August | 2025 | The Brevity Blog
10 posts published by Guest Blogger and Allison K Williams during August 2025| The Brevity Blog
10 posts published by Guest Blogger and Allison K Williams during August 2025| The Brevity Blog
By Deborah Carr Anne Lamott first coined the term “shitty first draft” in her 1994 book on writing, Bird by Bird. Her intent was for writers to free themselves from the burden of feeling that their first draft had to be perfect, or even coherent: it just had to be written down. But while the […]| The Brevity Blog
By Vickie Barret Years ago, during a writing class with a gifted and generous writer-teacher, the topic of what to read while writing came up. I looked to our writer-teacher for a singular answer, and without hesitation, he explained that he couldn’t read anything in the same genre he happened to be writing in. It […]| The Brevity Blog
By Amy Shea I didn’t set out to write a researched narrative nonfiction book. I’d spent over a decade writing mostly personal essays and creative nonfiction. But when I felt the pull to write on the topic of disparities in death and dying, which eventually developed into my debut book, Too Poor to Die: The […]| The Brevity Blog
By Natalie Serianni It’s been four months since I’ve written anything. Sure, I’ve jotted down ideas. Does that count? And it’s… weird. The problem wasn’t that I wasn’t writing. The problem was that I didn’t miss it. It all started in January. I was teaching a nine-week personal essay writing class outside of my full-time […]| The Brevity Blog
By Margaret Anne Mary Moore Seeing my Google Doc’s “Last Opened” timestamp, I cringed. Though my essay-in-progress was a piece I was excited about, seven months had passed since my last revision. At that time, I put a few bullet points in virtual sticky notes with the directions I planned on taking—“More emotion needed; […]| The Brevity Blog
By Marcia Heath A few years ago, I set out to write a biography about a couple of genius surfer dudes living a dream life in the Caribbean. It was a curious choice that mystified both my friends and me, a recovering executive and non-surfer in Maine. Why was I drawn to the story of […]| The Brevity Blog
By Laura Rink Your current writing project has stalled. A project you won’t abandon. A project that must progress, and soon. You stare at the page. You scroll through the manuscript. You flip through your notes. No solutions appear. You swirl in despair. Now what? Continue swirling in despair. This is an option—sometimes you need […]| The Brevity Blog
By Allison K Williams What makes a place, or a thing, matter? In The Late Scholar, Jill Paton Walsh’s continuation of Dorothy L. Sayers’ Golden Age detective novels, Peter Wimsey sees a book once owned by Alfred the Great. The scholar showing it to him doesn’t feel like that adds much significance: “Well, I don’t […]| The Brevity Blog
By Sue William Silverman In third grade, I lived on the island of St. Thomas and often visited the duty-free jewelry shop in Beretta Center. Not to buy, but to admire. Once, standing by a display cabinet shimmering with diamonds, emeralds, rubies, I overheard a tourist say the word “bijou.” I didn’t know what it […]| The Brevity Blog
By Michele Cantos Garcia “I’m 70 and single again,” the glamorous actor-turned-writer read tenderly from her notes. It was her first time in a memoir class—and my first time teaching it—but she alr…| The Brevity Blog
By Diana Friedman In 1971, my mother published her first book—a Dell Pocketbook guide to employment for female liberal arts graduates. I spent my childhood watching her hunch over her typewriter, p…| The Brevity Blog
10 posts published by Heidi Croot and Guest Blogger during July 2025| The Brevity Blog
By Stephanie Mitchell I had been coaching a memoir writer for six months and my client was three-quarters done with the first draft when she told me she was quitting. It had been a difficult road—h…| The Brevity Blog
A Q&A with Alyson Shelton By Andrea A. Firth Over the past year, Alyson Shelton has interviewed over 50 writers on Instagram Live about their response to the prompt “Where I’m From.” The conver…| The Brevity Blog
By Claire Polders I’m not a poet. I voiced this denial multiple times in my life and with complete conviction. It’s the first thing I told Alyson Shelton when she invited me to contribute to her “W…| The Brevity Blog
Dear Writer/Artist/Creative Person of Some Type— We have been admiring your writing/painting/non-specific creative thing for a while/some time/the length of time it takes to do a Google search now …| The Brevity Blog
Explore how AI can enhance your writing process, transforming rough drafts into polished works with creative insights and structural guidance.| The Brevity Blog
By Cindy Eastman So, I gave this prompt to a couple of my writing groups recently—Does your writing change you? How? I was wondering myself if it was true: has my own writing changed me? Having com…| The Brevity Blog
By Allison K Williams Brevity’s Editor-in-Chief considers his options for a new literary agent “Eeeeee! Eeeeee! Eeeeee!” were my measured and intelligent words upon scheduling The Call. For t…| The Brevity Blog
By Laurianna Murray It’s easy to think about writing as a solitary task. We write alone. In our office, on the bed, at the kitchen table. Even in a coffee shop surrounded by people, we are alone, i…| The Brevity Blog
By Karen Egee When my mother died, grief cracked my father open like a geode. Something about his state of vulnerability along with his emotional connection, his continual reaching out, clawing bac…| The Brevity Blog
By Katie Rose Pryal Life doesn’t come to us as a complete story. It comes in pieces, or fragments—what I call “leftovers.” Like this: I stumbled over a crack in a sidewalk today, which remind…| The Brevity Blog
By Caitlin Wahrer When I checked out Master Slave Husband Wife, the biography of an enslaved American couple who emancipated themselves in 1848, I expected a history lesson. I did not expect suspen…| The Brevity Blog
By Allison K Williams & Jane Friedman A writer asked me, “Allison, why are memoirs so much harder to get published than fiction?” I took the question as fundamentally true—that memoirs are hard…| The Brevity Blog
By Laura Zinn Fromm A few days ago, one of my students emailed. She had read an essay I’d just published about my father—dead now 19 years but still giving me plenty of juice to write about. The es…| The Brevity Blog
