what we hold

After a lengthy hiatus from writing memoir to write a second book, my first of fiction, I returned to memoir, and recently completed an essay about my mother and I during her final months of life . . . or so I thought. Yes, grief was palpable throughout the paragraphs, yet, when I read the essay a final time before [...]

stepping into your own writing style

Lately, I’ve been into writing styles as I plow through my summer reading list. I read closely for the tone, word choice, grammar, and language, the author manipulates to tell a story. I can’t help but to scrutinize what I read, from personal essays, and women’s fiction, to even nonfiction books about trees. My traveling eyes home in on a [...]

In a slump? Stay there for a while

I’m in a slump. The Wisdom of the Willow is completed, polished, shiny and bright, awaiting publication; the momentum of writing an outline for my third book has slowed to a crawl; a documents file of half-baked writing projects has been left to bake further; and I can’t think of a thing worth reflecting on for any meaningful monthly blog [...]

A writer’s brand and a little logline

I sat down today with an intention to write a logline for my new book, The Wisdom of the Willow, currently temporarily parked in a copy edit. Anxiety bled through thoughts and limbs, and I stalled at jumping into it. What do I say? How do I narrow my book’s synopsis to just a couple of sentences? Einstein’s words struck. [...]

Absent but not forgotten

I owe you an apology. I haven’t seen you in two months with no attempt to say hello with even a scribble of a few sentences. We haven’t tangled in sorting mixed words or found clarity in excavating unclear meanings or built a solid structure from a wobbly one in a long time. It’s not that I haven’t thought about [...]

Memoir-writing beyond its definition

Last month I wrote about how the definition of memoir, characterized by a single incident during a part of one’s life (not an entire life), can hold writers back from writing their memoir. As a writer, maybe you can’t see one outstanding incident to create memoir; there are many experiences that happened to you. And maybe you can’t see a [...]

of first pages and Hemingway

Prior to my memoir going to press, my hybrid publisher forwarded me “first pages.” As a first-time author, I was unaware of such a thing, a PDF file of how my finished book would look. First pages was essentially a last call, an opportunity to use a phone-a-friend lifeline to correct errors missed in copyediting or proofreading, and to check [...]

Can’t write? Use your stream of consciousness to get you started

Though it may sound counterintuitive, writers have been distracted during this pandemic. But how can we be now that we're no longer engaged in a multi-tasked life previously understood as “normal?” Self-isolation should give us nothing but time to write but we can't seem to get the job done. The absence of what filled my time, a void, became the [...]

too much time?

I was writing my follow up to “now moments,” a previous post, when I found the writing meandering. The twists and turns reminded me of the “crooked street”, Lombard Street in San Francisco, where I lived in my thirties. I didn’t know why I was experiencing a lack of focus. Now that I have loads of time with no demands [...]

on losing my voice

Last month I posted “truth didn’t set me free.” It was about my experience one early January morning in a courtroom. I read the post a week later and then took it down. As a memoir writer, I didn’t like how I wrote it; there should be more meaning to the experience than what I had written. But I wondered [...]

Go to Top