"I don't get stuck," Jillian Lauren says. She tackles resistance. Pray to write the most mediocre page, she told us. Write through your writer’s block. Jillian Lauren is a superstar. She’s written two bestselling memoirs and a novel, as well as an ongoing, award-winning mommy blog. We caught up with her at the launch of her tour for Everything You Ever Wanted. She gave terrific, clear insight into the process of finding an arc of your memoir, pinpointing the character shift and the moment that exemplifies that shift, and handling leaps in time deftly. We comiserated about the pain of reading your old journals, and she had an excellent tip for that, too. She showed us how to create a time map for your memoir, when to show and when to tell, and what it means to write through the body. In terms of structure, we talked about specific underlying forms and how to find the beginning. Jillian has a “board of directors”--the readers she trusts to read her drafts. She talks about when to show the work and what to show to whom. She inspired us with a frank look at honesty, rigor and self-reflection. “Art,” Jillian reminds us in a discussion of happy and unhappy endings, “is hopeful because it's an act of creation.”

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Authors

Amy Hempel

Joan Didion

Maxine Hong Kingston

Allen Ginsberg

Rilke

Dostoyevsky

Nick Flynn

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

Christine is one of those overnight successes that is a decade in the making. Her essay about having a stroke at age thirty-three lead to a two-book contract: a memoir will be out in 2017 followed by a novel in 2018. She’s also a stellar presence on social media, one of those people you feel you’ve truly befriended because she’s so generous and funny and brilliant in her online personality, as in life. Speaking of social media, promotion in general was one of our topics.

Christine served as the fiction editor of Kartika Review, "a national literary arts magazine that publishes Asian Pacific Islander American fiction, poetry, creative non-fiction, and art," and she gave us tips from the submissions-receiving side of the long climb to publication. Hilarious and helpful.

We also talked about structure, omission and selection in writing memoir, asking your character who drives the book, character mischief, and character change in both fiction and memoir. We delved into the differences between journaling, blogging and memoir--as well as the author note itself. We considered the role of self-discovery and cribbing structure, and  the importance of Kurt Vonnegut.

Links

“I Had a Stroke at 33:” http://www.buzzfeed.com/xtinehlee/i-had-a-stroke-at-33#3zhfw3g

Kartika Review: http://kartikareview.com/

Christine has amazing bios, and offers a variety of versions. You can check them all out at her web site: http://www.christinehlee.com/

Story Makers is a podcast that features in-depth conversations with accomplished writers, filmmakers and industry experts about story craft, technique, habit and survival--everything you need to know to stay inspired, connect to your creativity, find others’ wonderful stories and your own success.

The hosts:

Elizabeth Stark is a published, agented novelist and distributed filmmaker who teaches and mentors writers at BookWritingWorld.com.

Angie Powers is a distributed filmmaker and published short story writer with an MFA in creative writing and a certificate in screenwriting from UCLA who teaches story structure at BookWritingWorld.com.

Boris is charismatic, one of those charming, larger-than-life, generous-hearted human beings who is also a brilliant writer. Together, we discussed procrastination and the pros and cons of writing under contract, as well as the worth of work that never got published. Boris features some of his rejected pieces on his web site; find out why. We compared journalism to fiction writing, outlining to surprise (or maps to headlights). We touched on burying your ideas in a propulsive story, the lightbulb moment and unhappy women . . . We got into structure and readers’ questions and what to do when you are stuck. Some tips included taking time off between drafts and retyping the manuscript. When is the story over? When the character has lost something and learned something. Boris will inspire and delight you. Trust us.

Books

Don't Let My Baby Do Rodeo

Ron Carlson Writes a Story

The Last Flight of Poxl West

A Mind for Numbers

Zen Keys

Links

HD, poet

Paris review interviews