by Eugénie de Rosier

It was a grand task to take up the humanitarian challenge of Peace Corps work for 27 months in Southeast Asia. Whew! It was great to come home in May 2008, but not so fine to be faced with the chore of a job search in our slumped economy. Nonetheless, I started a disciplined and organized effort in June.

Seventeen months later, in December 2009, I was still without full-time employment and had been wrestling with writing fiction full time. I’d made a commitment to writing twice and did so for two weeks each time. Downbeat newspaper articles or national labor statistics affected me and I returned to networking. Not seeking paid employment was scary.

On the other hand, designing my life to have a kind of dedicated open space for writing fiction had been a goal for years. I’d published nonfiction for decades. Fiction, my heart’s desire, was generated, the usual way, over weekends and in the evenings across years. Here was an opportunity.

It came down to trusting myself. Why not risk writing full time for six months? See how much material I could generate. Certainly no money would be forthcoming. I receive a $1,200 stipend monthly. I’m a wizard at managing money. I could tighten my belt further. In December, I began.

My decision and the work felt right gradually. With the rhythm of daily writing, my employment cares vanished. My goal was to generate material, revise, polish, and market short fiction, heading toward a book-length manuscript. I tracked my writing time and disciplined myself to produce four to six hours daily. Usually that worked. Some days I wrote eight to eleven hours.

Everything related to writing counted: thinking, interviewing, researching journals, marketing, applying for grants or contests, writing classes, editor consultations, tracking hours, generating material. Occasionally, during those months, I was gripped with fear, and the siren call of a paid job overwhelmed me. My linear thinking intruded on my creative cortex, urging it with demands for action. How could I justify no health insurance, no IRA contribution, no investing? I mastered my thoughts, gradually, banishing every idea that didn’t align with my writing goals.

The six months ended on June 30. I’ve written, revised, edited, and cut five short stories, four of which are being marketed, individually, to literary journals. I hired an editor to assess each story, repeatedly. He told me I’d “been incredibly productive,” which made me realize, for the first time, that I had been. A literary journal editor commented: “We were very impressed by your writing. We hope you will be encouraged . . . to send us something else.” Oh, yes. A friend offered to evaluate my manuscripts from a reader’s perspective.

This way of living feels right, and despite its challenges I’m going to continue. On to month seven.

Eugénie de Rosier has published creative nonfiction in II Cities, Hurricane Alice, and Vertigo, and essays or commentaries in many periodicals. Her work has been included in an anthology: Streams from the Sacred River: Women’s Spiritual Wisdom. She wrote at a Norcroft retreat and has been working on short stories. In recognition of her creative efforts, she has won six writing awards. In June 2008, Eugénie returned from the U.S. Peace Corps with a sackful of raw material for new stories. She was a 2009 Loft Mentor Series finalist in fiction.

by Francine Marie Tolf

Philip Gerard’s observation about a book’s structure feels spot on to me—the average reader doesn’t notice flawed structure until a book falters. As a writer of memoir, I know how vital good structure is. It keeps me in control of my material instead of the other way around. But before starting a book, I have a choice: do I plunge into my story and let structure develop organically, or do I map out a plan?

The preference seems to be to plunge in. “As far as I’m concerned, the less you know about where you’re headed, the better . . . Take your time, listen more to your heart than your head, and let your writing shape itself into what it wants to be.” Elizabeth Berg’s advice (from her book on writing, Escaping into the Open) is echoed by creative writing instructors across America. It’s advice I find immensely attractive, an approach to writing that values the act itself and removes a lot of intimidation.

But is it always better to plunge in? There are advantages to knowing where you’re headed. You’re less likely to spend weeks writing pages you will ultimately discard. What’s more, self-imposed boundaries can lead to surprisingly creative solutions. As Gerard points out in Creative Nonfiction, if you think you need absolute freedom to produce art, “you’ll find yourself at odds with most of the greatest writers who ever lived.”

Since working inside a thoughtfully planned structure is not necessarily a bad thing, I am wondering why more writers don’t practice it. I asked four memoirists whose work I admire how much planning went into their memoirs before they started writing them. Marge Barrett, Vicki Forman, Kate Hopper, and Nicole Johns were happy to share their experiences.

It turns out that neither Marge nor Nicole had any idea that they were writing full-length memoirs. “I just started writing stories of growing up, then started to think of these memories as a collection,” says Marge, who is currently revising a memoir about growing up in Marshall, Minnesota, tentatively titled Drowning in Love. “Later, I worked on finding a narrative arc to connect my childhood stories, wanting to include both the voices of the changing young girl and the present reflective woman.”

Nicole’s experience was similar. She’s the author of Purge: Rehab Diaries (Seal Press, 2009), a ForeWord Book of the Year Finalist that is already in its second printing. But Nicole didn’t know she was writing a successful memoir when she started Purge. “I was just producing material for class. I wrote the bulk and then went back and looked for narrative arc/organization/themes, et cetera. I feel like I did everything backwards!”

Kate knew she wanted a book detailing the premature birth of her daughter due to severe preeclampsia, but felt no need to impose structure at the outset. It was only after 50-some pages of what she wryly calls “vomiting as many memories, images, and scenes as possible onto my computer” that she began to discern a shape to her narrative (which is currently in revision and titled Ready for Air).

Among these four writers, Vicki is the only one who actually did some deliberate planning before beginning This Lovely Life (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2009). Her memoir about the extreme disabilities of her very premature child was the winner of the Bakeless Nonfiction Prize and has earned high praise from reviewers. “I definitely had a sense of the narrative arc, and I had a list of scenes I knew I needed to include, those that were essential. I’m not much of an ‘outliner,’ but I do make a lot of lists and they sometimes have a beginning and middle and end to them.”

So where does that leave us? Four wonderful memoirs . . . not one of which was formally outlined. Seems there’s something to be said for plunging! But that isn’t the whole story. As I considered the answers of these four writers, I was struck by how their organizing techniques echoed those listed by Vivian Gornick in her now classic guide to nonfiction writing, The Situation and the Story. While Gornick does not recommend outlining per se, she’s definitely concerned with a memoir’s structure and suggests various ways of finding it. One is to decide which memories are key and use them to organize material. This is what Vicki did at the outset and what Kate accomplished after spewing all those pages onto her hard drive. Both writers knew intuitively that certain scenes were crucial. They weren’t satisfied until they discovered what they were so they could build the rest of their books around them.

Voice, too, can impose order, says Gornick. When the narrator knows exactly who is speaking, chances are she’ll know why she’s speaking—and an authentic memoir is on its way. Marge’s need for a device that allowed her to speak persuasively as a young girl and a mature woman reveals an instinctive understanding of how the right voice can organize disparate memories.

Finally, in The Situation and the Story, Gornick addresses the question of what a book is really about. Not the subject matter, mind you, but the reason it was written. Before beginning Purge, Nicole knew about eating disorders and what it was like to be in a rehab facility for treatment of one. She also understood that research, even coupled with personal experience, wasn’t enough. Nicole had to unearth why she needed to tell her story. The bulk of Purge may have been written before she found the answer to this question—but it wasn’t shaped into a book until she did.

All four memoirists told me they were satisfied with the slow, sometimes circuitous way their books came about—the many hours and many pages of hard work it took to discover cohesive narrative. Without taking their time and trusting that form would develop in the process of writing, they are convinced they might not have been blessed with insights that found their way into their stories. “I learn so much about what I’m writing in the process of writing,” says Kate. “I think I have to write my way into the story before I can see the structure that will best serve it.”

Nicole notes that there’s “a fine line between helpful organizing and procrastination” and points out that structure and cohesion may well be “too daunting to think about when beginning a project.” She intends to write her sequel the same way she wrote Purge: by diving in and organizing chunks of writing later. But before attempting a second memoir, Marge says she would give serious thought to a few questions: “What is my purpose in writing this? What simply must be included? How to begin, end? What structure would compel the reader to move on, turning the pages?”

This sounds like a pretty good idea to me. It took me ten years to create Joliet Girl from scattered essays, more than one of which was ditched when shaping the final manuscript. Like Vicki, Kate, Nicole, and Marge, I do not regret the process, but if I’d had a clearer idea of what I wanted to accomplish with my book, it might have taken five years to complete instead of ten.

In the end, I believe there’s nothing wrong with thinking long and hard about purpose and structure before turning to that first blank page. Such planning could ultimately prove useless, but it certainly won’t smother the creative process or hinder what Vicki calls “that element of happenstance” from surfacing.

The fact is that if you’re writing honestly, you can’t not surprise yourself. I know the four gifted writers I interviewed would agree that these unexpected discoveries are what make a memoir unique and memorable for the reader—and the author.

Francine Marie Tolf is the author of Joliet Girl, a memoir, and Rain, Lilies, Luck, a full-length poetry collection, both from North Star Press of St. Cloud (2010). Her essays and poems have appeared in numerous journals. She recently received an Elizabeth George Grant and a fellowship from the Ragdale Foundation in Lake Forest, Illinois. More about Francine at www.francinemarietolf.com.

by Caryl Yvonne Hunter

All writing, even fiction, contains some truth. Characters are usually based, at least in part, on someone we’ve met in our lives. Our perceptions, beliefs, and experiences can’t help but come through in our stories.

But when writing memoir, the author can’t hide behind a character. And no matter how much you might try to avoid telling a story, it will eventually have to be written or you just can’t move on with your life. I read somewhere that author Kathryn Harrison had to write about her incestuous relationship with her father, something that had been running in her head for years. When she finally wrote it out, she was no longer blocked. Said Harrison, “One of the solaces that art can offer you is the chance to make something out of what’s hurt you. You can objectify an experience, put it on paper, craft it, and shape it. There’s perhaps an illusionary control over it. But it is significant.”

I wrote my memoir piece for the anthology Voices of Multiple Sclerosis several years after being diagnosed with the disease. As often happens with me, essays start to flow out once I have that first line—and it just had to be shared. I suppose it is the same with all artists: writers need to write as painters need to paint as musicians need to play. Many love songs are about being heartbroken; many paintings express incredible pain. I am inspired every day by other people’s stories—told in whatever medium they choose. That is part of the reason I decided to make a very personal piece a public one.

I mainly look at myself as a freelance writer and photographer, but I also work in social services. I frequently joke that working in social services gives me plenty of book material, but I am actually quite serious. A serious comment. A serious business. My clients inspire me every day. What they have had to overcome in their lifetimes—often on a daily basis—would make most people just roll over and quit. But they keep on trying, and better than just surviving, they keep on excelling.

A couple of years ago I had a particularly difficult client, on a particularly difficult day, say something that hit me hard. You develop a thick skin in this business, but I admit I’m still a sensitive soul, some days more than others. On this day he was really struggling and he lashed out at me: “It must be nice to not have anything wrong with you.” As politely as I could without lashing back I said, “I suppose it would be, but I wouldn’t know. I have plenty of things wrong with me. Remember, not everything is visible.” I let it go at that and changed the subject. When you are working with someone who is having a hard time, you put the focus back where it belongs and off you.

I’ve thought of that encounter often . Some of my clients are just elderly and frail, some have physical disabilities, some have had traumatic brain injuries, and some are very mentally ill. I sincerely like all my clients. I learn from them as much as I can teach them. I help them, and quite often they unknowingly help me. I have numerous quotes for future books, many funny lines, and some characters that are so rich I couldn’t make them up even if I tried. I say it all the time: “We all have something wrong with us. We are all human. ”

When my client said, “It must be nice to not have anything wrong with you,” I felt fortunate that my issues were hidden. I’ve had asthma since I was a kid, and until better medications came out a few years ago, I would frequently be in the emergency room getting adrenaline shots because I couldn’t breathe. I also lost the ability to have a child a few years back. Those two things I’ve become open about. But there’s one that I have always been quite silent about—having multiple sclerosis.

I wondered a few years ago if I would ever realize my dream of being a recognized writer. Now, many articles later, that has become a reality. And, at the end of 2009, I finally got into my first book, the anthology. And this time the thing I’ve always been silent about has made it so I just can’t be silent anymore.

Because, if you can help someone, you should. And if you have a story that reaches out to others, you should tell it. And even if your disease is invisible, maybe there is someone else feeling the same way, and it is time to use your voice to tell people, “Hey, I live with this. And I struggle like everyone else. Every day. But I’m living pretty darn well. And I’m positive and happy—and sharing my story.”

Although I know I have many other stories to tell, there is something particularly important about telling this one. And I was thrilled one day last November when I came home to find a cardboard box sitting on my doorstep: an advance copy of Voices of Multiple Sclerosis. The book’s subtitle is The Healing Companion: Stories of Courage, Comfort and Strength. As scary as it was to tell a then-awful story of the discovery of the disease, during a then-awful year, things are different now. I have trouble with my eyes sometimes, I’m a bit unbalanced, I have some pain in my legs, I have some numbness in my hands, and I have a hard time with fatigue and heat. But, like my clients, I recognize myself as not just a survivor. I too am learning and growing every day.

My friends remember all the horrible things I went through during that time—the MS diagnosis was just the tip of the iceberg. My little story, “Tough Year,” near the back of the book, sums it up pretty well. But I lived through it. And now, with its publication, it is just another example of something I have always believed: there is always something good that comes out of something bad. My first book, my first real voice on the matter. And for that I am thankful and blessed. And, most important, no longer silent.

Caryl Yvonne Hunter is a freelance writer and photographer living in Minneapolis. She also works in the social services field in outreach programs throughout the Twin Cities area. She has been a member of The Loft Literary Center for several years. The book Voices of Multiple Sclerosis, an anthology of 33 articles by people with multiple sclerosis, caregivers, children, and doctors, is available at bookstores. It is also available on lachancepublishing.com and amazon.com.

by Bev Bachel

“I know we haven’t spoken in years, but I’m about to make a big career move and would really like to pick your brain. Lunch?”

“Okay, I think this draft of my résumé should do it. Could you take one more look and tell me what you think?”

“Hi, I’m friends with your friend _______. Would you be willing to put me in touch with your publisher?”

I get several requests like this each week. Perhaps you do as well. If you’re like me, you go out of your way to help. After all, that’s what being a good friend and colleague is all about.

by Mary Carroll Moore

When my novel, Qualities of Light, was published last fall, I celebrated as anyone would, fully enjoying the readings, book signings, and kudos. The book did well and received some good reviews. I even had my brief moment in the sun, being interviewed on WNPR in New Haven, Connecticut.

Then the furor died down. I unpacked my suitcases, went back to my writing desk, and faced my next book in progress.