On the Power of Writing, With Allison Fallon

ALLISON FALLON KNOWS ABOUT the power of writing it down. She is the author of 13 books to date, the latest of which is The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life. Ally runs the online education platform called “Find Your Voice,” through which she teaches, coaches, and supports writers worldwide. I’ve wanted to talk with her forever about so much, but particularly what she knows about the power of writing it down. Listen in and read along as we discuss that and so much more.

MARION: Welcome, Ally.

Allison: Thank you so much for having me. I’m so happy to be here.

Marion: Just delighted to get to talk with you and congratulations on the new book.

Allison: Thank you.

Marion: Oh, you’re welcome. I’m very excited about it because I so believe, I think we agree, on the power of writing it down. So we’ll get into that, but I’d like to set this up for people so they understand what you’ve done before this and really understand your authority. And as I said in the opener, you’ve written 13 books, two of which I think might best inform others on the most recent one. The first of those that I want to talk about is your book Packing Light: Thoughts on Living Life with Less Baggage. And the other is Indestructible: Leveraging Your Broken Heart to Become a Force of Love & Change in the World. In the first, Packing Light, you revealed that you got out of college with many of the same expectations we all share, and things didn’t quite go as you planned, to go on an epic journey to visit all 50 states, only to discover that shedding your stuff is harder than it sounds. So let’s just talk about that for a minute. When did that book start to take shape for you?

Allison: Such a good question. I mean, in some ways I think the book was taking shape from the time that I was a young girl, knowing that I really had always wanted to write and be a writer and write a book and become an author. And my career took some twists and turns as I moved through high school and college, and well-meaning adults would say to me, like, “Oh, that’s so nice that you want to be a writer, but you should also get a real job.” And so-

Marion: Like real adults.

Allison: I know, I know. So I got a teaching degree, I taught in a public school system for a while. I also was a barista, and I’ve waited tables, and a bartender and all kinds of other things. But all along, that book was kind of brewing inside of me. And for me, that book was to write that book, but also to live the experiences that I wrote about was this leap outside of the path that others expected of me or others were suggesting that I be on into the path that I really wanted to choose for myself. And it felt scary at the time because the way that it always does to go against what we feel like culture expects of us or our family systems or the religious communities that we grew up in. But it was also, for me, the step into adulthood and also, I guess, like appropriately so. It was also the step into the career and the work that I’m doing now.

Marion:

Sure. Absolutely. And were you taking notes while you were on this epic journey or did you write years later? I just want to give people some sense of you had this experience, and then when did you write about it actually?

Allison: I was actually blogging as we were traveling and this was the age… it was like the boom of blogs. I started out in the very beginning, right before we left on the trip. As I was thinking about going on the trip, I was writing what could be called blog posts, but I was posting them on Facebook, back in the day when Facebook had Facebook Notes, and you could write a note and then post a link to the note on your Facebook page. And that was how I originally started “blogging” before I knew how to… I didn’t know how to start a blog. And then once I figured out how to start a blog, right at about the time that everyone was doing this, I just started a blog called Packing Light, and I detailed most of the stops of our trip. I almost said every stop, I don’t think I did every stop.

And I wrote about people that we met and wrote about things that happened to us and kind of tried to pull universal themes or universal… like a moral to the story, I guess, from these experiences that we were having. And I thought that I was writing the book, and it came as a big shock to me later when I sat down to actually write the book that I couldn’t just sort of mash these blog posts together and call it a book. I had to do a little bit more work than that.

Marion: Yeah. That little bit more than work thing can sometimes be the shocker, but I love the idea that you were deploying in real time what you were seeing in thinking and that you learned how to stitch those together. I think that I give people advice all the time to test your material in short forums on the public and see what they think.

Allison: Totally.

Marion: But then, that shocker is right, either it’s not you haven’t actually written the book, you do have to then put those together.

Allison: Yeah.

Marion: So in your later book, Indestructible, you revealed that you married a pastor, only to discover that he was not the man you thought he was and you had some choices to make. So talk to us about when that book started to take shape for you and what the writing of it did for you and your understanding of self.

Allison: Yeah. Well, the book started as a totally different book because after I published Packing Light, I was in the hamster wheel of the publishing world where they’re like, “Okay, next book, what are you going to write about?” And I thought, “Oh, I’ll write a book about marriage. The original book was supposed to be called Our First Years, and I was writing about how our first years of marriage had been so difficult, but we had done some therapy and voila, now we were healed.” And I was sitting down each day to write that book the same way that I had written any past book that I had written, and I was really frustrated. It was the first time in my life that I had had really serious writer’s block to the point where I would sit down to write my pages for the day. And it would just be like nothing would come to me, and I’d be sitting there staring at the blinking cursor. And it’s such a frustrating feeling.

And as I’m in the process of trying to write that book, I uncover a piece of information that was I talked about in Indestructible as pulling up a thread on the sweater that unravels the rest of the sweater. So my marriage fell apart and I left that relationship in the process of trying to write this book, which there’s some irony there that’s obvious to see. But what I discovered from that experience was that when we encounter writer’s block, it’s not just writer’s block, it’s life block and that our writing can be kind of diagnostic like that because it can show us where there’s something we want to say or do or something that we know in our real life that we’re not allowing ourselves to know.

So that was, for me, the first really profound experience was seeing the connection between writing and life. And that book morphed into, after I left the relationship, my life was in shambles. Practically speaking, I was trying to figure out how to make ends meet financially, and what we were going to do with this house, and how we were going to split up all the assets, and what was going to happen with our dog, and I was just devastated. My worldview was totally shattered, and I just started writing down what was going on mostly as a life raft to keep me afloat in this new… I was like in the deep end. I just was like, I don’t know which way is up. I don’t know what’s going on. So my writing at that point in my life became much more out of necessity than anything else. So it was just a way to know that this was real. This is really my life. This is really what’s happening. And I would say often during that time, it feels like I’m living a movie, like this can’t possibly be my life.

But writing was the way to help keep me present and remind me that this was really my life. And over time, that grew into this book called Indestructible. When I was writing it, I thought for sure there was no way I was ever going to publish this. It was just a way to better understand myself and the story that I was living. And that really is the time in my life where this new book, The Power of Writing It Down grew out of because what I started to see is that if you can write down your story, even if you don’t ever plan to publish it, you get to take back your life. You get to decide, this is how I’m going to tell my story to myself, this is how I’m going to tell the story to the world. Nobody else gets to write my story for me. I get to write my story for myself, and that’s a really powerful feeling.

Marion: Yeah. And that’s why I wanted to just set that up this way because I think that the world online is filled with people who say that they are writing coaches and you’re a writer when you say you are, and all of these kinds of things, but the authority of this book is right there.

Allison: Yeah.

Marion: These are what you lived. This is what you did. And that’s why you know what you know about the power of writing it down. You have firsthand knowledge that a regular practice of writing can completely transform your life. And I think that that’s a statement that people need to understand that you didn’t make this up, that it’s absolutely legitimate. So it seems like that’s, as you just said, that’s really how your business began, and I congratulate you on that. I think that’s magnificent, and I think it’s really admirable. And I think it also gives encouragement to people who in the midst of fill in the blank, whatever it is, COVID to divorce, to whatever, can make some notes and can be helped and find their way out.

So congratulations on this new book, The Power of Writing It Down is very, very powerful. I frequently say to writers I work with or pretty much anyone who will listen to me, that I don’t know how I feel about anything until I write it down, and I mean it. I mean, even from those complex topics of the day or to the simple love for my dog, we all speak the same way. We say things like, “Oh, he’s so great. He’s like really, really great,” which means nothing.

Allison: Nothing.

Marion: But when I go to write it down, nothing, or my husband, like, “He’s really great.” What did you learn? Nothing. But when I got to write it down, the world of inquiry into myself and the world of annotation of what I’ve read and what I know seems to open up. So you’ve done a lot of research on this engagement with self. So let’s just peel this back a little bit. What first happens, do you think, or whatever in whatever order you want to tell it, what happens when we sit down to write, do you think?

Allison: The biggest transition is we move from operating in one part of our brain to operating in another part of our brain. And I’m not a neuroscientist, but like you mentioned, I have done a lot of research on this. And this is the most compelling aspect of all of the data to me is that what’s happening when you pick up the pen and write is you’re accessing this other part of your brain that we don’t access that often. And the important piece about that is so much of your daily behavior and the way that you experience your life is buried in this part of your brain called the limbic system, where your subconscious life lives.

And if we’re not regularly serving the scene of that part of our brain or we’re not checking in with it to see how are things going, what is my filter for the world, my filter for how I experienced my life, what are the buried beliefs and ideas and thoughts that I have about the world that are creating the experience that I’m having of it, then we’re just kind of living our life and thinking that the things that happened to us are completely outside of our control. And while a lot of things that do happen to us are outside of our control, like you mentioned coronavirus, for example, it’s been a really tough time for a lot of people and people have lost jobs, they’ve lost loved ones, they’ve lost all kinds of things, and so much of that is out of our control. And yet, there’s something that’s inside of our control and that’s how we tell the story to ourselves.

So writing does that. Writing forces us to go into that unconscious part of our brain to survey the scene, see what’s there, see how are we currently telling the story to ourselves. And a lot of times, just by shifting the way that we tell the story to ourselves, we can shift the way that we experienced it, so that doesn’t mean that you can change the details of your situation always. When I was going through the divorce and I was writing about the story, it wasn’t that writing about it changed the details of my situation, I was still in a really crummy situation, but writing about the story changed the way that I saw myself inside of it. So instead of seeing myself as this poor, sad victim who had been betrayed and taken advantage of, I started to see myself as this heroic character who was overcoming decent possible obstacles and challenges that had been put in front of me.

And just that simple shift changed the way that I experienced the story instead of sort of like moping around and thinking like, “Everyone else gets this happy life, and I’m just stuck with this crummy one.” Instead of that, I thought, “I’m incredible. I’m amazing.” And this is what I love so much about teaching people, the writing process too, is watching people have that epiphany. People will say to me sometimes like, “Do you ever help someone write a book and you think their book just really isn’t all that interesting?” My answer to that question is no, and the reason for that is because everybody is so remarkable. Every person, every human being who’s walking the planet right now is so remarkable, and they don’t have any idea how remarkable they are until they tell their story to someone who can help them see how remarkable they are.

So when I’m working with an author to help them write a book, whether that’s for publication or I’m just helping them write down their story, it’s really just about me helping them see the parts of their story that are already remarkable. And they have this kind of look that comes over their face, where they go, “Oh my gosh, I get it. I’m so amazing.” And that’s such a fun… It’s such a fun moment for me to get to experience with them.

Marion: It is a wonderful thing. I love working with authors and I love that transition, that transformation, that transcendence that’s possible. And I want to be very clear. We’re not talking about rewriting your story, as you said, we’re not talking about making it a happy ending. There is no happy ending in an abuse memoir. What there is, is understanding what the story is. When people come to me with those stories of abuse, whether it be emotional, physical, or sexual abuse or all three, when they say I have a member that’s about abuse, sometimes we discover that what the memoir is about, is about the many things that were lost along the way, one of which is their voice, which in abuse is lost because you’re told not to tell, you’re told many things about yourself. And you are, along the way, discovering your voice again.

And the story and the writing of that story give you that gift back a voice, and it doesn’t make it okay that it happened, it doesn’t make it different that it happened, it makes it that there’s this voice aspect that allows you to put your hands on your own story. So it’s not delusional, it’s not happy ending time, it’s none of those things. And you make a very strong point in your work that we can feel more empowered to make changes when we write as well.

And I found that fascinating that as we discover that we have a voice, maybe we’ll start to use it. It’s my experience with a lot of people who have experienced some kind of abuse. Healing from past pain and trauma, relieving anxiety and depression, these are things that you write about. And I think what you’re saying is that we contextualize. So let’s talk about that a little bit. Let’s use that word. How would you phrase that? If I said use contextualize in a sentence for how you believe writing helps shape a life going forward? What is that about context that is so supportive?

Allison: The word that I would use is framing. That’s the word that I use when I teach this, but it’s the same. It has the same meaning of what you’re talking about. When I think of a frame, I think of a picture frame. So when you have a picture frame and you put a picture inside of it, the reason that you have the frame is not so people focus on the frame, it’s so people focus on the picture inside of it. That’s the whole point of the frame is to point your attention to what’s inside of it. And the same is true when we contextualize or when we frame our stories, the question is, what do I want to pay attention to? What do I want to look at? What do I want to see when I see this thing? And what do I want other people to see when they see it.

You would never go buy a frame and frame a terrible picture of yourself that you didn’t like or frame like a terrible memory from your life and hang it on your well. No, you’d frame the memories that you want to meditate on. You want to think about, you want other people to know about you. You frame the time that you climbed to the top of that mountain and conquered that challenge for yourself. You frame the people in your life who are the closest to you, and you hang those people on your wall. You frame a cute picture of your baby and put that on the wall or your dog or whatever.

So the same is true with telling our stories, we create frames for our stories. And when we do that, we decide here are the things in the story that I want to focus on, that I want to remember. And that doesn’t mean that you don’t ever write, there are parts to the abuse memoir, for example, in my case. In Indestructible, there are moments in that story that are really painful to remember, but it has to do with how I frame them. I don’t frame the story like by just telling this horrible thing that happened to me, I frame the story by talking about how I was able to overcome what took place in my life.

And one thing I teach when I’m teaching memoir is there are two types of problems and stories. There are internal problems and there are external problems. And the external problems can be really challenging to fix or change. In fact, most of the external circumstances from our life, I think we spend way too much time trying to fix the external circumstances of our lives. We’re trying to lose 10 pounds or get this person in our life to start talking to us differently or trying to get a new job or trying to change the dollar amount in our bank account or whatever. And I think if we spent more time focusing on adjusting or changing the internal problems that we face, whether that’s feeling insecure or not feeling good enough, not feeling worthy, feeling like we’re unlovable, believing about ourselves that we’re weak, or we don’t have what it takes.

If we focused on changing those things about ourselves, the external problems would either become unimportant to us, we’d be like, “Who cares how much money I have in my bank account?” or they would just naturally change too. For the reason that you’re talking about, when a victim of abuse finds his or her voice and begins to use it, he or she will often find that the things that this person thought were unchangeable about their life are actually changeable, that I can say to someone, “You know what? I don’t like it when you call me at 10 o’clock at night and lay all your problems on me right before I go to bed. I would prefer if we were going to talk about your problems that we do that during the day or I’m making that up on the fly.” But what you learn is you can set a boundary and people will respond to that boundary. And a lot of times they’ll respond by saying, “Thank you for telling me. I never knew. I’m happy to honor and respect that boundary.”

So all of that to say, when we focus on changing the internal problems first, we find that we’re able to overcome many of these external problems. And the external problems that we aren’t able to overcome, oftentimes become unimportant to us or they’re just outside the frame. They’re not in the picture anymore. So the contextualization that you’re talking about here is the most important part of what happens when we tell our stories is we decide, here are the things I want you to remember and talk about, here are the things I want to remember and talk about, and everything else is just outside of the frame.

Marion: I love that. You have to go outside my frame. Absolutely. I totally get that. And I love the language you use. I went all around your site and through your books and in your book trailer on your site, it states that most people go through their whole lives without ever expressing themselves. I kind of had to grab my heart and say, “Oh God, that’s true.” Isn’t it? And while I’m not going to ask you to scoop yourself, I want people to buy the book and find out how they can be more expressive. I would like you to speak a little bit to this resistant we mostly meet in life. Why can’t we be more creative?

Allison: Some of it is just the normal pressures of adult life. I mean, this is not to underestimate the fact that when you’re a grown adult and if you have children or other people who are relying on you, sometimes that’s not children, but elderly parents or other people in your life who need your support, you have financial obligations and responsibilities, you’ve got a mortgage, you’ve got people who need something from you. You have a job that you have to go to every day. I have an eight-month-old baby at home, and my life has never felt more full than it does right now. So some of it is just the practical realities of being a grownup in the world, like all the millennials are saying now, hashtag adulting.

There’s some of it that’s just very practical that this is how we get into a place where we’re operating only from our frontal cortex, and everything is logical and analytical and focused on external problems. And I think it just takes some training and also some compassion for ourselves to give ourselves little windows of opportunity where we can say, “Right now, I’m not going to focus on being productive and efficient because right now for 5 minutes or 10 minutes or 20 minutes, I’m going to give myself permission to explore, to be creative, to ask questions, to play, to not know the answers, to not be on a path, to not be logical or analytical. And to just have an experience of being a human being. We might not get as adults 12 hours a day to do that or 6 or however many you would get as a kid, but you can have 5 minutes or 10 minutes or 20.

And when I’m encouraging writers to adopt this practice of writing, that’s what I’m encouraging them to do is just take 30 seconds for yourself, if that’s all you have today, to pause and think about what do I really need or what am I curious about? What’s calling to my highest attention? And then the rest of the day, of course, can often get taken up with emails and text messages and whatever else, but a writing practice does remind us to do that, that reminds us to come back to ourselves.

Marion: Absolutely. You have this lovely phrase in your work where you say, you say that we silently coach ourselves to keep the peace. And I felt that deeply. We’re told I will speak to the writers with whom I work. And some of their discouragement came from teachers they had, some were educated in more dogmatic religious settings, sometimes parents say, “Oh, you can’t be a writer. There’s no value to it.” So we silently do coach ourselves to keep the peace. Don’t raise the idea that you’ve got this idea for a short story. Don’t ruffle the feathers if you’re a banker, stick to your banking, damn it.

But you’re telling to people, you’re saying set aside some time for yourself and see what creativity is in there and what it speaks to, and I love that. We silently coach ourselves to keep the peace. I think anyone just hearing that phrase will feel that deeply. Is there anything more you want to say about that? When did you recognize that you silently coached yourself to keep the peace and were those early memoirs part of shouting out and not keeping that peace?

Allison: Absolutely. Quitting my full-time job and setting off on this journey across the country to drive to all 48 states in my car with my friend when I’m 25 years old, that was definitely a moment where I was like, “Okay, I’ve been keeping the peace in my own life and also keeping the peace in my family structure and in the culture that I live in and my religious faith community. And just kind of trying to jump through the hoops and go through the motions and do the things that are expected of me, but I’m really unhappy doing that. And so what’s a way that I can take back my life for myself and do something that I really want to do and create a life that I would love to be living.

But the one thing I want to add to this is creativity is inherently chaotic. And people will often say this to me when I am coaching them with a writing project, we enter into the process and then they’re like, “My life is in chaos. Things are going crazy.” And I’ll say to them, “Creativity is inherently chaotic. So when things feel chaotic, don’t think you’re doing it wrong. No, you’re doing it right. You move into the chaos and you try to make order of the chaos. And when you come out the other side, you hope that you’ve created some kind of order of the chaos.”

When you deliver a final product to the publisher, when you’re writing a story or writing a book and you want someone else to read it, you hope that it doesn’t read as a total chaos that no one can understand or wrap their brains around. You hope that it reads is like a cohesive story. Something that’s going to have a clear message or a takeaway, but when you’re in it, when you’re writing it, it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like you’re feeling around in the dark at something that you don’t really understand, and that’s the work of a creative person, and it’s the work of a writer. So I think it’s really just about reframing and re-understanding what it means to be in that creative process to know that when you feel that sense of chaos, it doesn’t mean you’re doing it wrong. It means you’re doing it. This is being creative.

Marion: Yeah. I love that. I absolutely love that. And I mentioned in your opener that you had published 13 books to date, and that’s just something to be congratulated on. Packing Light was published with Moody’s a few years ago. And your book Indestructible with Morgan James. This time, The Power of Writing It Down, you go on with Zondervan, and it’s a Christian communications company as is Moody’s. So let’s talk a little bit about finding the right publisher for the right book. What insights can you give to listeners about approaching the correct place to publish and whatever comment you’d like to make about. We use this phrase, Christian publishing, which I think is wildly misunderstood. So I just love you to educate us a little bit about finding the right home and what Christian publishing actually is.

Allison: Yeah. I think it’s really finding the right home for your book is just about finding a partner who sees in your book what you see in the book. And for me, the draw to each of these publishers was always the editor that I worked with. It was always partnering with an editor who saw the book the way that I saw the book and who really caught the vision for the book. So, the larger organization of publishing I never was as concerned. You can really easily get wrapped up in wanting to be one of the big five publishers or wanting to work with a certain publisher because they have a reputable name or whatever, and those things can be important.

But for me, it’s always about when I’m looking for an agent or I’m looking for an editor to work with, I’m always looking for people who have caught the vision of the book that I want to write because the other thing that often happens, we’re living in a weird time, it’s really exciting and good and also has some drawbacks as authors because what can sometimes happen in the industry of publishing is you can show up and say, like, “I’ve got this book idea.” And the publisher can say, “That’s nice, but we’d really like for you to write a book about this.”

And sometimes there’s some kismet there, some overlap, but sometimes as authors, you can end up getting kind of scooted over into another lane, writing a book that you didn’t intend to write because there’s a paycheck behind it. So it’s a complicated conversation, the idea of art and money, and there’s not like one black and white way to approach it. But for me, what’s always worked really well is finding an editor, finding an agent, finding a team of people who really believe in the message that I have to share and who were helping me shape it in a way that it’s going to have the most impact with the most people.

Marion: That is so important. I completely relate to that, and I think that’s a very helpful way to look at it. And as we wrap this up, I think we may have something else in common, and I’m interested to see if you agree. I find myself really turned off by the multiple memes that I see recirculated in social media badges about how deeply hard writing is every day. You know the ones. “My first draft in my mind,” and we see some picture of some fabulously, beautiful actor, and then, “My first draft in real life,” and there’s somebody faced out on the kitchen floor, and I think it’s really unfortunate.

Allison: Yes.

Marion: Absolutely. That memoir writing in particular is the single greatest portal to self-discovery. And this idea that it’s so hard and so awful and so difficult, I don’t think it does anybody a bit of good. So what do you think of all of those and what do you do when you see those? I don’t repeat them. I don’t send them along, but I just wondered how you felt about all that messaging, about how hard and awful writing is.

Allison: Yeah. You and I are on the same page here. I think it’s really damaging. And I think, for me, writing has been a lifeline. It’s been a life raft. It’s a thing that I go to because the page is a place where I can tell the truth that I sometimes can’t tell in other parts of my life, or I can tell it there before I can tell it in other parts of my life. So I meet so many other people who feel the same way. And when you really get under the surface, they feel the same way. They might not at first admit that writing feels like that for them. But I believe when you really boil it down, that writing is human nature. And that writing for human beings is communication. It’s spirituality, it’s creativity, it’s self-discovery, it’s prayer. It’s all these things that… It is when naturally drawn to the writing process.

And what’s happened is, is it’s been stripped out of us. The idea that we can write has been stripped out of us by the education system, by people who have tried to divide us into, like, “Are you right-brained or are you left-brained?” And by the messages that have been passed down for generations that say only certain people get to be writers. The fact of the matter is writing is essential to human survival in the modern world, and all of us are writers. And I think that we need to let go of and abandon this idea that writing is so hard.

What I try to do for my clients, honestly, is try to help them find a way to enter into the writing process where there’s some lift for them, where they actually start to crave it. And they start to go to it as a natural impulse rather than the other things that they might’ve gone to when they’re having a tough day. So whatever that takes for people, whether it means they’re writing not with a pen and paper, but they’re writing on their smartphone, great. If that’s what makes it easy for you, if it’s what makes you turn to that when you’re having a tough day, then do it that way, or if it’s taking the time limit off of it and instead of writing for 40 minutes, you write for four minutes, then great. Do that.

Find a way to bring some lift to your writing life and find a way to make this something that you really love to do and enjoy doing. And honestly, even for people listening, who are on a publishing path and who are aspiring writers and who are after things like getting a major publishing contract or being on the New York Times list or whatever, you have to find a way to love your writing life or you will burn out because it’s a long road without a lot of… It’s kind of thankless. So you don’t always get the validation that you’re looking for. You have to find a way to fall so in love with this thing that you just want to do it every day, or you will eventually quit doing it.

Marion: We’re going to leave it there. Thank you, Ally. Thank you so much. That’s perfect. I really appreciate you coming along today.

Allison: Thank you so much, Marion. This has been a pleasure, really a joy to be here, so thank you for having me.

Marion: You’re welcome.

The author is Allison Fallon. The book is The Power of Writing It Down: A Simple Habit to Unlock Your Brain and Reimagine Your Life, just out from Zondervan. See more on her at find your voice dot com, and follow her on Twitter. I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY podcast is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overit studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marion roach dot com and take a class with me on how to write memoir. And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to QWERTY and listen to it wherever you go. And if you’d like what you hear, please leave us a starred review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

Want more help? I am a memoir coach, memoir teacher and memoir editor. Come see me in any one of my online classes.

Memoirama: Live, 90 minutes. Everything you need to write what you know.

Memoirama 2. Live, two hours. Limited to seven writers. What you need to know to structure a book.

How to Write Opinion Pieces: Op-eds, Radio Essays and Digital Commentary: Live, 90 minutes. Get your voice out into the world.

And keep in mind that I am now taking names for the 2022 Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. It’s live, once a month, and limited to seven writers who are determined to get a first draft of their book-length memoir finished in six months.