How Many Drafts Do You Need? Listen to Allison K. Williams

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Marion: Today my guest is author, writer, editor, speaker and coach, Allison K. Williams, who also bills herself as a “guerilla memoirist,” something we’ll dig into as we talk. She has written and published on race, culture, and comedy for National Public Radio, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, The New York Times, the Christian Science Monitor, and more. Listen in as we discuss those topics as well as her most recent wonderful book, Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro From Page to Book. Welcome, Allison.

Allison: Hi, Marion. It’s great to be here.

Marion: Well, I’m really thrilled you’re here. And as an editor,    you’ve brought books to publication with authors from the top publishing houses in the world, great literary magazines and more. And online you build yourself, and I just love this, as the unkind editor, and I got that immediately. It says on the webpage for your editing services, that quote, “Praise makes you feel good, but specific critical feedback makes you write better.” And in Seven Drafts Edit Like a Pro from Page to Book, your most recent book, you restate that to say criticism is respect. Oh, sister, do I agree. And it seems from your book’s argument that respect begins at home. So, let’s start with that. Talk to me about having the discernment to respect one’s own work enough to get the most out of the editing process.

Allison: Well, I think many of us go through a stage where we need a cheerleader, we need nurturing, we need help. We need assistance to get better in our work, to start building our confidence in our work. And that’s a really valuable and important stage to go through. But the next step, the next level, is for us to actively seek criticism that, it’s not going to be cruel or gratuitous, but it’s going to make us feel bad. I mean even as a professional editor, I’m also a playwright, and my playwriting editor is amazing. Lindsay Price from Theater Folk. I always know that the feedback she gives me is going to make my work better. But every time I get a manuscript back from her all marked up, I have to sulk for two or three days before I can go back and look at it and then take great pride in fixing everything in ways that are different than what she suggested.

And so the challenge is as writers to recognize it is valuable and important to have this commitment to our work where we believe in it but we also have to make it better. And we can’t make it better entirely by ourselves because our brains fill in what’s missing, our brain fills in what’s not on the page.

Marion: Oh, that’s such a good answer. And I completely agree with you. I frequently have to tell writers, “I know it’s in your heart, but it’s not yet on the page.”

Allison: Oh, I love that.

Marion: Well, they feel something really deeply and they’re sobbing while they read it aloud or write it. But we are not sobbing yet. And I’ve seen that happen in my live classes where a writer is breaking down and yet we’re looking at each other like, “Hum, I wonder what she thinks she’s saying?”

Allison: Exactly.

Marion: Yeah, right?

Allison: And that goes back to theater as well, because I always used to teach acting students when I was a theater professor, “It’s not your job to cry, it’s your job to make the audience cry for you.”

Marion:  That’s so true.

Allison: And so often, particularly with memoir, if we are weeping and having a deep emotional revelation on the page, counterintuitively, that’s actually less powerful than putting the clues on the page and writing the details of the scene beautifully and clearly in a way that the reader puts it all together and they have that emotional transformation.

Marion: Absolutely. That is exactly right. And you teach so much of this in this book, Seven Drafts, which is really skillfully structured. To begin with, what in fact, what we are editing and you break this down, therefore the title, Seven Drafts, into the vomit draft, the story draft, the character draft, the technical draft, the personal copy edit, the friend read, and the editor read, seven. I love it. Let’s dig in.

We share a love for the phrase, the vomit draft. So go on, you explain it this time. I’m tired of explaining it to people.

Allison: Well, it’s because you just have to get it on the page. Get it out, get it out. Jenny Elder Moke has a better way of phrasing this. She calls it “the grocery draft.” It’s as if you have gone through the store, you bought what was on your list, but there was also some cool stuff on sale and oh, that lady had samples and they were tasty. So you got that stuff and then you get home and you have to put everything on the counter and figure out what am I going to make with the ingredients in front of me? And it is so easy to get discouraged at the end of our very first draft because we think, oh, depending on the amount of self-awareness we have, maybe it didn’t turn out the way I wanted it to and it feels very challenging.

And yet that rough draft that’s like the shoemaker’s elves have come in the night and left you with something that you can then polish and shape. And when we get to that vomit draft, that’s the raw material. And then from there we go, “Okay, actually I want to start here and not there.” I know so many writers who I have advised to cut their first 50 pages because that’s the part where they told the story to themselves until they figured out the story they wanted to tell the reader.

Marion: Absolutely. Cut those first 50 pages because they’re either justifying, telling it or saying, “Oh, well they won’t understand this unless I go back to my great, great, great, great grand,” no, hold on. How are you going to hook the reader? And I love the grocery draft. I once described it to somebody as my kitchen pantry, and you open the door and there’s everything in there and you use everything. And then you realize, “Oh, hmm, I put in those leftover Easter peeps, those little bunnies with the yellow-“

Allison: Maybe they don’t go with kidney beans so well.

Marion: Right. And what I’m really trying to write here is a Thanksgiving piece. And even if you lop the ears off those rabbits, it’s not going to work. And after I went on and on like this, I saw her staring at me, “You’re just really crazy, right?” No, I just can go on all day with metaphors for what you put in and what you have to take out and you do too. It’s just wonderful the way you lay this out. And you go on to say that most people, at least I think that most people use the phrase for draft two, the rewrite, but yours is really more precise. It’s the story draft where we fill in the potholes of what is not in the vomit draft and as you said now also take out according to the recipe we’re making, so what really happens in that story draft?

Allison: The story draft is where we really look at the material we’ve got and go, “Okay, this is the story. Here is the journey that I take. Here is the change that I make,” and we start looking at structure, which scenes belong and which scenes duplicate other scenes? Where is a character really valuable and important, and where do we realize, “Oh, maybe Aunt Martha isn’t actually needed in this book.” And shaping the story as a whole is absolutely the very next step because otherwise if you just start line editing, you might spend hours on a scene that you realize later you need to cut.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Allison: So, it’s that element of you pulled your rough diamond out of the ground and now you’ve got to chip away and start seeing what shape does this diamond want to be. But don’t polish a facet until you know that the facet is going to stay.

Marion: Yeah, and that’s exactly right.

Allison: We’re just metaphoring all over the place here.

Marion: We’re just going to metaphor the hell out of this thing, absolutely. So, you say in the character draft you suggest taking on the motivations of each character and you recommend checking in on point of view. This is a huge question for writers no matter what their level of experience, we’ve all written and rewritten things from different points of view to try to figure out how to get it as close as we can to our argument perhaps. So talk to me, for instance, about the pitfalls of writing from a child’s point of view versus from here and now as an adult.

Allison: So the challenge with writing as a child, whether this is a child character or whether this is yourself as a child in your memoir, we tend to imbue the child with what we know now. And it is very challenging to keep a type of voice and phrasing that’s not childish, but that reflects an earlier state of being that reflects a more innocent state of being like adult me looking back goes, “Oh, hey, my dad was a drunk,” but child, me thought my dad was real jolly and showing that jolliness through the child’s eyes may be in combination with the day I took a drink out of what I thought was his glass of water and it was a glass of vodka.

Marion: Mm-hmm.

Allison: Putting those things together lets the readers see through both the child’s eyes and what the child believes they’re seeing at the time, and see what the adult narrator realizes now.

And the trick is, as writers, we cannot put the adult explanation in the child’s point of view. And it’s okay if the reader wonders a little bit and then maybe five chapters later, the adult narrator goes, “And that’s when I realized my dad was an alcoholic.” And we want so much to spell things out for people that we forget the limitations of our particular point of view. And sometimes that’s literal. When you’re five, you don’t know if there’s cookies on the counter, you can’t see the counter. At the same time when you’re five you don’t know why did mommy cry when she picked up that earring from the backseat of the car? You just know she picked up the earring.

Marion: Oh, that’s such a good explanation. I frequently will tell people to go look at a good developmental scale like the Piaget Developmental Scale, so that they understand that what a four-year-old can cognitively understand so they understand what an 8-year-old can cognitively understand, that they understand when the brain hemispheres join and how that really causes a lot more integration of ideas.

But this is such an important piece for so many as they struggle, should I write myself from every various age and I think, oh, now there’s a hard one, right? But for me, what are you doing with the story? What are you doing for the argument when you start to take a different point of view? But that is so helpful, and I want everyone to buy and read this book, so I’m not going to walk all the way through all seven of these ideas because they’ve got to go get it.

But instead, I want to drill into two wonderfully helpful tips you give within the Seven Drafts when you say first that you need to let each draft rest for a while before undergoing the next. And that the seven drafts often take more than one revision each so to the first, why the rest period?

Allison: Because again, our brain is filling in all the gaps. When I first started editing before I had a better system for finding the right authors and helping them become ready to work on an edit so that they’re not wasting their money, wasting their time by getting edited too early.

I had so many authors who emailed me with their vomit draft, and the email always said, “All it needs is a quick proofread,” and it never needed a quick proofread. That’s the editor’s like, “Beep, beep, danger Will Robinson,” going off there. It never needs a quick proofread. It needs a complete rebuilding from the ground up.

But when we have just emerged from the joy and satisfaction and journey of getting to the end of the manuscript and typing those beautiful words, the end, we then need to take a moment and step back and let our brain disengage and step away from that world. Write some essays, write some short stories, read your friend’s book, go to the library, take a walk, listen to some podcasts.

But it takes time for the brain to reset so that we can approach with fresh eyes. And that’s where we realize not only little things like, oh, Sammy has brown eyes in chapter one and blue eyes in chapter five. I didn’t catch that. But also we realize, Ooh, actually this section is kind of slow. Maybe I don’t actually need it in the book, or, oh, hey, my motivation in that chapter, I thought it was clear when I wrote it, but it is completely not on the page. Like you said, it’s in my heart. It’s not on the page. And that resting stage is so valuable, it’s so necessary.

Marion: It’s such a good thing to remind people of, I say put it in a drawer for a couple of weeks, but I love the fact that you say, “But that doesn’t mean you stop writing.” You’re going to start thinking about what essays you might be able to extract from the book. Maybe you’ve got some scenes you didn’t use, and already, and you can put them out on a blog and on a website or in a magazine or as an op-ed, there’s all kinds of things. If you’re having a writing life that you should be doing and not just putting it in a drawer and walking away and going, doing something else, you can still write because there’s all kinds of satellite pieces that should be coming out of a book, I think.

Allison: Absolutely.

Marion: Yeah, right?

Allison: And I heard the weirdest piece of advice the other day that I thought made so much sense, which is if you’re writing nonfiction or memoir keep an eye on the key topics in your book, what is culturally relevant right now, but also be ready to write that immediate essay that you’re going to pitch to The New York Times or the Washington Post or somewhere that’s a last minute Lucy kind of place where, “Oh, hey, somebody famous just died and my book in some way intersects with that person’s story.” It is great if you already have the rough draft of that essay. So look around and see who’s getting up there in years, who has something to do with your story, but also be ready for the cultural moment to shift. And suddenly your story becomes instantly more relevant. And so that resting time, sketching out some essays is a great way to spend that time.

Marion: That’s such great advice, and I completely agree, looking for that cultural relevancy. I teach an op-ed class and I teach people to react. You’ve got to be able to react. And while, God forbid, we know it’s true that there will be another shooting in this country, do you have something to say? Does your book in some way talk about guns or gun rights or shootings or mass killings? And so have the piece ready to go, then all you have to do is put another top on it that reflects the shooting of the day. In good experiences as well, be ready, when something miraculous happens. During that period of DNA discovery that we were in that rich period some years ago, there were all these essays coming out about different kinds of qualities and traits and what we were learning, and I just loved that the writers were populating the science with story and it was deeply informative.

So let’s talk about that second point that you make though when you talk about having more than one revision, that requires energy. So let’s talk about keeping your energy for repeated versions of the same draft. And maybe you wouldn’t say it’s energy, maybe you would say you got to tone it down a little bit so you notice what isn’t in there. How would you describe about, when you say you can have multiple versions of the same draft, how do we encourage people to keep going in there and how do they do that?

Allison: That’s a hard one, Marion, because I already realized if I called the book 17 Drafts, no one would buy it.

Marion: Exactly.

Allison: I think the biggest thing to remember is that when we write, the better we get, the more there will be to fix. And so it’s actually a really good sign when you read someone else’s work and go, “Oh man, that scene was amazing.” And then the next step is, “How do I break that down? Why is it amazing? Is it because they focused on detail? Is it because the scene slowed down time? Is it because we saw a new facet of a character we hadn’t seen before?” And then the third step is how do I then apply that to my own work? How do I use that tool myself? So be impressed, see the tool, use the tool.

And I think that’s what helps sustain us because when we let the book sit and then we come back for that next draft, ideally we’ll have seen things in the world that have cast new light and make us excited again to get back to our book. And that said, there’s going to be times it’s a slog, and that’s okay. It’s not fun all the time. Sometimes it’s better than fun, but often it is not fun. Particularly writing memoir is generally not a joyful stroll in the park. And for me what helps a lot is focusing on the eventual readers, “Who needs this book? Who am I speaking to? How am I going to write the best words I can that will reach the people who need to hear them?”

Marion: Yeah, that’s the question. Absolutely. And I love the generosity of so many memoirist who are saying, I went through this and here is how I curated my life to show you my transcendent change. That’s what they’re doing if they do a good job.

Allison: And I think it’s a moral obligation. I think that those of us who have the ability and/or the time and/or the skill and/or the drive to tell our story, we owe it to our fellow humans for the people who are living the same story, but they do not yet have the courage to tell it, or they do not yet have the resources to tell it or they don’t have the time to tell it. And that’s the great gift of memoir when we are able to tell other people’s stories for them through the specificity and the beauty of our own story.

Marion: Mm-hmm, yes, exactly right. And you get to be part of a conversation, be part of a conversation as those stories piled on during Me Too, we really started to understand, despite the fact that it seems to have taken some turns and not everyone’s happy with where it went, but we were telling our tales. And it’s very, very important for people to witness each other’s stories.
So I have many answers and theories about this next question, but you’ve got a great answer in this fine book. And here’s the question, why is it so hard to edit ourselves?

Allison: Oh, Marion, what did I say in the book? Because I don’t remember, and I’m sure it’s cleverer than what I can come up with right now.

Marion: Well, you’ve touched on it to a certain extent in terms of we don’t recognize the holes we’ve left, but to get that sort of flyover of our own work, I think is what I’m trying to get at. I guess what you make is this really good point about how you’ve got to be able to read it for what it is as a story and not just see that you’ve got life Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, and Friday version to convey to us that you’ve got to see it for the story that it is.

Allison: Yes, and I mean, you’re right. It’s that we’re too involved in the story. Our brain is filling in the pieces. We are in love with what we wrote very often because I mean, hey, it’s a big accomplishment to finish a book.

I think for me, the number one trick to being able to edit our work is when you feel like it’s as good as you can get it, the next step is to print out the entire manuscript, make corrections in pen or pencil all over there, get out your scissors, and your tape cut and paste literally things that belong in other places. And then you sit down and with a fresh, clean, open, new document, you retype the entire manuscript weaving in the corrections as you go. Because anytime you get to something where you start to think, I don’t want to type all that. Nobody wants to read it if you don’t want to type it.

And every time I say that in a class, the authors look at me as though I have just kicked a puppy into the sun. And yet every time, about six months later, an author will contact me on social media and say, “I finally tried it. And it really worked and helped me make my book a whole lot better,” because just that being forced to confront every single word and judge its value really helps us elevate our work. And I mean, for me, that’s what I’ve done since I was writing bad middle school poetry and recopying each one over and over until it finally deserved a place in my hardback journal with the silver unicorn on the cover.

Marion: Oh, the silver unicorn notebook. Yes, absolutely. We all had that. Yeah, and that’s exactly it. You print it all out. I always still print everything out. I always taught you print it out. You do not change the word the first time you read it. You read it aloud to yourself touching every single word with a pencil. But making no mark on the page.

Allison: Mm-hmm.

Marion: Hearing the sentences together really changes my ability to edit, because I start to hear that there’s enormous word repetition. I start to hear the beauty of some internal rhyming. I start to hear the cadence or lack of cadence of some of the phrases, and that helps me. I love these kind of tips. And these are not the things that people think they should be doing because they think it sounds a little silly or it sounds a little embarrassing. Or in your case that you’re kicking a puppy into the sun.

Allison: Yeah, they don’t want to do that. It sounds basic. It sounds like how on earth is this actually going to help me? How can this physical process help me? But it really does. And I think the other one I’ve taught is 52 pickup. You write a one or two sentence summary of every scene in your book on a pack of index cards. You remove your pets and children from the room, and then you fling your index cards into the air and then you scrabble around on the floor until you find the scene that has to come first. And then you scrabble around on the floor until you find the scene that must come next or nothing else can happen. And at the end, you’ll be left with some cards still on the floor. And those are the scenes that don’t belong in your book because you didn’t need them to move forward.

Marion: I love it. I love that. It’s a form of audit and edit, absolutely. And I also love how you talk about plot. You state that at its simplest plot equals events, and then you go on to state that plot isn’t just what happens, it’s what happens that changes the protagonist’s life and that events that are valuable to your story strongly influence the outcome of the book.

So let’s put this in the context of memoir. I work with memoir writers all day long, and what I tell them is to curate from their lives, those scenes that illustrate transcendent change, that something must shift. So you and I really seem to agree on this, but what tips do you have for writers on how to develop the eye and discernment to identify which scenes change the protagonist’s life?

Allison: The biggest thing is look for the scenes where an abstract concept is made concrete in the details in the scene. So for example, I once wrote about a story where my aunt is resewing her underwear to make smaller underwear for her daughters. And when I first read this story, people were like, “Oh, wow, you guys were really poor.” And that’s when I realized, no, nobody was poor, but the men in the family controlled all the money and none of the mothers had enough money to sustain everything from day to day. And so they were constantly, my mother and her two sisters were constantly cutting corners and recycling, reusing before that was really even a thing because their husbands were not giving them enough money to fund the family.

So when we find these abstract details that show a concrete concept in a way that only we can show it, because that’s where memoir gets really specific to our own lives, those are the scenes that are the most transcendent, that are the most valuable, where the reader goes, “Oh man, that’s really important, and oh man, it means something even more than I thought it meant.” And it brings the reader to leaning forward into the book, to making their own deductions, to making their own connections as opposed to leaning back in a scene that just tells them what you thought and what you felt.

Marion: I love the underwear scene, and I really appreciate the generosity in what you just said in terms of saying you thought it was on the page, they had their response. You got to work that in more deliberately so that we understood the messaging there, and this is what great feedback is.

So, let’s talk about who gives great feedback. Professional editors whom a writer hires are very different than having friends, family, beta readers and more to have a critical look at your work and you give great advice on what to ask from each of these potential readers. And once again, I want everyone to get this invaluable book to read it, but I do want to dig into a bit about how to get useful feedback. You write that in your outreach to a potential reader. You often ask a question and state clearly why they are the perfect person to read this.

For instance, if the piece contains computer expertise, you’ll write to your computer friend and ask if you got the computer programming language right or for a story that takes place in court, you’ll reach out to an attorney and inquire about the court scenes if they’re realistic, if they make really good sense. So you strongly suggest we state the parameters of our needs in advance.

I’d just like you to go into that a little bit more. I do suggest this to people all the time, and they seem a little skeptical to ask for what you want? Why?

Allison: Why I learned this when I was a teenager reading tarot cards on the street in Canada, which was my summer job for three summers in a row.

And what I learned is everybody wants to be important. Everybody wants to be paid attention to, everyone wants to be thought of as valuable. And so when we approach our beta readers, not so much in the sense of, “Oh, will you please do me this favor because you’re my friend,” but instead, “You are an expert who’s expert knowledge is going to help make this book better.” You will get better feedback. It will be more likely to come in on time, and they will be more likely to actually do it because they feel trusted and respected when they are consulted for their expertise.

Everybody loves to yammer about what we know the best. We all love to talk about our favorite subject. And what I find is that when I have specialty beta readers or expert beta readers, and that’s everybody from the attorney who really knows medical malpractice law all the way down to the 10-year-old, who is the ideal end reader for this book, consulting them as though they are an expert who is going to do me a big favor, but not in a like, “Ooh, please, please, please,” kind of way as one colleague to another.

They give me tremendous feedback, and it very often helps shape the book in a way I wouldn’t have expected if I was only listening to my own opinion. And so me treating them as an expert also helps me take their opinions more seriously. It helps me give more weight to the outside readers when I know why I have asked them to read.

Marion: Oh, yes, absolutely. I also find that if you say to somebody, “I don’t need you to copy edit this,” that the friendship will last longer because those people who just feel, even though it’s a rough draft or a little further in than a rough draft, they feel that they’ve got to correct your spelling and grammar. I’m not even vaguely there yet in my draft. I’m just trying to get this courtroom scene right. So they say, “Well, I spent hours with your punctuation is atrocious.” It’s like, I didn’t need you to do that part yet. So be specific in your ask, right? And so I don’t want to undervalue for a moment your writing career, which is vibrant. And as I mentioned in the intro, you’re a well-published writer and author. And if I had to pick one thing that I love most about your work, it is definitely your voice. I like it. I trust it. I laugh out loud, I feel informed, and I think it’s well-represented throughout your work. It’s a brand.

So, here’s a question I get from writers every day, how do you find, develop, and evolve your writing voice?

Allison: For me, my writing voice came from my acting voice and specifically my street-performing voice. And where I discovered running a small circus company and performing on the street and at festivals and at corporate events, I discovered the voice I have, which is, “I’m going to tell you what to do, but I’m going to be funny enough about it that you’re okay with doing it.” And that comes from everything from, “No, we’re not going to wear black and green suits like bumblebees just because they go with your logo,” all the way up to, “Sir, I need you to hold this fire torch and don’t drop it and don’t wave it around.” And so this idea of we’re going to instruct specifically that really is the voice that I have in everything, even in my fiction. I love writing characters who have expertise in some way that the reader will learn from because that’s what I love to read myself.

I love the Dick Francis horse racing mysteries, the original Dick Francis, not the dead Dick Francis, revived by his son, who is a significantly lesser writer, no offense dude, but all of his stories, they’re not only set in the horse racing world, but one of them, the main character’s an architect who renovates old barns, one of them, the guy’s a caterer, one of them, the guy’s a meteorologist. And so as you read the mystery, you’re also learning about this intriguing, interesting world.

And I would say for all writers, what defines your voice is bringing everything you are to the page. And so I told fortunes, I was in the circus, I was a classically trained actor. I’ve traveled all over the world. All of those things get worked into what I teach, what I write, what I say. And even someone who has spent their life quietly at home, you may have maternal experiences that are far outside my realm.

I really want to know what’s it like raising a child? How does that happen? What do you say to your kid? And we’ve got to boil all these stories down into a way that is like we’d tell a friend, but better. This idea that almost everybody has a party story that we tell at parties and it’s not exactly rehearsed, but we have told it before and we know where we need to pause for laughter. And so that’s the voice we want to use in our book. Not this fancy special writer voice that gets flowery and shows all the big vocabulary we know, but like we tell a friend and just a little bit more polished.

Marion: Oh, that’s great. And I agree with you, and I was interviewing Matt Mendez recently, and he used his experience, life experience, as an example of how to write. He was a mechanic. He is a mechanic, and he talks about how I recognize a dead carburetor when I see it. So I just take it out and throw it away. Same for my paragraphs and we just howled over that.

Allison: I love that.

Marion: As much as I am enjoying all of the theatrical, the tarot reading, all of that is there. And so as we wrap this up, and I would prefer actually not to, just keep talking with you all day long, but we do need to wrap it up. I mentioned in the beginning that you’re a “guerilla memoirist,” and I want you to explain what that is because I love the voice, as I said, but the term was not something I was familiar with. So why don’t you explain to the audience what a gorilla memoirist is, please?

Allison: Well, number one, like Che Guevara, not the ape, I called myself “Guerilla Memoirist,” and in retrospect, I should have picked something that was easier to spell and did not have two legitimate variant spellings when I first got on social media. But I picked the name because at the time I was writing a lot of extremely honest, I wouldn’t say vulnerable memoir because I mean, on one hand it was vulnerable to people who were not as show-offy as I was, but where I was being very clear about my own villainy in my life. I had kept a blog for several years where I was recording the dissolution of my first marriage, largely due to my own behavior, and just really kind of putting it out there. And what gorillas do is they blend into the environment and they leap out and grab you when you least expect it.

I mean, that’s what a successful guerilla does. So as a memoirist, I think of it as the ha ha ha stab. I want the reader to be laughing along and, oh, this story is fun. Or, “Ooh, this is intriguing, and it’s kind of exciting,” and then, “Oh my goodness.” And then they feel like they just got stabbed. One of the nicest compliments I ever got about my writing was a short story when someone said it was like being bitch-slapped by Ray Bradbury in the heart, and I was like, that’s it. That’s what I want to write.

Marion: Well, you just keep at it, sister, because we’re reading every word. Thank you so much for coming along today. I deeply appreciate it.

Allison: Thank you for having me. It’s been great talking to you, Marion. I respect your work so much. It is such a pleasure to chat with you.

Marion: Oh, thank you. The writer is Allison K. Williams. See more on her at allisonkwilliams dot com. Get her book, Seven Drafts: Self-Edit Like a Pro From Blank Page to Book wherever books are sold.

I’m Marion Roach Smith, and you’ve been listening to QWERTY. QWERTY is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reach them at overitstudios dot com. Our producer is Jaquelin Mignot. Our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit marionroach dot com, the home of The Memoir Project where writers get their needs met through online classes and how to write memoir.

And thanks for listening. Don’t forget to follow QWERTY wherever you get your podcasts and listen to it wherever you go. And if you like what you hear, please leave us a review. It helps others to find their way to their writing lives.

Want more help? Join me in live, online memoir 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 next  Master Class, the prerequisites for which are Memoirama and Memoirama 2. Live, once a month. Limited to seven writers. Get a first draft of your memoir finished in six months.