But no, our published pieces are captive to the amber of time, words that were written can’t be unwritten. Your writing is out there naked in the world colliding with the viewpoints, critiques, and skepticism of others. 

Returning written words to your imagination isn’t an option, but embracing those words is, no matter how imperfect you might perceive them. An essay collection just might make for the perfect embrace.

More than just an exercise in self-aggrandizement, or a nonfiction writer’s greatest hits, an essay collection can trigger reflection, contemplation, and self and societal assessment in a reader. Essential ingredients for both individual and social betterment. 

No, not everyone’s essay collection will have the might of Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard, but, of course, not everyone is Toni Morrison. But your resurrected work can provide readers with a unique way of looking at their life, this world, and the people they inhabit it with. 

But choosing exactly what to include out of your massive archive of writing can provide a unique challenge. What stays and what goes? How do you organize it all? And will any of it still resonate with readers after all this time? 

These are questions I was forced to answer while gathering the essays that comprise my collection, Readying to Rise. Hopefully my hard earned knowledge can assist you with building your own essay collection. 

1. Embrace the Past

Reencountering old writing can be scary, in no small part because you’ve hopefully evolved as a person, writer, and thinker since you put the final punctuation mark on a months or years-old essay. 

A friend says old writing can be like bumping into an ex. You’re different and so are they, but no matter how the relationship ended, whether you wish it had concluded differently or not, you have to make peace that you made an impression upon their life, and they yours.  

You were who you were during that time period. And that is completely okay. Chances are, the thoughts, experiences, and interpretation of events then still ring true to someone encountering a similar circumstance that you previously wrote about. One person’s past is another’s present, afterall. 

Maybe you would’ve even drastically changed things had you written the same piece today. But remember writing is like Virgina Madsen’s description of wine in her monologue from the movie Sideways: I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

Don’t deprive readers of the taste of your past work, the work you were uniquely able to craft on a singular day, just because your own tastes have evolved. 

2. Make Order Out of Chaos

Most of your work was probably intended to live as stand alone pieces without regard to potentially being bound together one day in a single essay collection.

This means you have to go about the business of organizing disjointed columns or essays into something that a) makes it look like you knew what you were doing all along and b) doesn’t completely jar the reader’s sensibilities. Going from a scarthing piece on FEMA’s missteps following Hurricane Katrina to a musing on overcoming severe halitosis probably isn’t the best sequencing. 

Once you’ve identified all the pieces you found fit to reprint, you want to ensure that you’ve categorized them under comprehensible themes. They don’t necessarily have to be grouped by a concrete topic (e.g. politics, culture, art, etc.) but a reader should be able to implicitly understand why an essay was placed where it was.

I originally chose to group my essays under three categories: Tribulations, Trials, and Triumphs that corresponded with essays dealing with my mental health struggles. I eventually decided it would be better to sort them chronologically. 

You shouldn’t try to shoehorn a piece into a category. If you have enough pieces that seem out of place, there’s nothing wrong with simply creating a new category called Random!

3. Pick That Which Endures 

With an essay collection what’s old is new again. A piece you wrote five years ago about the destigmitizatizing mental health in professional sports may now have new relevance given the recent stances of athletes like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka. Likewise, a profile you wrote about an Afghanistan War veteran’s return home a decade ago might provide an illuminating insight into the recently concluded conflict. 

In both cases, it’s not only that each story has a renewed news peg, it’s that each story deals with underlying issues that will be ongoing long after your book is planted on someone’s self: The normalization of discussing mental health in the workplace, and America’s role in conflicts abroad. 

You want to do your best to ensure that what you’ve selected can add to those continuing conversations. 

4. Your Vulnerability is Someone Else’s Strength

My favorite writer, James Baldwin, once said that a primary reason he wrote was so that long after he’d departed, hopefully someone who was looking through the wreckage of the past for words of inspiration, comfort, and affirmation might find refuge in his work.

Black, gay, and atheist at a time when just one of those identities would invite scorn, prejudice, and even death, he left a goldmine of words for others to find who dealt with racism, homophobia, bigotry, and alienation. 

Writing about your life’s struggles is never easy, especially when you might still be dealing with those struggles.

However, resharing them in the form of your essay collection can potentially make a difference in someone’s life. It can allow them to know that they are not isolated in their experiences. Your words can make someone feel like their life is seen, heard, felt, and potentially rescue them from a dark place.

Add your words to what people might find when they rummage through the past. 

5. Take Stock

You’ve spent years writing. You’ve persisted through criticism, negatively, doubt, and frustration to arrive at a body of work that you should be proud of. While others waited for the muse to strike, you set your butt down solidly in your chair and produced. 

Was everything you wrote Nobel laureate worthy? Of course not.

But in all your writing, you’ve surely crafted something that has the potential to uplift someone, change their bullheaded beliefs, increase their empathy, or just put a smile on their face after a particularly craptastic day. 

The fact that you amassed enough work that can be bound into a collection is an achievement worthy of celebration. It also means that your work as a writer most likely matters to someone, whether dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people, but who cares.

It all means that you haven’t written in vain. And sometimes we all just need a testament to that.

Marcus Harrison Green is the author of Readying to Rise, the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity,  and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020. You can follow him on Twitter or connect with him on Facebook.

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In fact, how does a writer train himself? Hemingway trained himself by listening to his memory and rearranging it by tinting it, thus many of his writings seemed to come from first-hand experience. 

You can create fiction from secondary sources by alertly watching what happens around you. You listen when people talk. You discern the smells around you. You understand, never judging, because you are everything―being the Maker―when you write. 

The following five tips for writing fiction are subjective—every writer must have his own rules of writing. However, we all learn from one another and writing tips, therefore, contribute to such growth.

1. On Building Short Story Collections

Writers who have in their repertoire published and/or unpublished short stories would fret about how they fit together in a collection. Should the stories share a common thread, a theme? Can they be unrelated to one another and yet stand on their own merit?

Either approach works. However, the building of a story collection might benefit by strategically placing stories with reciprocal settings and moods in such a logical way they help the stories flow better. 

Then each structure, as a cohesive unit, must impress either as a whole or by the strength of each individual story. Pleasure reading is that which seeks enjoyment. Whatever structure a story collection is built with must please readers in the end.

2. On Writing Routines

So you want to start writing fiction. Do you have a writing routine? I know no one’s routine is like another’s. I wrote every day. Each day, faithfully, by sticking to some basic rules:

• Find discipline in solitude so you can meet your characters. It’s like a rendezvous with ghosts. Then make that meeting every day or every night with no excuses.
• Write each scene as if it were the only thing in your universe—it must command all your attention.
• Write one scene well and let that scene breed the next scene.
• Leave room for readers to participate. Remember: Less is more.
• Stop where you still have something to say so the next day you won’t face a dry well.
• Read each day to keep your mind off your own writing.
• Don’t believe in anybody’s rules except yours.

Somewhere I remember Toni Morrison once said, “I wrote my first novel because I wanted to read it.” 

3. On Revising

You finished a short story or a novel’s chapter.

Now go back and fine-tune it—add, delete—what needs to go in, be taken out. Repair the characters. Do it when your mind is still fresh with the scenes and the characters of that story or chapter. 

However, you must be unbiased (which is hard toward what you’ve just written) and detached (which is harder from what you’ve just built), so you can see your own creative flaws.

Or it will be challenging much later to go back to fix the flaws either on your own courage, or at an editor’s request.

4. On Characterization

Unlike an actor who plays just his role, an author plays all his characters’ roles, like a man who plays chess against himself.

You can imagine characters. Yet until you write them out, you haven’t known them. Let them interact with one another. It’s then that you begin to explore your characters’ depths. 

If you ask me what’s the hardest part in writing a novel, I’ll tell you: characterization. That’s what separates a literary novel from a potboiler. 

Characters shape a story line, not the other way around. You can’t think up a plot and shoehorn your characters into it. If you do, you are writing a potboiler. 

In fact, well-developed characters create a more convincing story line, even shaping it or altering it against your original vision.

5. On Hard Scenes

Writing fiction is just like any normal part of our daily life. It ebbs and flows. The worst thing to a writer isn’t writer’s block but illness that can really affect his writing. Other than that, as Hemingway once said, there will be days when you have to drill rock and then blast it out with charges. When that happens, just take a break, do something else and let your battery be recharged.

There are no hard scenes to write. Really. Those so-called difficult scenes are what writers make them out to be with their paranoia. So before they can write such scenes, their anxiety has already killed their creativity to write them.

What is your best advice on writing fiction?

Khanh Ha is the author of Flesh and The Demon Who Peddled Longing. He is a seven-time Pushcart nominee, finalist for the Mary McCarthy Prize, Many Voices Project, Prairie Schooner Book Prize, and The University of New Orleans Press Lab Prize. He is the recipient of the Sand Hills Prize for Best Fiction, the Robert Watson Literary Prize in Fiction, The Orison Anthology Award for Fiction, and The C&R Press Fiction Prize. His new novel, Mrs. Rossi’s Dream, was named Best New Book by Booklist and a 2019 Foreword Reviews INDIES Silver Winner and Bronze Winner. You can find him on his website, and follow him on Facebook and Twitter.

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1. Borrow from Real Life

In his memoir, Rushdie writes his father cried out, “What am I going to tell my friends?” when he told him he was going to be a writer. A similar scene appears in the novel, The Satanic Verses, with a main character telling his father he’s going to be an actor. Fourteen pages later, he recounts an experience I recognize from the novel Fury, which includes a character, whose physical description is based on his ex-wife, Padma Lakshimi. 

These are just a few real life elements that made it into his fiction. I used to avoid including anything from my life in my writing. I thought people might think I was hiding behind fiction to write about myself or them. 

More importantly I thought it would make me a fraud—fiction is supposed to be made up. 

I realized Rushdie, and most fiction writers, frequently include details from their lives in stories. They give fiction that bit of truth it needs to be believable. And some stories are too good not to use.  

You don’t have to include intimate details or base a whole character on someone you know. Including pieces of a real conversation might bring your dialogue to life. Try expanding a childhood accident or a bad work experience into a traumatic event for a character’s backstory.

2. Characters Need Distinctive Voices

When asked, Rushdie advised writers to give characters their own distinct voices, explaining that while reading passages of character dialogue you should be able to tell the difference. Each character should have different vocabulary, syntax, attitude, and body language. 

Rushdie focuses on voice. This stems from the advice of a history professor at Cambridge: “You must never write history until you can hear the people speak.” He remembered it and thought it was a valuable principle for fiction as well. He writes in his memoir you need a sense of how people speak to tell their story. The way characters speak reveals a lot about them.

Think about how your characters speak. Do they use short or long sentences, are they slow and deliberate or do their words come out quick and garbled? Maybe they use a lot of slang or technical jargon from their work. 

Remember to read dialogue out loud to really hear the character’s voice.  

3. Do Your Research

Rushdie’s novels take place in a variety of locations in the world and in time. It’s hard to believe that he could recreate these settings in his fiction without doing at least some research. 

Before writing Midnight’s Children, he left his job to travel through India for as long as possible. Much of the story is about India itself and it’d been over a decade since he’d lived there. He describes the trip as “plunging into the inexhaustible Indian reality, so that [he] could drink deeply from the horn of plenty and then come home and write.” 

He mentions a variety of media he consumes as he developed The Ground Beneath Her Feet. He had a friend in the music industry review it to point out related mistakes. 

The clearest evidence of his research was the four-and-a-half-page bibliography included in The Enchantress of Florence.

You don’t need intimate knowledge of every setting. If you can’t manage a visit, there are other options. Key details can be found on the internet using local newspapers, blogs, maps, and satellite views. 

When writing an era other than your own, look up cultural norms, technologies and language quarks. 

Lastly, reach out to friends, family and colleagues that might be willing to fill you in on their areas of expertise or knowledge.

4. How You Write Is as Important as What You Write

You can tell Rushdie pays careful attention to language and how he uses it to tell his stories. One moment from the novel Fury has always stuck with me. When the narrator is introduced to the female love interest, he loses touch with reality describing her. It’s four long paragraphs that verge on a philosophical lecture on her beauty: “Extreme physical beauty draws all available light toward itself, becomes a shining beacon in an otherwise darkened world. Why would one peer into the encircling gloom when one could look at this kindly flame. Why talk, eat, sleep, work when such effulgence was on display?” 

The long rambling sentences made me slow down, pulling me into the long, drawn-out moment, which was abruptly interrupted by a piece of dialogue from narrator’s friend. 

I remember the first time I read it. I had to stop for a minute to collect myself and remember where I was. It felt a lot like how the character was snapped out of his own thoughts and brought back to reality.

Think about what your characters are going through and how your writing might reflect what they are feeling. 

Short sentences with abrupt changes in topic mimic the rapid thinking of anxiety and panic, while the same words in longer sentences feel like being lost in thought. An elaborate explanation or description where a few words would have sufficed might cause suspicion.

5. Keep Writing

Right out of college, Rushdie knew he wanted a career as a writer. It’d take almost thirteen years to really get his start. In the meantime, he worked as a copywriter and wrote what he describes as “unbearable amounts of garbage.” 

His first novel, Grimus was dismissed or ignored by critics. 

For him, Midnight’s Children was his last try at achieving his dream. He thought it was more likely to fail than succeed and took five years to complete. Fortunately, the book was a success and he enjoyed continued success until publishing The Satanic Verses. Labeled blasphemous by Muslim leaders, there were violent protests against the book and it was banned in several countries. A fatwa—official death sentence—was issued for him and anyone involved in publishing the novel. He had to live in hiding under police protection for nine years. His personal and professional life suffered as a result of the controversy surrounding the book. 

There were moments when he considered not being a writer. Progress was slow and he would go long periods without writing fiction, instead focusing on efforts to defend his work and speak out for freedom of speech and expression. It would have been easy and safer for him to stop writing, but he didn’t.

It’s easy to get discouraged. Writing is not easy and sometimes the risk is greater than the reward. But there is joy in the process of creation and seeing the result of your hard work. Focus on that joy and keep writing.

Alexis Collazo, sometimes LexC online, is originally from Brooklyn but currently lives in Pennsylvania where she has worked at the Public Library for the past four years. Her favorite part of the job, other than being surrounded by books, is leading writing workshops. She is passionate about helping others improve their writing and sharing their unique stories with the world. She enjoys creative work that bends artistic boundaries and crosses genres, and is currently working on a mixed genre memoir combining essays, poetry and poetic prose. You can find out more about her by visiting her website, or by following her on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.

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1. Audiobooks help you read more

Maybe you listen to audiobooks already, and if this is true, it’s undoubtedly improving your writing. Reading is essential for authors not only to learn good writing, but also to stay up to date with publishing trends. If you want to sell your work, it helps to be aware of what’s selling. It also helps find accurate recent comp titles when pitching your books.

Audiobooks are a great way to get more books into your brain. A UC-Berkeley Gallant Lab study found your brain creates meaning from words in the same way whether those words are read or listened to. Sure, keep reading print or ebooks too, but if you have an audiobook on while you drive or do the dishes, you’ll likely end up consuming more words, and I am a firm believer that authors should read deeply and broadly. Fall asleep reading nonfiction in print? Put it on in the car. Prose too dense to get through on the page? Try listening!

The more books you read, the better your understanding of what makes good writing will be, so pop on your headphones and get reading!

2. They support authors and publishing

Audiobook sales increased in 2020 and are becoming increasingly popular. As the publishing industry continues to shift and evolve, it will likely continue to rely on audiobooks to thrive. Libraries, too, deal increasingly in digital content, and audiobooks are a big part of this. When you buy audiobooks or borrow or request them for your library, you are supporting the industry as a whole, which makes it a more viable space for your own work. A rising tide lifts all boats, and writers’ support for one another is essential.

3. Audiobooks can help you find your voice

In addition to letting you read more, audiobooks are one of the best tools for finding your own authorial voice, as they let you listen to literal voices. When you read text, you likely still hear your own voice saying the words in your head. Hearing audiobook narrators helps distinguish between different authors’ work.

Neil Gaiman, in his Masterclass, recommends the following exercise for finding your authorial voice: Attempt to write a paragraph about the same event in the voice of several different authors. Then, write it in your own voice.

To add an audiobook twist to this exercise, listen to a clip of an audiobook from each author before you attempt to imitate their voice. After you write it, see if you can imagine it in that narrator’s voice. Make any adjustments you need.

When it’s time to write in your own voice, do so and then read it aloud. Does it sound right in your own, literal voice? How does it differ from the narrations you listened to and imitated?

4. They can help you find your characters’ voices

Many audiobook narrators are excellent at using variations in their voice for different characters’ dialogue. Some use full casts or different narrators for different points of view. It can be easy to let your characters blur together, becoming indistinct from one another, but even minor characters should have unique voices and quirks.

As you listen to audiobooks, pay attention to the shifts in narrators or in a narrators’ voice. What shifts in the authors’ writing do these reflect? 

5. Audiobooks can help you learn to write with rhythm

Finally, as an author, you don’t just want the meaning of your writing to be clear. You want it to sound good in readers’ brains or aloud. When you hear prose aloud, you hear the rhythm of the words and sentences and, thus, are more likely to listen for these in your own writing. 

I was first introduced to this concept when I read Gary Lutz’s essay, “The Sentence is a Lonely Place,” but the how didn’t click until I thought about Lutz’s charge to “combin(e) the acoustical elegance of the aphorism with the force and utility of the load-bearing, tractional sentence” while listening to an audiobook.

As you listen, pay attention to the way the sentences sound. Are they clipped and bouncy? Soft and rolling? Lutz describes words that “fizzed and popped and tinkled and bonged.” How do you want your sentences to sound? The actual sound of your work should reflect the feeling of the scenes you’re writing.

Try listening to an audiobook without paying attention to the story. I do this sometimes as I’m falling asleep, letting the words of a book whose story I’m not necessarily interested in absorbing wash over me. Can you hear the words as they flow? Do the sentences sound smooth or choppy? Does a rhythm begin to emerge? Can you hear the rhythm of your own writing? Are there words to add that make it better? Words to take out that break the flow?

Audiobooks, especially modern ones with professional narrators or full casts, are a fun, entertaining way to read. But more than that, they can be used as a tool to keep you up to date on the publishing world, support fellow writers, and take your craft to the next level.

Becca Spence Dobias lives in Southern California where she writes frantically as her children sleep. Her short stories have been featured in two Writing Bloc anthologies, Inlandia: a Literary Journey, and A Short Guide to Finding Your First Home in the United States. Her debut novel, On Home, will be out August 24, 2021 from Inkshares. You can pre-order your copy on Amazon or Bookshop.

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1. Be clear on why you’re writing it.

People write memoirs for many different reasons: therapy, vindication, revenge, or merely to tell a good story. Before beginning to write, ask yourself what you hope to accomplish. As I’ve said, I had no intention of writing this memoir, particularly because it delved into a painful chapter of my life, but others convinced me that the story was critical to my own development and that sharing it might help others. 

Now I personally believe that the publication of this book was part of a spiritual agreement between my ex-husband and myself, that it was something I was destined to do. The paranormal aspects of the story definitely make me vulnerable to skepticism—possibly even ridicule. 

That’s another thing about memoir: when it’s published, people will not only judge your book, but it will feel like they’re judging your life and behavior as well.

2. Real life can be as subjective as fiction.

When you write a memoir, your major source of information is yourself: your memory, your perspective, your version of events. Mary Karr, known as “the boss of memoir,” provides a helpful checklist, which includes the advice to “Collude with the reader about your relationship with the truth and memory.” This can often be achieved with a perspective of reflection from the future, when you might feel differently than you did in the moment, or when you see the error of your previous thinking. 

In The Ghost Marriage, I used phrases like “Was it ignorance or fear that prevented me from asking deeper questions, demanding more details?” and “If I’d been older, or wiser, or had children of my own, I might have pointed out…” to show that I, the writer, didn’t necessarily condone my own past behavior.

3. Just because you have a voice doesn’t mean it works on the page.

 Voice is critical to memoir. It’s such a personal genre, readers need to love your voice in order to keep reading. However, our spoken voice isn’t necessarily our written voice. I recently read a memoir by someone I’ve met. In real life, she’s funny and brazen and sarcastic. But on the page she was wordy and grammatically correct and, well, lawyerly (she’s a lawyer). She was so used to writing briefs, crossing every T and dotting every I, that she couldn’t relax on the page. 

There are so many memoirists whose voices I do love: Elizabeth Gilbert, Cheryl Strayed, Glennon Doyle, Mary Karr, to name a few. Their humor and personality are all the more admirable because I know how hard it is to convey that on the page.

4. Your characters are real people who will be affected.

They say to write a memoir as if no one will read it, so you can be as honest and outrageous as possible in your first draft. But the closer you get to publication, the more you need to think about the real people you might be implicating in your story. In my case, I was blessed in that my antagonist—my ex-husband—had died. I could say what I wanted about him. But my children, my step-daughters, and my friends were all still very much alive. For that reason, I changed everyone’s names and left out certain events that I thought would be just too painful for them to read about. The two names I didn’t change were my ex-husband’s and my married name (I’ve since returned to my maiden name). 

When I finally told my children about the book, when I was very close to publication, my son asked if I was still using the family surname. That was their legacy, he said, and an important final layer of privacy. I have to admit that it hadn’t even occurred to me. Fortunately, I was able to do a universal change at the last minute and goodwill was restored. 

Anne Lamott famously wrote, “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.” While I agree in principle with this sentiment, I also know that I don’t want to lose my family and closest friends over a book.

5. Your life isn’t necessarily as interesting as you think.

Memoir is not biography. It should focus on a period of your life during which something happens to fundamentally change you. That said, you might need to provide some backstory to put that period into context. 

My story didn’t really begin until my marriage began to fall apart, and I struggled to summarize the previous 20 years in just two chapters. Then, when I submitted my 134,000-word memoir manuscript, my publisher strongly suggested editing it to under 100,000 words—trimming 34,000 words meant cutting 25 percent of the entire book. This was not a task I was up to myself. 

After cutting only about 3,000 words, I threw myself at the mercy of a professional editor. Whole scenes and hundreds of pages of dialogue and description that I thought were essential to my narrative ended up on the editing room floor. 

Kirsten Mickelwait is a copywriter by day and a writer of fiction and creative nonfiction by night. Her memoir, The Ghost Marriage, has just been released by SheWrites Press. Kirsten has been passionate about reading and writing for as long as she can remember, but her love of literature was really ignited as an English major at UC Berkeley, where she discovered James Joyce and the expatriate writers of 1920s Paris. She has a few short stories in print (her story, “Parting with Nina,” won The Ledge’s 2004 Fiction Award) and an ambitious first novel, set in six historical periods, sits in some forgotten drawer. She’s an alumna of the Squaw Valley Community of Writers, the Napa Valley Writers Conference, and several other writers’ workshops. Kirsten lives in the San Francisco Bay Area and is currently at work on a historical novel featuring several members of the Lost Generation. 

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