Tell It Slant, Second Edition

If there’s a book you really want to read, but it hasn’t been written yet, then you must write it. —TONI MORRISON

Memory itself could be called its own bit of creative nonfiction. We continually—often unconsciously—renovate our memories, shaping them into stories that bring coherence to chaos.

“Good memoirs are a careful act of construction. We like to think that an interesting life will simply fall into place on the page. It won’t. … Memoir writers must manufacture a text, imposing narrative order on a jumble of half-remembered events.”

By paying attention to the sensory gateways of the body, you also begin to write in a way that naturally embodies experience, making it tactile for the reader.

In nonfiction, if we place a premium on fact, then this man’s diary would be the ultimate masterpiece. But in literature and art, we applaud style, meaning, and effect over the bare facts.

Readers tend to care deeply only about those things they feel in the body at a visceral level. And so as a writer consider your vocation as that of a translator: one who renders the abstract into the concrete. We experience the world through our senses. We must translate that experience into the language of the senses as well.

“the five Rs” of creative nonfiction: Real Life, Reflection, Research, Reading, and ’Riting.

Memory begins to qualify the imagination, to give it another formation, one that is peculiar to the self. … If I were to remember other things, I should be someone else. —N. SCOTT MOMADAY

to tell the truth, yes, but to become more than a mere transcriber of life’s factual experiences.

continually seeking meaning in the random and often unfathomable events in our lives.