As with all prose writing, memoir writing really comes down to voice. You are asking to be invited into your reader’s home. Will they be...

So we’ve talked about how Trevor Noah creates the classic archetype of the scampish kid, and he also taps into the universal archetype of ...

Up to a certain point, readers love rascally misbehavior. We’re happy to read a paragraph like this one, in the first chapter of Trevor N...

There are a couple of ways to tell a complex anecdote from your childhood when you’re talking to your friends. Sometimes you start with t...

There is nothing you can do that is more self-important than writing a memoir: “Hey, you! Hey, everybody! Stop what you’re doing and devot...

I’m memoir crazy now!   And 2018 crazy!   I figured why not try another bestselling memoir from last year, but this time with an antipode...

We already talked about personifying nature with “The God of Small Things”, but Tara Westover in “Educated” does it even more so, many tim...

As I said before, Arundhati Roy begins “The God of Small Things” by jumping all around, not landing at the book’s real 1969 timeline for 4...

Last time we looked at the way Arundhati Roy accumulates reality from small, odd, vivid details, but once we piece it together “The God of...

You may have noticed that in each of my annotations I’ve praised opening sentences for having no adjectives or adverbs, and in our last po...

So I’ve got a problem: I was going to talk about how Arundhati Roy uses a lot of adjectives and adverbs, which goes against my advice, but...

Another bestselling novel from 1997!  I know what you’re thinking: “Um, isn’t this a big jump from Lee Child?” But is it? Both Jack Reach...

On Sunday, we’ll do a radically different novel, but first let’s wrap up Reacher: The Annotation Project: Killing Floor Why Do They Onl...

Trent Reedy is an award-winning YA novelist who wrote the excellent novels pictured above. His “Divided We Fall” trilogy was painfully pr...

A lot of you have been holding your nose as I’ve stunk up the place these last two weeks with an examination of Lee Child’s first Jack Rea...

The hardest part of thriller writing is getting your hero into and out of trouble in compelling and believable ways. The easiest way to g...

We mentioned last time that readers of Lee Child’s books admire Jack Reacher’s eyes, wishing we could see the world the way he sees it (al...

Lee Child insists that he doesn’t research, doesn’t outline, and doesn’t revise . He just sits down and writes, and the most he ever dele...

When I work with authors, one of their greatest frustrations is that potential agents and publishers, and even some contests, only want t...

Let’s do our first Annotation Project in a while. Lee Child’s Jack Reacher books are comically macho, but they’re big fun and massive bes...