“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.”

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

We go to literature—and perhaps especially creative nonfiction literature—to learn not about the author, but about ourselves; we want to be moved in some way.

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.

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.

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

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

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.