brevity and The Brevity Blog, and is author of the memoirs Between Panic & Desire and To Hell With It, and the writing guide Crafting the Personal Essay.
____
Looking for tips on how to bring the “I” alive on the page, how to create the “lush, sticky past”? Join Allison K Williams and Dinty W. Moore in July for Midsummer Memoir, three days of craft, live community, and guided revision. The virtual intensive includes sessions on backstory, dialogue, the “I’ character, writing what you aren’t certain about, and key scenes for your memoir. Find out more/register now
Doing the Heavy Lifting: Writing Between Repetitions
June 3, 2026 § 9 Comments
By Carlin Steere
One Saturday in November, two months into my MFA program, I decided to carve an hour and a half out of my Saturday schedule to really hit the gym — to do more than the 30-minute quadriceps session or back workout that I’d been squeezing into my busy school schedule.
This meant I would spend less time at my desk working on the manuscript of personal essays on memory and early adulthood that had me in a state of writer’s block that month, which meant fewer words would grace the blank document I had open on my computer. I believed this meant I was falling behind.
Less than enthused to use the sparsely furnished apartment gym and anxious about not meeting my writing goals for the day, I headed from the front door of my shared apartment to the clubhouse.
Once inside, I pulled the convertible bench into a chair form before wrapping my hands around the handles of two dumbbells as I prepared for my bicep curls.
After completing three sets of 20, with added recovery time, I grew agitated thinking about the time I’d spent away from my writing. I wanted my mind to be working as hard as my biceps.
Still mentally stuck on how to move an essay about an old boyfriend forward and nervous that I’d have nothing to write about when I sat down for my regularly-scheduled writing time later that day, I pulled out a small notebook I keep in my gym bag and jotted down the thoughts related to the essay that were troubling me.
The first few lines were more akin to a madwoman’s ramblings than a well-crafted outline of an essay about a man who’d told me, “When I see you, I’m reminded of a time when I hated myself.” Ouch.
I wrote: Lewis’ hippocampus is perfectly healthy. Perfectly intact.
These bursts of writings weren’t perfect, but writing whatever came to mind as soon as I put down the dumbbell allowed me to think more about developing Lewis as a person and not merely a character in my own narrative of personal growth. Rather than villainizing him, I was able to ruminate during my repetitions on why my boyfriend might say such a thing.
I kept at it, writing during my resting time between lifts — fleshing out different themes for my braided essay about Lewis and my thoughts on how I, in hindsight, didn’t want to blame him for associating me with his lowest moments.
After several brief resting periods, I’d written the following, free-association comments related to my thoughts about Lewis and our relationship:
Making another a monster, scientists erasing the memories of snails, and Doctor Who. These were ideas I’d shelve to jog my memory during my scheduled sit-down writing practice, when I’d have more time to develop the ideas and give them space on the page.
I was pulling myself out of my writing rut.
At the end of my workout, I expected to feel mentally and physically exhausted, but instead, I felt productive — more productive than I’d felt during my writer’s block-inhibited two-hour writing sessions with caffeine as my helper.
During this workout, I felt in tune with both my writing self and my exercising self — my sedentary writing life engaging with my muscle-building, active side. After just one gym session, I decided to make writing a part of my workout routine. Not only was I able to spend time maintaining the muscle I’d spent years working hard to build, but I was also creating an alternative writing space for myself.
From then on, during lifting sessions, each time I added more weight, I increased the number of sentences I wrote between sets. Each time I added an extra five calf raises, I wrote a couple more sentences than before.
In my next gym-and-writing session, I realized that with endorphins released, I was drawn to my reactive emotions, specifically anger, in my essay about Lewis. I wrote the following:
I wanted to feel angry, so I let myself feel it, if only for a moment. How dare he use me as a physical manifestation of his self-disgust!
I realized that the rush of hormones from my exercises made it easier for me to embody the emotions I felt in my past. The high of my bicep curls, shoulder presses, and later chest presses allowed me to connect on a deeper level to the emotional rush I felt during the moment I wished to write about.
Transitioning to my routine writing practice grew easier after accomplishing my physical and in-the-gym writing goals. When sitting down to write more about Lewis, I didn’t twiddle my fingers deciding which part of my essay I’d write next, as I had already thought about it during my workout.
Rather than fearing the blank page, I grew to love this practice of working with my body and keeping my mind active so as to better support my sit-down writing sessions later. Now, I don’t sacrifice exercising for writing, nor writing for exercising.
___________
Carlin Steere is an essayist, editor, and educator. She divides her time between the Connecticut and Tampa shorelines, where she is a Nonfiction MFA Candidate at the University of South Florida. Her work appears in Sweet: A Literary Confection, Burningword Literary Journal, and Yale News, among other publications. Find Carlin on Instagram, Facebook and Bluesky.
So You Got Scooped: The Advantages of Being a Book Twin
June 2, 2026 § 25 Comments
By Andromeda Romano-Lax
Many years ago, I attended a prestigious writing workshop taught by one of my idols. He was a great writer and a good teacher, yet he knew little about publishing and even less about marketing. To a woman writing a cancer memoir, he advised her to give up on her book, because there’d already been a bestselling cancer memoir published recently. She’d missed her chance, he told her. The woman left the workshop in tears.
I think of that woman every time I read a review of the latest inspirational cancer memoir. Which means I’ve thought of her—and the well-meaning teacher who gave her bad advice—at least a hundred times.
But even though I know there’s room for more than one book per topic, I still worried when my own idea got scooped.
My suspense novel, What Boys Learn, about a mother concerned her teen son has been involved in two local murders, confronts the issue of the online manosphere and other negative influences on boys. I got the jitters when the Netflix series, Adolescence, about a boy accused of knifing a classmate, came out in March 2025, only months ahead of my release. People might think I copied the idea. The whole topic might be played out!
Fast-forward to Spring 2026. Louis Theroux’s BBC documentary, Manosphere, was a hit, garnering tons of attention whether or not Theroux said anything “new.” In September, Jon Ronson’s newest nonfiction will be The Castle: Adventures in a World of Unraveling Men. Yet another take I can’t wait to read.
Whatever you’re writing about, chances are others are writing about it, too. But the market does not close after a certain memoir or novel category is filled.
Cheryl Strayed’s Wild (2012), about healing by going on a long walk, didn’t close the door for Raynor Winn’s The Salt Path (2018), a memoir about healing by going on a long walk. (Nor did multiple exposés about the latter memoir’s deceptions prove problematic for Winn’s follow-up sales—but that’s another story.)
Perhaps because memoir is constrained by the limits of fact (one hopes), and therefore addresses a fairly finite category of “plots,” it is even more rife with book twins and even octuplets. Pick any memoir category, from “late life neurodivergent awakening” to “sudden midlife marriage collapse” to “remote homeschooler finds success after growing up” and you’ll find many titles.
Furthermore: there are no original premises.
Most good ideas, writes David Epstein, author of Inside the Box: How Constraints Make Us Better, are multiple births. Whether it’s abstraction in visual art, atonality in music, or stream-of-consciousness in fiction (Virginia Woolf, meet James Joyce), innovation arises in multiple places, often nearly simultaneously.
This doesn’t mean that authors with similar ideas won’t have a problem getting published, if the topic is extremely common (and yes, illness memoirs by non-celebrities are hard to sell) or the reverse—so unusual and specific, it’s hard to repeat without readers noticing.
A few years ago, I stumbled upon a seldom-known facet of an extremely famous person’s life story and decided it would make a great historical novel. A few months later, a novel that superficially resembled the one I’d hoped to write was published; although thankfully, the voice, angle, and scope were different from what I planned. (Phew!) I’d already pitched my novel idea to my enthusiastic publisher. She wasn’t worried about the overlap, in part because my take was different, but also because she understood that I was just beginning my research. My book couldn’t possibly come out for at least five more years.
Think back to Wild and The Salt Path. They were published six years apart.
Or five widow memoirs: Memorial Days by Geraldine Brooks (2025), Widowish by Melissa Gould (2021), The Light of the World by poet by Elizabeth Alexander (2015), A Widow’s Story by Joyce Carol Oates (2011), and The Year of Magical Thinking by Joan Didion (2005). All five books sold extremely well. Note the spacing: they were published four, six, four, and six years apart.
If you’re feeling recently scooped, consider how the book twin phenomenon can help you:
If you’re still writing, a “got-to-the-market-first” lookalike can motivate you to ensure your angle, structure, or genre approach is sufficiently distinct. (And watching that author’s promotional efforts can help you plan yours for the future.)
If you’re querying, a recent title in your topic area becomes a comp—all the better if it’s a good-seller, but not this week’s runaway bestseller, which others may be overusing.
If you’ve just published, that recent hottie becomes the book or TV show you can mention in your interviews: My novel opens like Adolescence, with a boy accused of a crime, but the protagonist is a single American mother and a midbook twist changes the whole story.
Lookalikes are not to be feared. People who enjoyed one type of book are more inclined to seek another on the same subject, with a new angle. Publishers see that people like a certain formula or subject and take a risk on repeating it.
As Allison K Williams wrote at this blog five years ago, “A truly one-of-a-kind story might not even resonate with readers, because part of the value of memoir is seeing ourselves in someone else’s world.”
My post is a twin of Allison’s, it turns out. And isn’t that sort of perfect?
________
Andromeda Romano-Lax is a book coach and the author of the mystery novel, What Boys Learn, a Kindle Daily Deal on sale today, plus six other novels. Subscribe to her Substack for free.
Record First, Write Later
June 1, 2026 § 11 Comments
By Katie Rose Pryal
When my younger son, now fourteen, was in Kindergarten, I was called in to meet with his teacher to discuss his bad behavior. Luckily, my husband could come too, because I was so overwhelmed—traumatized—by the meeting that I couldn’t speak.
While my husband did the pro forma nodding and smiling, I pulled out my notebook and transcribed. Like a court reporter, I wrote down everything that the teacher said about my kid.
At the time, I didn’t know that this teacher struggled with kids who didn’t march to her rigid tune. Instead, as a neurodivergent mom of a neurodivergent kid, all I could hear were the terrible words she used to describe my child.
I put her words down on paper. All of them. I scribbled as fast as I could, knowing I would eventually need to process this input and figure out what to do with it. But I couldn’t process it at the time.
I was making a record. It was the only way I could cope with what was happening.
That day, I learned that it is not always a good time to write about something hard. Later, we might wish to write an essay about a particular moment of grief or trauma. But writing about traumatic events can be challenging because trauma harms our memory.
My advice is this: during traumatic times, don’t create. Record.
Trauma turns our memory into a mess, activating the amygdala—our fear detector— while shutting down the hippocampus—our memory center. Plus, we can’t access the peace required to write if our brains are in survival mode.
When the time comes to write about a traumatic event, anything from the death of a pet, a car accident, a difficult childbirth, a deep depression, or an awful meeting with our kid’s teacher, we can struggle to remember details. Timelines become jumbled. Dialogue is nowhere to be found.
Months after that painful school meeting, my record provided the details I needed for an essay published in the magazine Catapult that eventually became the foundation of my book Your Kid Belongs Here (Johns Hopkins, 2025), about how hard the world makes it to be a neurodivergent parent of neurodivergent kids.
As I wrote the essay, I was grateful to know exactly what the teacher said. During the school meeting, I didn’t have critical distance; I was overrun by emotions. But I kept emotions out of the record. Later, my record affirmed my emotional memory of the traumatic event, and it helped me find connections that I might not have seen otherwise (excerpts from the essay):
She said, “I’ve been teaching for thirty years, but I’ve never had such a difficult student. I’m at the end of my rope with him.”
Later upon reflection, I wrote: I felt crushed. What did that mean? Did that mean she’d given up on him?
She said, “I can’t make him do the things the students are supposed to do.”
Here’s what I recalled and added to the essay in response to those recorded words: I couldn’t talk. I let my husband answer, with mild nonsense words that appeased her. All I could think was, Why would you want to make anyone do anything?
And then I added more reflection: You don’t force children to do things. You work together, you explain, you teach. I know how much my kid wanted to make this teacher happy. He told me that all the time. “I want to make her happy, Mommy.” He just didn’t know how.
I turned that awful day—and my record of it—into a reflective, thoughtful essay, art that I am proud of.
Writing about difficult things has been shown to help people cope with them. Researchers have found that writing about traumatic experiences helps people process their emotions, leading to reduced psychological and physical symptoms. So, writing about traumatic events can literally help us heal.
But as writers of memoir and CNF, we take things a step further. We turn our pain into art to help others heal, too.
Preserving the record is a gift we can give our future selves. Only you know what trauma feels like to you; only you know what traumatic events you are encountering. I encourage you to record those events like a court reporter as soon as they happen, even while they’re happening if possible. Leave emotion out of it. Leave out analysis, too. Don’t worry about creating art; you won’t be able to if you’re traumatized.
Put those records away. For months. Maybe years. Then one day, pull them out and you’ll find the clarity you need to write an essay about an awful day and be able to share your understanding of what it means.
__________
Katie Rose Pryal is a Bipolar-AuDHD author of memoir, essays, novels, and nonfiction. Her most recent book, Your Kid Belongs Here (Johns Hopkins 2025), is about being a neurodivergent parent of neurodivergent kids. Her literary memoir, An Autistic Girl’s Guide to Horses, is forthcoming from West Virginia University Press. Her work has appeared in many venues, including Ecotone, Full Grown People, and Catapult. She teaches in the Drexel University MFA program.
Something Besides the Parts: On the Alchemy of Collections
May 29, 2026 § 5 Comments
By Tamara Dean
When I first heard “The whole is greater than the sum of its parts,” I didn’t understand the expression. I had just graduated; my college training in science and engineering focused on breaking things into parts or assembling parts. There was no slop in those equations. No alchemy—as decreed by the laws of physics.
The phrase is usually attributed to Aristotle. But what he actually wrote, in Metaphysics:
In the case of all things which have several parts and in which the totality is not, as it were, a mere heap, but the whole is something besides the parts, there is a cause; for even in bodies contact is the cause of unity in some cases, and in others viscosity or some other such quality.
In essence: organized in some way, parts form a whole whose qualities differ from qualities of the parts alone.
That’s logical. A cake has different qualities than each of its ingredients. A soccer team scores more goals by supporting each other than individual players could separately.
Yet now, as a more experienced reader and writer, I feel sure that something besides logic holds sway. Poems, stories, fragments, and essays gain new, ineffable qualities when collected. The whole—whether a single-author collection or an anthology—swells with significance. Common threads weave pieces together. The pieces “talk” to one another. Once assembled and bound, the meaning of each is altered and amplified.
How can you make the most of this alchemy as you gather your poems, stories, fragments, and essays?
Consider:
What is the shape of the journey you want readers to take? Maybe you want to lead readers through a spiral or labyrinth, introducing them to an idea or question, leading them through other experiences to shift their perspective, then reuniting them with the original idea. Claudia Rankine said that her groundbreaking collection Citizen: An American Lyric, “string[s] together a series of microaggressions to replicate the feeling of accumulation—and also to prepare the reader for the macroaggressions, those moments when people are actually killed or abandoned.” Through this trajectory of accumulation, she “wanted to show that anyone who was involved in the earlier microaggressions could also have ended up as a victim in the later macroaggressions.”
Some collections follow natural patterns of time. Ross Gay’s The Book of Delights gathers brief pieces written daily, starting with Gay’s birthday, for a year. Others follow the shape of a space. The pieces in Joan Wickersham’s No Ship Sets Out to be a Shipwreck trace her journey through the Vasa Museum in Stockholm. Wickersham’s arrangement mimics a re-creation of the iconic ship whose wreck the museum is built around even as it excavates and reassembles the author’s past.
Maybe your collection’s journey resembles a seesaw, each chapter or section contradicting the one preceding, or by placing the fulcrum in the middle of the collection, surprising readers and signaling a major shift.
A mandala, pyramid, waves—what shape does your material call for?
What theme(s) will you highlight and how? Will you establish a theme and offer variations? Will your theme begin as a faint note and crescendo to resound forcefully by the end? Will your pieces address themes in multiple ways, creating a kaleidoscopic or fractal effect? Maggie O’Farrell’s memoir I Am, I Am, I Am: Seventeen Brushes with Death, collects stories about her near-death experiences, organized not chronologically but by body part. She had been thinking more about mortality since her daughter was born with a deadly allergy, and the book “is about how we carry on in the face of these big experiences…and how we come back changed and different from every single one.”
After identifying your main themes and how you want readers to experience them, you might even revise pieces to strengthen your desired emphasis and outcome.
How do your parts match or contrast in mood, style, scope, or action? Will a mood persist even through pieces that vary wildly in style? While variation creates interest, do any parts diverge so dramatically that they would pluck readers out of the odyssey you’ve crafted, and therefore must be cut? Can the last line or image of one piece lead to the beginning of the next? Can an action recur in different circumstances in different pieces?
The recurring images in Natalie Diaz’s collection, Postcolonial Love Poem,
…were built from my image system, my way of constellating languages and images… ‘Repetition,’ some might say, but I’d like to imagine the appearance of these word as ‘beginning again.’ I want to let language be what it is, an energy that is new each time it is uttered, or each time it fires the brain toward ‘meaning’ or ‘lack of meaning,’ each time it rings the bones in the ear.
There are practical considerations in assembling a collection—for example, writers are wisely counseled to position their strongest piece first and another strong piece last. But when it comes to alchemy, whether or not your design for the whole is obvious, readers will be moved by your purposeful arrangement.
Sometimes the assembly can even surprise the writer. Starting with a handmade blank “guest book” while on tour with my essay collection, Shelter and Storm, I encouraged audience members to add their own stories of shelter and storm. The book became an accidental anthology of fellow travelers on a shared journey.
I think about this alchemy a lot! Even as I work on a new nonfiction book, I’m cooking up a new anthology and a story collection. I look forward to discovering how the pieces will complement each other and develop deeper meaning.
How will your pieces grow stronger in unison?
________
Tamara Dean’s latest book, Shelter and Storm: At Home in the Driftless, a Sarton Award and Wisconsin Writers Award finalist, is a memoir in essays that invites readers to consider how we tend the earth and thrive in community during a time of climate change. Her work in The American Scholar, The Georgia Review, the Guardian, Orion, The Southern Review, and elsewhere has received Pushcart and National Magazine Award honors.
Join Tamara Dean and Brevity Blog Editor Allison K Williams, literary agent Jessica Berg and bestselling author Andromeda Romano-Lax for the Craft and Publishing Voyage onboard Queen Mary 2, setting sail September 5 from London to New York. A once-in-a-lifetime writing conference at sea to level up your craft and further your publishing path–now with last-minute savings on cruise fare. Find out more/register now.
You Belong Here
May 28, 2026 § 26 Comments
By Beverly Kingston
In July 2017, during my first month writing my memoir, my husband and I took a trip to Steamboat Springs, Colorado. We rented a two-bedroom condo downtown, and I turned the second bedroom into my writing space—spreading my notes and journals across the bed and floor.
Early the next morning, I went for a run along the river. I didn’t get far before something about the Art Depot building caught my attention. I slowed down enough to read a sign taped to the door: Steamboat Springs Writers Group – Thursdays, noon to 2:00.
When I got back, I looked them up online. They welcomed writers of all genres and experience levels to share unpublished work. They emphasized encouragement and feedback on effectiveness, not critique of content. I clicked through photos and read the bios of twenty published authors, wondering who I might meet. Would this be where I found validation? A mentor? A sign that I was on the right path?
All week, I went back and forth. Attending would take me away from my carefully protected writing time. But what if the group was exactly what I needed to quiet my insecurity or make connections that could help me?
On Thursday morning, I tried to write, but my thoughts kept drifting to the group. Finally, I gave in. I packed my laptop, a legal pad, and a few snacks into my tote bag and headed out the door.
I arrived at just before noon, still unsure. The building was empty. I re-read the sign and realized I was at the wrong location.
I plugged the new address into my phone and started walking quickly. I wished I had my car. Or at least my running shoes instead of flip-flops. The midday heat pressed down on me, and sweat dripped down my back, but with every step, my determination grew.
I rushed inside the building. The hallway smelled like turkey dinner. At 12:30, I opened a door to a room filled with at least fifty senior citizens eating lunch.
I tried another room. A man setting up tables looked up as I asked about the Writers Group.
“I’ve never heard of it,” he said. “I’m setting up for bridge.”
Maybe I had misread the sign. Maybe they were back at the Depot. I imagined them gathered around a long wooden table, pages spread out, voices warm and welcoming. Even if I missed the beginning, I could still get there.
I turned and walked back along the river path. The water roared beside me, but it couldn’t match the intensity building inside me—the longing to be seen, to be told that what I was doing mattered.
Ten minutes later, I was back at the Art Depot. This time I searched everywhere. I opened doors, climbed a narrow staircase, checked every hallway. Every room was empty. Every door upstairs was locked.
I stopped.
I wasn’t going to find them.
I needed somewhere else to go to sit with what just happened. That’s when I remembered the library.
It was only a block away. Within minutes, I found a cushioned window seat with two orange pillows and a wide view of the mountains. I stretched out my legs and settled in.
To my right was the teen section. A girl sat alone reading Go Ask Alice. I remembered how grown-up I felt reading that book at fourteen. I never imagined my own life would include addiction.
Two girls laughed over a cat video. A boy and girl sat close together watching skiing footage, their hands intertwined.
The girl looked like me at that age – petite, brown hair, leaning in as close as she could to the boy. I recognized that pull.
Are you like me? I wondered. Needing a boy’s attention to feel like you can exist.
I hoped not.
I pulled out my legal pad. What did I want to receive so desperately from the writing group?
What did I wish they would tell me about my writing?
The group’s imaginary voices poured out. A man with a weathered face and a worn cowboy hat spoke first. “Yes,” he said. “The world needs what you’re writing. You aren’t wasting your time.”
My eyes filled with tears. He continued, “Your voice is beautiful.”
An older woman, with gray hair and a gentleness in her blue eyes leaned forward. “Your story was hard. How did you find the courage to keep going? Can you write more about that?”
A younger woman smiled, “You write like you care about my soul.”
And then someone in the room said something so softly I could barely hear her, “Beverly, you belong here. You are welcome at our table.”
I was looking for a room full of writers to tell me I belonged. Instead, I found the one voice that finally could, and it was mine.
___
Beverly Kingston, Ph.D., is a sociologist and Director of the Center for the Study and Prevention of Violence at the University of Colorado Boulder. Her writing has appeared in The Huffington Post, The Conversation, and The Denver Post. She is currently pursuing publication of her memoir, Soulshine: A Memoir of Courage, Healing, and Hope, which explores addiction, trauma, and the conditions that support healing and human potential. Find her on LinkedIn and Instagram.
