Writing Certificate

I've been working on my memoir for almost a decade now, which delves into my abusive marriage to my now ex-husband. It was a challenging time, marked by a toxic relationship, but I've found solace in expressing my truth and documenting my story. While I’ve shared some of my pages with my writing group, I've kept my memoir under wraps from my family until recently.

A few weeks ago, I allowed my daughter to read some of my work, and while I knew that it would be challenging for her, she had an extremely negative reaction that made me question whether I'm prepared for the pain that publication might bring to her and other family members who are part of the story. I'm grappling with how to handle her presence in the narrative. I don’t think I can exclude her from the story, considering her firsthand experience of the abuse and the role she inadvertently played as our relationship deteriorated. I hate the thought of shelving my memoir before finishing it, but I also feel paralyzed. Is there a way for me to stay true to my experience without causing collateral damage to loved ones? Any advice would be greatly appreciated.

Truth Seeker in Turmoil
 

Dear Truth Seeker,

Oh, how I understand your conundrum! It’s a pickle that every memoirist finds themselves in at one point or another. Unless your memoir is of your year spent meditating in a cave in solitude, in writing about ourselves, we inevitably write about others. We have to. We must. With the exception of solitary confinement, every memoir is about, or at least contains, relationships of some kind: to a parent, a partner, an ex, friendship, a child—and/or all of the above. Even memoirs about our own addictions, mental health, travel journeys, or careers inevitably involve other people.

Before I address your question, congratulations on working on your project for almost a decade! That’s too important to give up. So let’s do away with that option straight off. Your daughter—who is not the antagonist of the story—shouldn’t get to dictate the fate of your book, in my opinion.

I’ll briefly tell you my own story on this front: I wanted to write a memoir of my first marriage to my best friend, who is gay. The reason for the marriage was that he could have been deported otherwise and I wanted to keep him with me. The reason for the quandary? This could have been seen as illegal at the time. Things were different back then. Fearing legal consequences, he didn’t want me to write about our relationship—what it was and what it wasn’t. I hatched a plan. “What if—if the authorities question us—I’m just another fake memoirist? What if it’s all fiction? How would they even know?” He said that if I was willing to put my writerly reputation on the line to prevent any bad fallout if it arose, he’d be okay with seeing what happened. And guess what happened? Nothing! Time passed. Laws changed. Our situation looked so ambiguous to begin with. He came to my readings. All was well.

I share this to encourage you. Things can work out with writing about others, even if at first it looks bleak or even impossible.

For your case, I’ll share my favorite Anne Lamott quote on the topic, which you may have seen: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them they should have behaved better.” (It sounds like your daughter was more of a bystander, though, so this would apply to writing about your husband and the abuse you experienced.) 

And another piece of advice I received from a mentor of mine, memorist, journalist, and novelist Susan Shapiro, went something to the effect of, memory is subjective and personal, and if someone else has a differing perspective, they are welcome to write their own memoir telling their version of events.

The reason I share these first is because they are, well, simple; don’t worry about this, write what you need or want to. Of course, the question you’re asking—and this issue in general—is more nuanced and complex, but I like these bold statements as a sort of what if? 

I think you should write the full book as if you’re going to put it in a drawer, not pursue publication, and it will never be seen by anyone but you. Free up your ability to be absolutely honest and bold. Go everywhere you please within the writing process. And at this time, that’s really all that matters, because you can talk to people about their roles, fact-check, change names, and/or take anything out later on.

So please first go back and finish that book as if NO ONE else but you will ever see it. Put everything in, your entire truth, your daughter, your ex, everything.

Then, let it sit for a month or two, return to it with fresh eyes, and make decisions about what absolutely belongs, and if there’s anything gratuitous or unnecessary you can take out. Ask yourself: does it move the story forward? If not, it can probably come out. This can save you some details your loved ones might take issue with. For instance, how is a scene different if your daughter is in it as a bystander, versus if you simply took her out? (Not suggesting you take her out of the whole book, but you can do a revision pass on the questiondoes my daughter being in this scene/chapter/section matter?) Then you can write in an author’s note something along the lines of “I’ve minimized other family’s involvement in certain places to protect their privacy.”

Another revision question: while you’re free to go anywhere and everywhere in drafts, a version that will be read by others must interrogate your own experience more than anyone else’s, so make sure the primary inquiry is into self, which helps ensure the lens stays focused on the person at the center of the experience—you. Self-implication and examination ensures that the story is ultimately about YOU, a transformation or lesson in your life that’s relatable to others and speaks to experiences we all go through (love, death, heartache, humiliation, miscommunications). Your memoir is about your own experience and perspective more so than anyone else’s, even if they appear in the work, and that lets you off the hook a bit as far as what kinds of details you reveal about anyone else in the story. Given that you are mining your own depths and interrogating yourself and your decisions and actions first and foremost, self-inquiry and reflection aren’t really elements others can get up in arms about. This is reflection and retrospection, interiority, and your personal changes and growth through the difficult experiences you’re investigating on the page. For example: “the moment I realized I would not take this anymore, moved out, and filed for divorce.” What brought about the change(s) in you? What can you mine from the experience that could help others in similar situations?
 
In terms of risking hurt feelings, there’s no way to guarantee your daughter won’t be upset with you when she finds out in the book about things you may not ever have told her. However, know that this can also open channels of communication in your life as well as your writing—it can be an opportunity to face fear and work out complex situations on the page and off. I encourage you to continue talking with your daughter, especially about the cathartic process you’re getting through the writing, how healing it is for you, and the possibility of minimizing her role in the memoir so that it’s something she can feel okay with if and when you pursue publication. It may take a while, but keep communication open while also not talking about your project too much. Save your energy for the writing itself.

If you want to obtain her approval on the manuscript—which is such a personal choice, in the end, how much or little you want to involve someone else in your book’s process—you might opt to show her only sections or pages in which she appears. And it’s also up to you whether you want to share it for approval or notes, or as more of an FYI, such as, “I’m going to start looking for an agent to represent this book and shop it around to publishers, so here are the parts where you are present on the page.” 

Just make sure there is no cause for libel, and know that publishers have lawyers who take care of this later in the process, too.

For now, don’t shelve your project. Shelve your worries. 

Write your truth!

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Do you have questions for our writing instructors? If so, feel free to submit them to [email protected] for possible inclusion in our next quarterly Spotlight.

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We are thrilled to celebrate new publications, awards, and other writing-related news from our student community.
 

• Wendy Adair (Novel Writing Certificate) wrote in with this news: “The audiobook of my first novel, The Broken Hallelujah, has been awarded a 2024 Gold Medal for First Place in Audiobook Overall Presentation by BookFest. It was also recognized last year with an IPPY Bronze Medal for Wartime Fiction from the Independent Publishers Book Awards, and was a finalist for the 2023 International Book Award and the Page Turner Award. My first mystery, Deliver Us From Evil…and the Six O’Clock News, was published in January, and the second in the Brentwood Women Mystery series, Deadly as a Walk in the Park, will be released this summer.”
   
• Diane Byington (Novel Writing Certificate) has just published a brand new novel called Mia’s Journey.
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• Brian Christopher Giddens has a new piece of flash fiction published here. He also wrote in to share this good news: “I have a non-fiction chapter included in this anthology (#1 in Great Britain for memoir/non-fiction). The book is about transitions, and my chapter is called "Write Your Next Chapter." It's about how I transitioned from early retirement to writing fiction and poetry. I also mention Stanford's writing program as a source for learning and inspiration, which it continues to be today. I start a new short story class tomorrow night, in fact!” 
   
• Leslie Fiering, a student in Rachel Smith’s class, “Crafting Unforgettable Short Stories,”  has a new essay (written in that class) that she published here, as well as another piece here. 
   
• Anne Glaser has published an essay on an FBI raid and investigation of her husband's pain clinic in the Michigan Quarterly Review. 
   
• Betsy MacWhinney published a Modern Love column a while ago that was just chosen to be read by Celsete Ng for the Modern Love podcast. 
   
• Simi Monheit (Novel Writing Certificate) is celebrating the publication date of her debut novel, The Goldie Standard, which was named a “Best Indie Book of March” by Kirkus Reviews, which also gave her their coveted and elusive starred review. 
   
• Lydia Morrey (Novel Writing Certificate) wrote in with this really fun update on where her writing journey has taken her: “For the past few years, I've been writing professionally for game companies. I work on tabletop roleplaying games (an example of a TTRPG would be Dungeons & Dragons). Last year, I was promoted to Lead Writer of The Stormlight Archive RPG based on Brandon Sanderson's bestselling series. It has been a dream come true! I put writing novels on the backburner while I was making leaps in my game writing career, but I am finally starting an entirely new draft of The Wilting Lotus, which I will be querying upon completion. I still can't believe I get to do creative writing as a full-time job now. It's a dream come true!” 
   
• Jamie Pessin has two short stories that have been published recently, "Mikveh" and "Shofar," both written while she was a student in Stanford Continuing Studies writing courses.
   
• Elaine Ray (Novel Writing Certificate) was the recipient of the Alexander-Green News and Documentary Award as she was inducted into the Black Legends Hall of Fame Silicon Valley. As described in The Stanford Report, “Whether at The Boston Globe, Essence Magazine, or Stanford University, Communications Director Emeritus Elaine C. Ray has remained committed to community, justice, diversity, creativity, and lifelong learning.” 
   
• Suanne Shaffer (Novel Writing Certificate) wrote in to share that: “I got so upset by the actions in Ukraine and Palestine that I brushed off my second novel, Hunting the Devil, with some minor revisions and am releasing it with a new cover on April 1, 2024. From April 7-July 15, 2024, the ebook will be free for the 100 days the Rwandan genocide lasted. Just my way of trying to promote awareness.” Grab a copy of this wonderful novel while you can!
   
• Liam Taliesin (Novel Writing Certificate) has a new novel out, Lithium Fire. Read more about his experience of writing the book in our Featured Essays below. 

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Instructor Writing News

Suzanne Finnamore’s wonderful memoir, My Disappearing Mother: A Memoir of Magic and Loss in the Country of Dementia, is now available as an Audible book read by the author.







 
Nina Schuyler’s novel, Afterword, is a finalist for the Foreword INDIES Book of the Year Awards in two categories: literary fiction and science fiction. Congratulations, Nina!








Greg Wrenn is touring to promote his debut memoir, Mothership: A Memoir of Wonder and Crisis. Read this wonderful article that he published in Writer’s Digest about the pleasures and pitfalls of doing research when writing creative nonfiction.








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Feature Essays: Rachel Howard and Liam Taliesin

Rachel Howard

Rachel Howard, who has published both a novel and a memoir, and teaches in both of our certificate programs, reflects on the connections between novel and memoir craft:

Not long after I published my first book, a memoir about my father’s unsolved murder, I gave a reading at a Master of Fine Arts program for writing. “I appreciated your memoir,” a professor told me before I headed onto the stage. “You used a lot of fiction writing technique.”

Really? I hadn’t thought of myself as using fiction writing technique, and I hadn’t considered “technique” a thing to be applauded. I just wrote the book any way I could, by finding memoirs I admired and trying to emulate the way those memoirs were written. One of my favorite books, released just a few years before I started drafting, was The Boys of My Youth by Jo Ann Beard. Writing about her childhood, Beard dropped the reader into vivid scenes full of sensory details. So, for the first year of drafting my memoir The Lost Night, I strove to write similarly vivid scenes, dropping the reader right into the night when I was 10 and woke up to my father’s blood in the hallway. In other scenes, I let the reader feel the sweat on my thighs as I sat on hot vinyl car seats, let the reader sense the prickly dry Central Valley grass stabbing bare feet, let the reader smell the dung from the neighborhood dairy. And I let the reader hear what characters said in real time, even though I could not perfectly remember it.

Scenes, sensory details, reconstructed dialogue: evidently this was fiction writing “technique.”

After The Lost Night came out, I went back to school for a Master of Fine Arts in writing. My second book, written after I graduated, was a novel. Writing The Risk of Us with the benefit of schooling, I was much more aware of “technique”: how to end chapters with a propulsive new development, how to track the character arc by identifying the character’s core internal issue and pushing her further and further towards facing it (or definitively NOT facing it, as the case may be!). I worked deliberately with technical tools like rhythm, making sure the sound of the sentences brought the reader inside the feeling of the scene. But again my primary method was to read and re-read—and read yet again—the books I wanted to emulate. I read Jenny Offill’s novel Department of Speculation back to back eight times.

A lot of people told me this second book read like a memoir. They questioned whether it really was a novel. In hindsight, I used a lot of memoir “technique” in that novel, working with a narrator who sometimes speaks in a confessional way to the reader, and shaping the book with two arcs: an arc of action and an arc of reflection.

These days, I am back to writing a memoir. Funnily enough, after I published my first memoir, people in the publishing world told me I shouldn’t write fiction. Then after I published a novel, people in the publishing world told me I shouldn’t write memoir. Hmmm.

Only you can best determine what genre your work should be, and what technique will serve it. For me, the calculations have been both complex and simple. At the end of the day, I write memoir when I want everything in the book to be factually true, and for the reader to know this. This could be because I am writing in order to make sense of facts that I’ve never been able to fathom. Such was the case with the memoir about my father’s murder. I needed the facts to be true so that I could reach my own arc of understanding that would be the peak of the book.

In other cases of choosing nonfiction, I want everything in the book to be factually true because I am paying tribute to a real person or place, or because the material has power as documentary information. This is the case with the memoir I’m writing now, which pays tribute to a 90-year-old piano bar and the real-life person who played piano there for more than 57 years. But true facts about a piano bar don’t have the same power as true facts about an unsolved murder. (That “Why should anyone care?” question rings a lot louder!) To make this memoir work, I’ve needed to make it read like fiction. My main technical inspiration this time has been, of all things, a novel about boxing: Fat City, from 1969, by Leonard Gardner. I’ve now read that novel six times.

“Technique” in writing is just another word for “how to create the effect you want to have on the reader, using only words and page space.” The wonderful thing about technique is that it transcends all genres and forms. We can learn plenty of technique that might be useful for a memoir by reading essays and poetry, or from watching films or listening to music. Fortunately, gaining technique is an intuitive matter as much an intellectual endeavor. The important thing is to find your inspirations and to examine them closely, again and again and again.
 

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Liam Taliesin

Liam Taliesin, who finished the Novel Writing Certificate and is now celebrating the publication of Lithium Fire, wrote in to share this exciting piece of news:

Years later, I came to understand the meaning of those simple lines. Death grows a winter garden long before the tree boughs hang low with fresh blossoms and fruit. As we age, friends, family, colleagues, and other folk pass on to whatever realm waits. Grief never entirely ends, but permeates the spirit with quiet melancholy. We carry inside those who have passed, honour them by holding them close, maintaining their legacy, and keeping their memory alive without regret, without rancour, but with love. This not only helps keep them alive, but enriches and uplifts us. We are heirs to their strengths and finer qualities.

Living with ghosts is the natural state of writers. They haunt and amuse; charm, threaten, intimidate, and ultimately seduce the scribe. Often they will pace silently, patiently waiting for their turn on the wheel. After a lifetime of wrestling with these ghosts, I learned to embrace them in my work. I am the custodian of their memory, the guardian of their history. And while they do remain shadows of their former selves and my recollection flawed, my expression an imperfect, pale reflection of who they were, it is what I have to work with. The urgency to honour them is all-consuming. I try to give voice to them as best I can.

At the beginning of my writing life, my goal was to paint pictures with words, write music with the rhythm of sentences. I thought it was enough. In time, I discovered there was more and I needed to share stories, create characters. I struggled alone for a long time without community, feedback, or the lessons to help me grow as a writer. Through the Stanford Continuing Studies Novel Writing Certificate, I found necessary support, a place where we could debate the value of the semicolon or the verity which makes a story hum. The program helped me finish a novel.

In the past, I claimed creating a work of art is an act of courage. I would amend that now to say it is a sacred trust and must be exercised with humility, humanity, and profound recognition of the effort’s poverty. Fusing the retelling of someone’s story with imagination hopefully speaks to others, touches a chord, and offers a truth which resonates. I have tried to achieve this in my first novel, Lithium Fire, which was published in February by Bookland Press, a small, fiercely assertive publishing house in Ontario, Canada. Art is alchemy, transforming that which is conceived in the mind into material constructs. We turn to it for solace and insight into the human condition. It is a form of expression which dissolves chaos to reach other like-minded souls and facilitate the evolution of empathy and self-discovery. It is all any worthy wordsmith can hope to achieve.


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Remembering Amy Ettinger

(Photo credit: Dan White)

It is with great sadness that we share the loss of a beloved writing instructor from our community, Amy Ettinger, who passed away in late March. 

Amy was the author of many articles, personal essays, and a book on ice cream. She wrote about her cancer diagnosis in a piece for the Washington Post that received a tremendous response from readers moved by her account of "choosing to say yes to life," and feeling that she had no regrets. In a second story—published in print the day before she died—she reflected on some of the meaningful moments during her final months.

In honor of Amy's spirit of adventure and joy, her husband Dan has launched the project "Live Like Amy." We encourage her former students and anyone inspired by her writing to sign up and join the community.


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