(6 Types of Personal Essays for Writers to Try.)

What struck me most was not the punchlines or the details, but the act of slowing down. Of listening deeply. Of acknowledging that these moments are finite. We will not always have the people who matter most to us, but we can hold onto their stories.

And that, in many ways, is where compelling storytelling begins: with the willingness to notice the moments that sparkle.

Every writer has experienced this challenge: You know something meaningful happened in your life, or in your family, or in your childhood, but when you try to turn it into a story, it lies flat on the page. You can feel its importance, yet the translation from life to narrative is murky.

This is where the concept of the Sparkling Moment comes in.

A sparkling moment is a tiny, vivid memory—positive, resonant, emotional, or simply alive, that captures something essential. It’s not the whole story. It’s the spark that leads to the story.

The exercise comes from a chapter in my book A Story For Everything, and I’ve used it for years to help both new and experienced writers find clarity and contour in their narratives. It’s simple, it’s surprisingly powerful, and it teaches you two skills at once: how to listen and how to shape.

Below is the core exercise, and then we’ll break down how to use it in your writing practice.

Step One: The One-Minute Story

With a partner (or a voice recorder if you’re working alone), tell a very short true story, something happy, positive, or meaningful that can be told in 60 seconds. It could be something from childhood. Or something from this morning. The smaller the moment, the better.

Examples often sound like:

• “My daughter finally rode her bike without training wheels today.”
• “My grandfather taught me how to fold a fitted sheet when I was ten.”
• “Yesterday, a stranger paid for my coffee and it shifted my whole day.”

These are memories, not epics. They’re sparks.

If you’re working with a partner, have them listen fully without interrupting. Their only job is to be present. If you stall out before the minute is up, they can encourage you with gentle prompts like “Go on” or “Tell me more,” but they should avoid asking questions that steer the story.

Step Two: The Retelling

This is where the magic happens.

After you finish your one-minute story, your partner retells the same story back to you, from memory.

Sometimes I ask the reteller to speak in first person, as if it were their own story. Other times, I ask them to retell it exactly as heard. Either way, the real work is happening not in the retelling, but in your listening.

When you hear your own story told back to you, you immediately notice:

• Which details they remembered.
• Which details they dropped.
• Which parts they emphasized.
• Which parts surprised you.
• Which emotional beats landed without you trying.

This is live, instantaneous feedback on how your storytelling is being received.

Writers spend so much time inside their own heads, shaping sentences and rearranging paragraphs, that they often forget a story is a two-way experience. Someone else has to hear it, understand it, and feel something from it. The Sparkling Moment exercise shows you exactly how much of your story is actually crossing that bridge.

In workshops, I don’t reveal this retelling step ahead of time. Inevitably, listeners laugh and groan when I tell them they’re going to have to retell the story, because most weren’t truly listening. They were half-listening and half-preparing their own story for when it would be their turn to talk.

Sound familiar?

Writers often do the same thing: Instead of staying inside the moment, they jump mentally to what’s next. Instead of sitting in the sparkling memory, they try to build the whole narrative arc before they even understand what the story is really about.

Listening is not passive. It is generative.

Step Three: Identify the Emotional Pivot

Once you hear your story reflected back to you, ask yourself:  Where did the story change?

Every compelling story has a pivot; the moment when something shifts. It might be tiny. It might be emotional rather than external. But it’s the pivot that gives the story meaning.

In the restaurant last week, my dad told a story about a painting he kept in his dental office for years, an image of the Patron Saint of Dentistry. He originally bought it from another dentist; recently, he passed it down to his nephew (my cousin), who is also a dentist. On the surface, it’s a simple story about a painting changing hands. But as he spoke, the emotional pivot became clear. It wasn’t about the sale at all. It was about passing the torch. It was about tradition, and pride, and the “spirit” of the profession he devoted his life to. The painting itself was an object, but its transfer from one generation to the next revealed continuity, identity, and legacy.

The pivot is where the story stops being a list of events and becomes an experience.

When you identify that pivot, you’ve found the beating heart of the story.

Step Four: Add Reflection

A true event becomes a compelling story when you add reflection, when you connect the moment to something larger.

Reflection answers the question:

Why does this story matter?

It doesn’t need to be profound. You don’t need to have learned a grand lesson. But you do need to articulate meaning.

Look back at your sparkling moment and ask:

• What did this reveal about me?
• What changed?
• What do I understand now that I didn’t then?
• Why did this moment stay with me?

Reflection turns memory into narrative. It’s where the sparkle becomes illumination.

Step Five: Expand the Edges

Now you have everything you need:

• A vivid moment.
• A clear emotional pivot.
• A meaningful reflection.

All that’s left is expanding the edges, adding just enough context and detail to immerse the reader without burying the moment.

Most writers do the opposite. They start with too much backstory or setup, drowning the scene before the reader ever finds what’s important. The Sparkling Moment exercise reverses that instinct. It makes you start with the moment that matters most, then build outward with intention.

The Spark Is the Story

Sitting around that dinner table with my parents and brothers reminded me that storytelling is not a performance; it is preservation. We talked for hours, savoring stories we’ve told before and discovering ones we’d forgotten. And as I listened, I felt something that has stayed with me since: These sparkling moments, once spoken aloud, become the way we hold onto each other.

A story doesn’t have to be big to be unforgettable. It only has to be true, told with presence, and anchored in the moment where something shifted.

You don’t need to be a “natural storyteller.”

You just need to notice your sparkling moments, and let them shine.

Check out Corey Rosen’s A Story for Everything here:

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(6 Types of Personal Essays to Try.)

My debut essay collection, Uncanny Valley Girls, is mainly not about books. A mix of memoir and criticism, it’s about survival and interpersonal relationships, using horror movies—another early obsession—to think through the ways art can save and vex us in equal measure. In other words, it’s a book about love, in all its complex valiances. But I couldn’t write it without this other foundation in literature, both the interiority I found in memoir and poetry and the rigorous critical eye I found in theory.

Because really, both these modes of writing saved me. “My silences had not protected me,” Audre Lorde famously wrote. “Your silence will not protect you.”

In memoir and creative nonfiction, I found the commitment to truth-telling that led me to believe my own truth could be told, the importance of sharing experiences with violence—sexual, physical, structural—and their aftermath. Through foundational authors like Lorde to contemporary writers like Melissa Febos, Johanna Hedva, and Elissa Washuta, I discovered ways to document said experiences and their bright aftermaths, the way hope can be practiced even in the wake of structural harm without negating the reality of said harm. Through these authors and others, I found the fortitude to end my own silence.

Uncanny Valley Girls is a book concerned with enduring pain, but it is also a book concerned with how to make a life we can live within. In it, I write: “The miraculous thing about a wound, after all, is not its capacity to heal. Many wounds do no such thing. The miracle is our capacity to live and love despite this wounding.” It was important for me to think—and feel—through my life to highlight this living and loving, and memoir was the most immediate way for me to do so at the time.

But as I wrote the book, I also was interested in thinking holistically and expansively about the media we consume. The essay collection is focused on horror, which for my money is the genre most concerned with violence’s aftermath—which, given the inescapability of violence between people in an unequal society, makes it the genre most concerned with intimacy and relationality as well. In Uncanny Valley Girls, I use horror as a mirror into my own life—a disabled trans woman in relationships with other disabled trans people, someone who had to construct a previously nonexistent faith in community in order to survive. The book itself is an act of community-construction too, a way to solidify and think through the ties that allowed me to live.

Though while I draw from memoir to construct this community, I also am interested in the long history of feminist and queer horror criticism as a form of truth-telling, too. Some of these works of criticism I draw from I cite explicitly—Julia Kristeva’s seminal monograph Powers of Horror, Eve Tuck and C. Ree’s “A Glossary of Haunting,” Willow Catelyn Maclay’s trans reading of the pubescent werewolf movie Ginger Snaps. And some of my other antecedents, including Carol J. Clover’s equally seminal Men, Women and Chainsaws and Jack Halberstam’s Skin Shows: Gothic Horror and the Technology of Monsters, I only allude to. Regardless, given the existing brilliance of so many horror scholars, I was interested in writing a book with a robust citational practice—a book that, in addition to conveying the emotional and material truth of how art can save a life, also engaged that art with intellectual rigor.

Which is, of course, something that Lorde believed in, too. Throughout her collected essays—Sister Outsider most famously, but also my favorite book of hers, A Burst of Light—she cites rigorously and widely, documenting a reading and thinking life. Even in constructing this essay, I built a false dichotomy; for all the memoirists and essayists who have most inspired me have similarly substantiative citational practices too. The thing about being saved by books is that it’s a recursive sort of salvation; books almost always point to other books, too. Even as I was engaging with film, which I do throughout the whole essay collection—good movies and bad movies, movies I hate that almost everyone else I know loves (like Black Swan) and movies I sometimes feel I’m a singular defender of (like Lars von Trier’s Antichrist)—I couldn’t keep other books and writers out. I love them too much not to include them. In giving me models for a writing and thinking life outside of the bounds of my own town, they helped me live, too.

In her essay “Believing in Literature” from her essay collection Skin, the lesbian feminist working-class writer Dorothy Allison, a creative and political lodestar of mine, talked about her own motivation for writing. She said: “What did I want? I wanted the thing all writers want—for the world to break open in response to my story. I wanted to be understood finally for who I believe myself to be, for the difficulty and grief of using my own pain to be justified.”

I see this same motivation in theory, which is concerned with understanding the world through understanding and analyzing texts; and I see the same motivation in memoir, too, which is concerned with understanding the world through understanding the self. They’re both searching for the same understanding, which I tried to capture in Uncanny Valley Girls as well. How could I not? I wrote a book about survival, using the tools from memoir and criticism that allowed me to survive in the first place. It’s only through both, after all, that I was able to see my life in its full, shining wholeness. It’s only through both that I was able to break open my own world just a little, that I was able to live.

Check out Zefyr Lisowski’s Uncanny Valley Girls here:

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(See the winning entry list here.)

All the Way to Mystery

by Stacy Clark

The waves come and come. Don’t give in, don’t give in, I silently whisper. I run down the suburban path, wending beneath the leafy oaks. Tripping on snarls of roots bursting up through the asphalt, I do not fall. Not this time. I run on. To the pace of classic rock.

Some days the wind is at my back, nudging. On this day, I am running into the wind. Waves of sweet, spring air coming at me as I push toward, forward, against. It is harder. Often. Lately. Don’t give in, don’t give in, I silently whisper like a mantra deep inside.

Around the bend, crepe myrtles in bloom. A gust loosens a shower of color. Pinkish petals fluttering like butterflies, only falling down. Don’t give in, don’t give in. Let the beauty take you all the way to mystery, I whisper to the sleeping part of my soul.

Silence is my superpower. So, I hope, is following beauty.

Silence is awkward for a writer, who writes about life.

For a mother who encourages her daughters to speak up.

For a woman with a diagnosis she can only run toward, not beyond.

The difference is in one letter. “A” means acute. An all-out, immediate battle to the other side. “C” means chronic. A wait in the shadows for what is gathering like a coming storm. I am grateful for the “C,” and yet, living into something can be hard to explain.

Living in a palm-lined Florida suburb, I raised two daughters. When I came home that startling day, the daughters still lived with us, a high schooler and a young professional diverted by a pandemic.

“You have to tell them. Tell them now,” my husband insisted after meeting me in the driveway with a shaky smile.

He called them down from their bedrooms into the kitchen. But what would I say?

My older daughter knew what to say. “Mom,” she explained when I told her, “It’s like nothing has changed and everything is different.”

At first, I told a few friends. The sister of a brother waved it off with a story of how he survived. The nutritionist gave me nutrition. The born again gave me God. The optimist brought optimism. One friend brought coffee. She arrived on my porch with to-go cups in hand, and we sat outside on the back lanai and looked at life without blinking.

Quickly, I went silent. I was fine. Nothing had really changed. Except I drove fifteen minutes down the road to Moffitt Cancer Center for a blood check every three, and then six, months. Except a friend texted me every Sunday to see how I was, even if I was fine.

Life carried on. I ran half-marathons. I celebrated birthdays. I said goodbye to the daughter moving away for her job, the daughter going off to college, the dog that had been here for all the growing up. I went back to work for an ad agency downtown.

Everybody went back to life as usual, with the rare exceptions.

Before one appointment, I meet a friend, the kind of friend who marks her calendar and invites me for coffee before I go to see if my blood cells have picked up speed. She and I sit sipping warm coffee at a high-top table and, fine as I am, I tear up. Silence had made fear fall into the background. A quiet brewing, unnoticed, unreal. Talking makes it real. My friend says hiding fear is like trying to keep a beach ball under water.

When it is time to go, I tell her I have to pull myself together. “You can’t cry on the way into Moffitt,” I say.

She laughs. Wonders why. Says, “There’s a story there.”

Why not cry? Because Moffitt people are caring, from the cheerful valet to the smiling greeter who directs your lost-looking self to the Hematology Department. If you cried, I think, they would care like a four-alarm fire. But more so, if I am honest, I do not want to be noticed. I do not want to be cared for. I do not belong in this story.

Belonging is the heart of this story.

No longer am I the heart of my family with two growing lives spinning around me. No longer am I making lunches, driving carpool, reading stories in small beds tucked shoulder to shoulder as if we had all the time in the world. Where do I belong now?

When life is pulling you toward the daily responsibilities of motherhood, there is scarce time to ask about belonging. To wonder what life is asking of you. I went from childhood to adulthood to motherhood. What hood am I in now?

There are wayward cells at the deepest part of me. There is loss at the heart of me. The me that wrapped my days around mothering. The juggler of school papers and dentist appointments, art classes and piano lessons. My daughters used to call me “The Great Scheduler of All Things.” Now they tease I am “The Not Very Good Scheduler of Much.”

When I left my younger daughter on the sidewalk beside her newly stuffed college house, I felt as if I had been mugged, and they took everything. Here on the empty margins, I have had to face myself head on.

Unbecoming. Rewilding. Surrendering. The story travels these unfamiliar grounds.

When you are running toward a storm, even on a sunny day, everything has changed.

Silence is no superpower.

Some days feel like bailing sloshing emotions out of the emptiness so I will not sink.

One day, a friend tells me she went looking for wild ponies on an island. She found pony hoofprints and pony poop so fresh it was still steaming. She did not see a single pony.

She poetically decides this is faith. The evidence clear, the mystery remains unseen.

What am I looking for? Her wild ponies make me think of rewilding golf courses. Where the fairways and the greens are left to revert to their natural state. The wildlife returns.

Now that my children are grown and I am running toward the storm, I like the idea of rewilding. Though I am not sure how wild I can get on a cul-de-sac in suburban Florida.

That night I dream of a whole herd of wild ponies galloping toward me.

I read that some golf courses get turned into Super Targets, and I wonder if it is better to try and stay who we are. Being a fairway is better than a parking lot.

Small miracles, small miracles, I remind myself in silent deep-down whispers.

I cannot see the edges.

Beauty in all its rawness and nowness is the only place I have found I am able to stand. I tell myself, if things get bad, I will get a tattoo on the inside of my wrist, delicate, almost indecipherable script meant only for me saying: Beauty all the way.

I believe in beauty. Except at Moffitt.

The first couple years, I went into Moffitt head down, tucked away. No beauty there. Only something invisible ravaging human life, and life, and life. Hope wafting like ragged flags as families pushed wheelchairs, held hands and held tight.

I did not belong in this story.

Nearly four years have passed since I embarked on this unchosen journey. As fine as I am, the Sunday texts and the pre-appointment coffees unfailingly continue. During one of these coffees, my friend says with a smile crinkling the corners of her eyes,

“There’s beauty at Moffitt, you know. Even there.” “No,” I quip. “Where have they been keeping that?”

Maybe in the painted stones of the flowerless garden outside the front door. On my way into Moffitt right after this beauty conversation, I see the stones. A leave-one, take-one offering of stones painted with hearts, stars and words of hope. Silent messages saying I see you, I know you, hold me in your hand, I’ll go with you, as far as we can go. I pick up a stone with the word “Hope” and wrap my fist around it, hidden in my pocket as I wander through my appointments.

When I leave, I set the stone back in the garden. A few days later, when I return for a follow-up, I put my own painted stone in the garden. Hot pink with rays like a sun. I’m no painter, yet it has its charm.

I never go back to see if anyone picks up my stone. This is not that kind of give and take. You give, and what happens next is not up to you.

Recently, a friend gave me a book, a YA novel, purportedly lighthearted. She is the one who came with the to-go coffee, but she is innocent here. The main character is a sentient typewriter, helping a family solve a mystery. How dangerous could it be?

There, in the end, I am crying softly as the family solves the mystery of a missing mother. They drive all night and find her high up on her rock of safety. She has run away from what has returned to her body, what she fears will take her family down this time.

The relieved family entices her down from her rock, they wrap their arms and love around her no matter what comes. And they know what is coming.

My snuffles and sleeve wipes carry on after the last page. I slip into the bathroom to avoid my husband, daughter and tear-licking dog on the couch catty corner to mine.

The sobs go on for a good twenty minutes. It’s a typewriter for Pete’s sake.

It’s this. When I run for safety, will my family come and wrap around me? I am afraid they will find me. I am afraid they will not look.

That startling day I stood on the sidewalk at Moffitt, minutes after the doctor had gently, matter-of-factly handed me a diagnosis, my brain clouded with thoughts. I did not know what would happen, how good, how bad. The most actionable thought: Do not go home.

The valet took a while to bring my car. Even I knew, even then, I could not run away from me. I could not find safety on a rock. But the desire to flee was like a mother’s need to push her newborn into the world—volitional and not of her say. The only handhold I saw was truth. The known and unknown, felt and not felt, set forth and apart. Squinting into the sunlight on the sidewalk, I vowed to stand there. I vowed to not turn away.

Holding out for truth led to silence. I could not bear the push for positive thinking, the cheer handed out like candy. It slayed me. Still does. I feel guilty. As if I have somehow failed to think my way out of this. Positive thinking feels like chasing a butterfly.

Beauty cannot be chased.

After all these coffees, texts and runs, I have learned there are rocks in a secret garden hiding in plain sight. I have learned, sometimes, in the stillness, beauty finds you.

Like on a run into the wind when the petals fall across your path.

Beauty comes in its own time. Disguised in the dark.

Heading to my most recent appointment, I drive up to Moffitt. Inching through the valet line, with rogue cells in the marrow of my bones, I am spontaneously singing along to AC/DC. Head-bobbing, voice-screeching, body-wiggling singing. When George Thorogood’s Bad to the Bone comes on, I smirk and eye the sky.

There are times I give in to the waves of despair. I can feel them, those wayward cells elbowing out the healthy ones. I keep running toward, because it is better than away. Truth always gives back. I do not want to miss the beauty no matter its duck and cover.

Slowly, though, I am beginning to put my faith in the story I am, in the wild mystery coming at me like a butterfly, like a galloping herd.

When I can, I surrender, which is not the same as giving in. More a waking of the soul.

Beauty carries us forward.

I am hoping it can take me all the way home.

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(In Praise of Writing the Small Story.)

Maybe it was a few years after that, during my repeated conversations with college friends about my experiences on the equestrian team. Maybe it was my senior year of college, when I took a course called Writing the Athletic Body with the writer Anelise Chen, and wrote about horses and race for every assignment. When I try to identify an origin story for my book, I realize that there is no linear timeline but simply a series of spiraling and overlapping moments of obsession.

Mounted is about the shared entanglements between Black people and horses, exploring interspecies connection through the stories of cowboys, dancehall artists, pop singers, protestors, fugitive slaves, visual artists, and pony book characters. In 12 essays, it spans several hundred years of history and various forms of media from children’s literature to film and textile art. The book arose from my own experiences as a Black equestrian and horse lover, who began riding horses as a child at a local stable in Brooklyn, New York.

Throughout my life, I have kept returning to horses. Whether through riding or archival research or art, I have found myself unable to let go of the complex significance of horses and their histories. So much of my writing is inspired by the things I can’t stop talking about, the themes and questions that I am pulled back to when I am least expecting it, the feeling of being given a spiritual assignment that I cannot be finished with until it is finished with me.

My writing process is informed by the storytelling forms of those who refuse the neat and the linear, by oral practices that revel in the juiciness of a story unfolding, then folding back on itself. Obsession takes up space and time, defying the tyranny of the clean, intelligible narrative. I have been taught by those who are people of repetition and excess: queers, immigrant mothers, the various sidewalk scholars and self-appointed preachers of Brooklyn. My writing has been shaped by the groupchat, the two-hour phone call, the grocery store reportback, the pamphlet manifesto, the updates about people I have never met. The same sentiment repeated 10 different ways, each time with a new wisdom and cadence.

As Hanif Abdurraqib has written, “I’m not all that interested in repetition or return as a vehicle for correction, or to make things ‘right’…I get obsessive about my returns because there are places…where I know for certain that I have left behind a sweetness, and I am interested in seeing how it has grown in my absence.”

There is a sweetness in so many of my early interactions with horses: the silver horse pendant dangling from a suede necklace, the cowboy boots I wore to my first riding lesson, the curiosity with which I approached my relationships with the school ponies at the stable. Even as this sweetness became complicated by knowledge about the role of horses in policing and colonial economies, I still reached for stories of the layered intimacies and forms of resistance practiced by Black people who rode and cared for horses. I return to horses because I know that I must, because I know there are parts of myself I have left lingering on bridles in dusty saddle rooms and tucked between the pages of Saddle Club books and stored in digital folders full of 19th-century images of Black people and the horses they loved, and I want to see what has transpired in my absence.

My creative practice of obsession is one that lives in the body, informed by aesthetic lineages of the African diaspora. As James Snead wrote in the essay “On Repetition in Black Culture,” “In black culture, the thing (the ritual, the dance, the beat) is ‘there for you to pick up when you come back to get it.’…it continually cuts back to the start, in the musical meaning of ‘cut’ as a…willed return to a prior series.”

Snead is referring to sonic and literary traditions such as the repetition displayed in jazz music and African-American folklore. However, I would also describe this as a philosophy, one that emphasizes the unfolding and layering of memories and experiences over time. It’s a practice where each return is an opportunity to elaborate on an argument, listen to something from a different angle, or check in on the sweetness you left behind.

To obsess is to refuse enforced forgetting, to allow yourself to be moved by what haunts you, to sit in the mess of what has been rather than rushing forward in the name of progress. Many of my essays are woven together from months’ and sometimes years’ worth of phone notes, screenshots, quotes, are.na tiles, found images, and links. I have learned to allow my obsessions their rightful time and to trust in this stubborn and sticky recursiveness, this inherited commitment to memory-keeping, knowing that the things I simply can’t let go of will teach me something about the stories I must tell.

Check out Bitter Kalli’s Mounted: On Horses, Blackness, and Liberation here:

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“Nothing extraordinary has ever happened to me.”

“I don’t think anyone would be interested in reading about that.”

These are some common hesitations shared by nonfiction writers worried that they have not had remarkable enough lives to engage readers’ attention. Yet most of our lives are not comprised of a series of extravagant events, but rather a compilation of small moments that nonetheless have large personal and political impacts.

(6 Types of Personal Essays for Writers to Try.)

My latest book, Abbreviate, is a small collection of small essays that examines big ideas, like how the injustice and violence of girlhood leads women to accept and even claim small spaces and stories. Though the essays in this collection focus on everyday experiences—probing the girlhood play of Polly Pocket and planetariums, strobing with a sleepover blacklight illuminating teenage magic, and ricocheting with the regret and rage of adult women whose lives have been constellated by harm—it is this commonality that reinforces the significance of the stories.

When I began writing Abbreviate, I wanted to write stories from my childhood, adolescence, and early adulthood that others deemed too small to be significant. These were the childhood experiences I tried to tell adults, only to be told little girls should be seen and not heard. These were the stories from my teenage years that shaped me irrevocably, but were deemed too commonplace to warrant much attention. And these were the experiences from my adulthood shared by many women yet silenced by a sexist society. Growing up, I shared many experiences with girls and women around me, as well as the experience of being told our stories were too small to matter. And so, it was these small stories that I wanted to praise.

~

Many readers of nonfiction turn to the genre looking for connection. While we certainly read to learn about lives unlike our own, we also read for the familiar, to see something of ourselves reflected in the pages, to witness a world that makes us feel a sense of unity rather than isolation. There is an inherent power in engaging with a stranger’s story and thinking, “Yes, I’ve felt that way too” or “I thought I was the only one.” We read nonfiction to feel a sense of wholeness, to feel as though we are a part of the larger human experience.

If we only focus our work on the extraordinary, however, we risk losing this quality. We risk alienating our readers. We risk missing the point of the genre entirely—the poignancy and power of the everyday. And we risk alienating ourselves from the narratives of our own lives, thinking instead that we are somehow not living or writing well if we are not exceptional.

Part of the craft of writing creative nonfiction is retraining ourselves to notice and appreciate small moments in our lives. Contemporary culture tends to favor extremes in news headlines, social media, and movies, so it can seem as though storytelling requires dramatic events. But there is as much narrative tension in the small moments of our lives as there is in these extremes, perhaps even more so, for what is higher stakes than the truth?

Learning to cultivate a sense of curiosity about small daily moments can begin anytime. Going through old photos, listening to music, reading old letters or emails, or reminiscing about particular periods in your life will naturally produce them. You do not need epiphanic revelation or a sudden stroke of artistic inspiration to locate a meaningful memory, image, or emotion. If a particular moment in your life, however small, is one that brought you pleasure, heartache, intrigue, or simply stands out strongly in your memory, then this is a good sign that it will do the same for readers. What matters is your willingness to notice, your belief that the minutia of your life matters, and your ability to reflect on what larger truths these small stories reveal.

For example, while Abbreviate contains extreme events, the majority of moments throughout the collection are brief flashes. Dramatic events like domestic violence, sexual assault, and abuse by authority figures juxtapose with small events like childhood games, teenage school projects, and adult trips to museums. The large events are certainly important to the narrative, but the smaller moments are equally important, perhaps even more so because of their unexpected narrative weight. While it was easy to reflect on significant moments of narrative tension in my life, it was more powerful to reflect on forgotten moments, and I found that lingering memories of elementary school classrooms and middle school dances gave way to more varied memories with greater thematic significance.

When we write about extremes, there’s often little opportunity for thematic surprise. Writing about my middle school principal running off with a student, for example, expectedly leads to outrage, shock, violation. But writing about small moments provides narrative flexibility and many opportunities for thematic exploration. Writing about building a life-size model of a refrigerator for a middle school project, for example, foreshadowed the disordered eating many girls I grew up with experienced later as adults. Surprising yourself with the power of the small will naturally surprise your reader.

Click to continue.

Small moments can also lend themselves to creating stronger thematic connections. For example, when writing about domestic violence, which eventually led to my aunt’s husband running over his ex-wife, an image of my aunt teaching me to play with stomp rockets, launching them up into the air and far away to safety provided more interesting images, metaphoric opportunity, and thematic resonance, than writing about my uncle directly. Since I was a child when this event took place, it also makes sense to write about childhood memories of play, rather than the adult events I didn’t fully understand at the time. When reflecting on my uncle, the memory of his violence always surfaces, but it was remembering my childhood play that allowed me access to writing about this difficult subject and with a more nuanced approach.

Once you have determined which small moments were impactful, it is then time to use them thematically. Remember, readers engage with nonfiction not simply for the plot, but for a larger reflection about the human experience, so it is not enough simply to share specific memories. Instead, you must work to make greater meaning beyond these memories, to use these recollections as the impetus for or the lens through which you create deeper reflection.

Many times, the small experiences or images that you have chosen to write about will lead you directly to larger themes. You might find that writing about quilting with your grandmother as a child lends itself to themes about piecing together your family history as an adult. You might find that writing about playing with dolls as a girl lends itself to larger themes about motherhood. Moving beyond the memory can be as simple as asking yourself what this memory taught you about the world or how this memory foreshadowed what was to come later in your life.

Other times, you might find that your themes come first. When we begin with themes rather than plot, it can sometimes be difficult to know how best to illustrate these themes. But turning to the small moments in our lives can give us a sense of direction. For example, in Abbreviate, I wanted to examine the rise of sexism in America, as well as the ways women have been erased from history. I did so by focusing on small moments from my past like how elementary boys learned bullying techniques from adult men or the ways a girlhood visit to a planetarium revealed few women constellating the sky. Reverse engineering allows us to sift through the card catalogs of our minds to locate specific examples that might illustrate the larger points we are trying to make. Remember, these memories don’t need to speak directly to the themes. Sometimes it is best if they provide emotional weight, rather than direct commentary.

To create deeper meaning from your memories, you can also either implement direct comparisons or utilize juxtapositions. You might share specific small moments to reflect directly on a related topic. For example, in Abbreviate, I share stories of being required to apologize, smile, or hug people even when I didn’t want to in order to reflect on the ways girls and women are taught to conceal their true emotions for the ease of others. Direct comparisons strengthen both the specific memory and the larger thematic weight, allowing readers to fully engage with each.

On the other hand, you can also create deeper meaning from your memories by using stark contrast. By juxtaposing a specific memory with a seemingly unrelated larger theme, you employ the element of surprise for readers, moving the reading experience beyond expectation and toward originality. For example, describing learning to play Dungeons & Dragons in the wake of our current political climate allowed me to reflect on the ways men seek to control even women’s minds and imaginations. Contrast allows both you and your reader to move beyond the expected, and to be reminded of the power of the genre and the ability of our lives to move in surprising ways.

~

“I can’t believe I never noticed that before.”

“Even after all these years, I still remember that.”

“I never realized how much that tiny moment impacted me.”

Growing up, many of the girls and women around me believed their stories and selves too small. And yet, if we had only shared our small stories, we might have understood their significance in our lives and in the lives of others, might have seen our connection, might have realized our individual and collective power. By claiming space on the page, we might have learned to claim space in the real world, might have demanded more for ourselves and each other, might have stretched ourselves in search of all that we desired and might one day achieve. In recognizing the power of the small, we might have recognized our ability to tell stories larger than we ever imagined.

Check out Sarah Fawn Montgomery’s Abbreviate here:

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I am about to introduce you to one of my favorite student essays. Maybe my absolute favorite. There is a story behind it. Over many years, I have worked with a public school teacher named Holly Slaughter. She is an expert on teaching reading and writing, a published author, and a leader for teachers at the elementary school level. Holly has two daughters, and the younger one, Emme, was working on her college admissions essay. She wanted to join her older sister at the University of Florida. Now Holly knows how to coach writers of all ages, but as sometimes happens in families, Emme preferred not to be coached by her mom. That’s where I came in.

(How to Write a Five-Paragraph Essay That Works.)

Emme sent me a draft of her story. I read it once; I read it again, thinking of ways I might help her improve the draft. I read it a third time. Then I messaged Emme and her mom. “It’s perfect,” I told them. “I have no changes to suggest. If UF reads this and does not accept you, you don’t want to be there.”

What was all the hubbub about? See if this essay excites you as much as it did me.

She Wants to Be an Astrophysicist: Get Used to It

By Emme Slaughter

(650 words)

Two years ago, I won my family’s Fantasy Football League. To many this may not seem like a highly esteemed accomplishment. But if you were to ask me how I felt, I would have told you I won the actual Super Bowl.

I eagerly began to count down the days until Christmas, excited not for the holiday itself, but instead because I would get to see my entire family gathered at one long dinner table. Put in more accurate terms, I would be surrounded by people who had all just suffered defeat to the youngest member of the family. I was ecstatic.

My whole life, I had spent every Sunday and Monday night sitting on the very edge of my couch with my dad, ready to leap out of my seat and cheer at any play that gained over 30 yards. I memorized all the penalties, all my favorite players’ names, and became my mom’s favorite person to ask when she got a football question on her Sunday crossword.

So, when I walked into Nana and Poppa’s on Christmas with a big grin on my face, exuberant to talk about my team’s flawless fantasy season, I was not expecting the response from my oldest cousin, Josh: “How could we get beaten by a girl?” My heart sank as ripples of laughter, mostly from my boy cousins and uncles, echoed throughout the room.

While my response to Josh should have been a confident “Get used to it,” my fifteen-year-old self could not muster a word. I tried to hold back tears. Was I embarrassed? And why? I now know that what I was feeling was shame, rooted in the message that a woman could never be more knowledgeable than a man at football, or anything for that matter.

The way that I view the world changed on that day. I became heightened in my awareness of gender roles and societal perceptions, especially as I explored my future in STEM. In my AP physics class, I couldn’t help but notice that I was part of a very small portion of girls in a male-dominated class.

Between freshman and sophomore year, I was invited to attend an engineering camp at a state university. Excited, I listened to the camp leaders share the agenda for the week, including all kinds of engineering activities and competitions. We would build marshmallow launchers, attend lectures, and kick off the camp with the ultimate competition: science trivia.

I remember looking around the room and noticing the majority of male students. I found myself allowing the implicit message to seep into my brain: boys are naturally better than girls at science. Wasn’t the very make‑up of the room showing me just that? I blocked out everything and focused on answering the questions at break-neck speed. Later, when I held the pineapple-shaped trivia championship trophy above my head, all of my fellow campers, boys and girls, were screaming and cheering me on.

Today, I have taken Marie Curie as my role model, and just as she did, I strive to be the best in everything I do regardless of whom I compete against. Curie discovered radium. She observed that radiation wasn’t dependent on the organization of atoms at a molecular level; something was happening inside the atom itself. The atom is not inert, indivisible, or solid.

Like Curie’s discovery, something has happened inside me, deeper than the molecular level. There have been times that I have been shaken and so unsure of myself that I was unwilling to speak. And times when I have felt indivisible and unstoppable. I am growing to understand that it does not matter whether I am attempting to succeed in a career dominated by men, because my mind and actions are completely independent of those around me. For those who doubt me along the way, I say, just wait and see. And get used to it.

THINGS I LOVE ABOUT THIS ESSAY

It’s the essay only Emme could write.

It has a catchy title. This essay has a title and a brief subtitle, both of which tell us something about the writer. If you have a catchy title that attracts the interest of the reader and also captures the main message of the essay, you are in great shape. Notice that her desire to become an astrophysicist is never mentioned in the story. But she doesn’t have to because that title is like something on a billboard or a movie house marquee. The title tells, and the story shows. Meanwhile, the subtitle, “Get used to it,” is a brilliant use of a catchphrase that expresses the strong voice of the writer. Notice that she uses it three times — which in writing is always a magic number. She uses it in the subtitle, in the middle, and then again at the end. You plant it, you water it, you harvest it.

It has spirit. Sam’s story had a playful spirit. Emme’s essay has spirit, too, from first word to last. Sam is a romantic. Emme is a warrior princess, someone who is determined, indefatigable (which means she is tireless!) with her eyes on the prize. She has heart, which she displays in the most casual settings, and the most serious ones.

It has a focus. One way to tell if an essay has focus is to try to summarize the meaning in as few words as possible. She does the trick with the title, but supports it throughout: “I am a determined young woman whose vocation is to work in a field now dominated by boys and men. It doesn’t matter if you approve or not. Here I come.”

It reveals her character and her knowledge base. When I read the essay, I drew immediate conclusions about what kind of person the writer is. From the evidence of the text, I would use these adjectives: intelligent, curious, determined, focused, versatile, sensitive, clever, organized, and literate. She could have referenced Shakespeare rather than Madame Curie, but she makes the good decision to reveal the knowledge base she wanted to pursue. And it gets brainier and brainier. In that sense our author, intelligent throughout these 650 words, reveals her intelligence in stages. It is obvious that colleges and universities want to accept brainy young people, and the readers of this essay will get a good insight into what this student already knows and what kind of learner she is likely to be.

Its use of detail

It has vivid scenes. The first scene is at a family Christmas dinner, where the boys shame each other for losing to a girl. It includes that snippet of dialogue. Her disappointment in that moment is neutralized in the second scene where she lifts the trophy. I love the fact that she includes the detail that the trophy is shaped like a pineapple.

It shows and it tells. In kindergarten, I learned the game show-​and-​tell. I would bring in an object from home and tell the class a story about it. Never did I think that it would lead to a lesson I would use in my writing for a lifetime. Emme tells us about boys thinking that they are better in science than girls, and she also shows us that bias in action. She tells us about how she grew in her confidence, and we see it when she holds up the trophy. Show and tell.

It has a great backup singer. My analogy of the backup singer refers to any person, living or dead, famous or not, whom you quote or refer to in your essay. Our young author chooses a brilliant one: Madame Curie, one of the most famous scientists in history — and, of course, a woman.

It moves from popular culture to science. It is so much fun to witness that journey this writer takes us on, from a family gathering focusing on football and popular culture to lessons at the end about her knowledge of science.

Click to continue.

Its use of language

It reveals the power of two. The number of examples a writer uses has meaning. When a writer uses two examples, they are asking the reader to compare and contrast. In that sense, Emme offers two moments of triumph: the football pool and the science trivia contest. They are alike, but different.The first one leaves her disappointed because the boys reveal a belief that they are or should be better than girls. In the second, she is cheered and celebrated by all.

It climbs up and down the ladder of language. The writer uses two different types of language. Words that make us think, and words that help us see. Words about ideas, and words about things. A phrase about ideas, such as “awareness of gender roles and societal perceptions” is high on the ladder. But words lower on the ladder, such as “marshmallow launchers” and “pineapple-​shaped . . . trophy” are things we can see and hold in our hands.

It makes good use of white space. OK, I fibbed just a little. The essay wasn’t perfect. I did make one suggestion to improve it. I thought, in her original version, Emme’s paragraphs were a bit too long. There is nothing wrong with good long paragraphs, except for this: They are harder to read than shorter ones. You know that a sentence ends with a period. But you may not have thought that a paragraph ends with a period followed by white space. That white space helps the reader relax. The reader can see the parts better. If a reader sees a 650-​word paragraph, they assume that the meaning, like the visual text, is dense and difficult to plod through.

It has a transformative journey.

It reveals how she overcomes obstacles. It turns out that a character’s ability to overcome obstacles remains an enduring pattern in storytelling, one that has existed from the earliest examples of Western literature. You may have heard of an ancient epic called the Odyssey, in which it takes the hero ten years to find his way home after the Trojan War. Or think of everything that Harry Potter must suffer, including the murder of his parents when he was an infant, before he can overcome the ultimate evil. The famous novelist Kurt Vonnegut advises writers to create a likable character and then spend five hundred pages doing terrible things to him. The idea is to see what the hero is made of. In Emme Slaughter’s case, she has 650 words, not 650 pages, but we see what she is made of — in her family and in her education — by overcoming traditional obstacles placed in the path of women’s achievement.

It ups the ante. Emme’s essay moves in lots of ways. One move is from less serious to more serious. She wins in a fantasy football league. Then she wins at a science camp. Then she chooses Marie Curie, one of history’s most famous scientists, as a role model. This is clearly a resilient young woman who would thrive in a demanding academic environment.

It has a strong ending. I think of a good ending as a gold coin the writer gives the reader for making the journey. Thanks for reading all the way through. This reward is for you. What makes Emme’s ending so strong is that she has foreshadowed it, beginning with the title and then building steam through the text.

Epilogue: The world of science, from the time Emme was a little girl, imposed obstacle after obstacle to her achieving her dreams.

Paul Cottle, a physics professor at Florida State University, writes about how few women wind up in his engineering, math, and computer science classes. The number can be as low as one in five, even though many universities are more than 60 percent female. That last data point may make it harder for women to get into schools that do not want a great imbalance between women and men.

I caught up with Emme’s work at the University of Florida, the college of her choice. As a sophomore, she earned a  position as a research assistant to a science professor. She wrote in a text: “Yes, we will be doing biosignature detection using gas chromatography-​mass spectrometry with the Mars Rover and other landers!! And then doing field work and running rock samples through the GC‑MS system here and comparing them with the samples we get from the Rover data to search for evidence of life beyond Earth!! I start tomorrow.” It appears the young woman, whose boy cousins mocked her in her youth, is living her dream to become an astrophysicist.

So far you have seen the essay by Sam French, which reveals his wit, his charm, and his intelligence. Then you met Emme Slaughter, who shows us her brains, her commitment, and her determination. I did not coach either Sam or Emme, even though I have known their families since they were young children. Both have the advantage of being born into families where reading and writing are very important. Sam is the son of a prize-​winning journalist and an outstanding high school English teacher. I have worked with Emme’s mom, Holly Slaughter, who is a leader among language arts teachers in the public schools. I think it’s cool that neither Sam nor Emme sought out their parents for help when it came time to write their essay. Each wrote the essay that only they could write.

Check out Roy Peter Clark’s Writing Tools for the College Admissions Essay here:

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Credit line: Excerpted from WRITING TOOLS FOR THE COLLEGE ADMISSIONS ESSAY by Roy Peter Clark. Copyright © 2025 by Roy Peter Clark.  Used with permission of Little, Brown Spark, an imprint of Little, Brown and Company. New York, NY. All rights reserved.

The post My Favorite Student Essay of All Time appeared first on Writer's Digest.

Want an opportunity to win a WD award? Keep checking our competitions page for upcoming competitions.

1. “Ground Zero” by F.A. Battle

2. “They Say if You Name the Thing, it Helps” by Allie Dixon

3. “A Stroke, a Recovery, and a Marriage Revised” by Charlotte Troyanowski

4. “How to (not) get into an Ivy League School” by jlee

5. “Letters from Far Away” by Jean Palmer Heck

6. “The Verizon Guy” by J. Shepherd

7. “A Baker’s Dozen: Thirteen Perspectives on Anorexia” by Deborah Svec-Carstens

8. “Ode to an Ugly Urn” by Katrina Gallegos

9. “Delivery Notes” by J. Mackenzie

10. “Didu” by M. Talu

11. “The Hunt” by Elinor Horner

12. “Cardinal Virtues” by Robin Clifford Wood

13. “Treasures from the Sea” by Renee Srch

14. “A Clash of Cultures Around the Dinner Table” by Genine Babakian

15. “AFTERTHOUGHT ON AN EPITAPH” by Melanie Verbout

16. “Because the Night belongs to Mothers” by Hope Loraine Cotter

17. “My Name Isn’t Michelle” by Nicholle Harrison 

18. “Historian of Silences” by Jonathan Odell

19. “In the End” by Mark V Sroufe

20. “Man Enough” by Christian Escalona

21. “Across the Gulf” by Annie Barker

22. “On Fathering (What You Didn’t Know)” by John Cheesebrow

23. “My Name is Not Sally” by Celia Ruiz

24. “An Abortion, a hysterectomy, and Black Sweatpants” by Lynne Schmidt

25. “Aging, Angst, & Anxiety” by Stephanie Baker

Check out the latest Writer’s Digest Competitions!

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Want an opportunity to win a WD award? Keep checking our competitions page for upcoming competitions.

1. “How to Read Your Work Aloud” by Sonja Livingston
2. “Borrowed Time in Wild Places” by Heide Brandes
3. “I Came Here to Burn” by Cheryl Kelley
4. “Passthrough” by Cheryl Kelley
5. “Mouth Full of Grass, Facing East” by Karen Bellerose
6. “Singing in the Valley of Death” by William Ablan
7. “When a Tree Falls..” by P. James Norris
8. “The Year I Wrote Myself Back” by Kathryn M. Bowman Johnson
9. “the wolf” by Cheryl Kelley
10. “Magpie at the Mirror” by Nadia Alavosius
11. “The Empty Tattoo” by Elizabeth Ciufo
12. “My Belly’s Breathing” by M.K. Been
13. “Mugwort” by JoAnn Stevelos
14. “Lying Down with Wolves” by Laurie Paternoster
15. “The Moonlight Hotel” by Charles Lutz
16. “Sounds of Freedom” by Kiki Cunningham
17. “Until” by Kelly Stallard
18. “When My Secrets Were No Longer Mine” by Jean Romano
19. “Girlfriend ~ the short and longing of it” by Mo Conlan
20. “What Sisters Do” by Rebekah Rossman
21. “The Rock” by Christine Cameron
22. “Crystal, Clear” Gordon Portman
23. “That First Night” by Bari Benjamin
24. “The El Salvadorian Motorcycle Accident” by Michael Fitzer
25. “Unchosen” by Cheryl Kelley

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(10 Ways to Improve Your Writing While Thinking Like a Comedy Writer.)

Suddenly, a loud ruckus shatters the early morning hush as a middle-aged man and woman board the plane. 

“You’re the one who left me,” the woman is shouting. 

“I would never have left you if it hadn’t been for the gun,” the man shouts back.

As the couple heads down the aisle, I glance nervously at the two empty seats next to me. I breathe a sigh of relief as they squabble all the way to the back of the plane. But fate is not kind on this day. They circle back and end up, you guessed it, in the two seats right next to mine.

“Hi there. I’m Martha. What’s your name?” The woman leans over toward me, her voice loud and coarse, the alcohol on her breath overwhelming.

“Hello,” I murmur reluctantly while groping through my backpack for something to read.

To the amusement of the early morning passengers, Martha returns to her bickering with the man next to her, the whine of the plane’s engines no match for her booming tirade. More entertaining than any inflight movie, we soon learn that the man is Martha’s ex-husband, Henry. He used to hit Martha. He used to throw her up against the wall of their trailer. But Martha still loved him. Until the day something inside of her snapped and she waited for him in the driveway where Henry came face-to-face with his own shotgun. He never hit Martha again. 

With all thoughts of napping now aside, coffee finally arrives. For me, that is. Martha has ordered a Bloody Mary.

She asks me again for my name. “Rita,” I tell her.

She tells me about the guy she lives with now who refuses to marry her. She tells me how much she misses her mother who died when Martha was 12. She tells me about her 21-year-old son who recently stole her life savings and disappeared. The details of her life rush by like the clouds outside the window. Despite myself, I feel my heart welling up in sympathy.

As I finally set my book down and truly listen to Martha, an uncontrollable shiver suddenly lances up my spine. Maybe it’s a draft. Maybe it’s the chill of her words. Immediately, Martha takes off her blue vinyl coat and gently places it around my shoulders despite my very sincere objections.

When we finally land, I try to return the coat. But Martha stubbornly refuses. She tells me that it gives her great pleasure to leave me with this gift.  Not wanting to delay her departure a moment longer, I agree to keep it, just until she gets off the plane. 

As I walk up the jetway, I assure myself that I’m just hanging on to the coat in case I see Martha in the airport. But the coat eventually makes it all the way back home where it now resides in the basement.

Why did I keep the coat?

I had to write about it. In order to try to make sense of the inexplicable events of that flight, I had to recreate the scene—beginning, middle, and end—over and over and over again until I reached a place of understanding. Until my word and thought processing illuminated what, besides the coat, I could take away from that plane.

The resulting essay led me to create more like it, which eventually led me to writing a column for The Providence Journal. I considered each piece to be an 800-word story. That’s all the space I had to work with so each and every word had to move the narrative forward, share an observation or experience, and ultimately leave readers with insights they might not have considered before.

Click to continue.

Surprisingly, each column had its own way of coming to me. Maybe this happens in your writing, too. Sometimes, you know exactly how to begin. Sometimes, the ending appears first. Often, you’ve got nothing at all except a visceral feeling that there’s something in your idea that’s worth excavating, a gem that needs to be tilled over and up and down and around until eventually it comes shining up to the surface.

Years later, when my husband and I dropped our youngest child at New York University for the first time and returned home to our “empty nest,” I found myself needing to do a lot of thinking which, for me, meant a lot of writing. In this new stage of life, as I encountered changes in my marriage and friendships, my aging parents and growing-up children, my work, my play, our house, our finances—just about everything—I kept writing. One story at a time. Eventually, I realized there might be a book here.

My memoir-in-essays needed a cohesive structure to hold it together. Chronology worked well with several flashbacks sprinkled in to provide a panoramic perspective. The characters were easy to work with since I’ve known them for years. I chose to ground each chapter in scene, which meant many of my earlier, narrative essays were discarded or rewritten. I explored the challenges of our empty nest in the early chapters and resolved them one way or another toward the end of the book. The theme of the book—how accidental motherhood changed me—became increasingly apparent as the stories melded together to form an overarching one.

Admittedly, the telling felt vulnerable at times. But I believe that honesty and authenticity is the only way to relate with readers. To share thoughts and feelings, painful and awkward though they might be at times. To find the answers to questions not unlike the ones that confronted me on that 6 AM flight to Boston.

Why did I keep the coat?

What made Martha so different? What possessed her to divulge the private details of her life to someone she had never met before? Even little children know enough not to talk to strangers. Oh, a pleasantry or two, perhaps, but not the intimate musings of a soul poured like coffee into the cup of the stranger seated in 24D. 

The unspoken rules of social etiquette have taught us to keep our distance. Keep our cards close. But unlike most of us, Martha did not play by those rules. The circumstances of her life had seen to that.

So there she was. Sitting next to me. Just exactly who she was and nothing else. “Hello stranger. Here, take the coat off my back. You’re cold and I like you. You listened to me.” 

No games.  No pretenses. Just stark, raving honesty. How could I expect anything less of myself?

And so the coat is still down there. Still in the basement. Tangible proof of what Martha taught me. That the boundaries we carefully construct are as fragile as gossamer. So why not reach beyond them while we still have the chance?

Give some time. Give some attention. Give some empathy.

Maybe even a coat.

Check out Rita Lussier’s And Now, Back to Me here:

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As we move into a new year, it’s time to get the creative gears turning to make this your most successful year ever. Whether you want to write personal essays that grab the attention of editors, write in a new genre, or simply generate more story ideas, this issue has it all.

Features include:

+ The WD Interview: Pat Barker: The Booker Prize winning author of Regeneration shares the role characters play in developing novel ideas, explains what appeals to her about reimagining mythology, and discusses the newest novel in her Women of Troy series, The Voyage Home. By Amy Jones

+ The Idea Factory: Tired of staring at an empty screen? Unlock your inner fiction generator with these surprising inspiration techniques. By Ryan G. Van Cleave

+ Seinfeld Was Right; That’s a Story: Use mundane moments from everyday life to create stories that pack a punch. By Jeff Somers

+ “You’ll be a great essay.” How to write six types of personal essays by finding the funny in your life. By Elissa Bassist

+ The Shortest Distance Between Two Points: 10 tips for writing a novel using 100-word stories. By Ran Walker

+ Mayfly Marketing: How to sell your novel in a short-attention span world. By Paul Goat Allen

+ How to Write in Different Genres: Emiko Jean and Yulin Kuang share tips and strategies for how they successfully write in different genres and mediums. By Jennifer Chen

This issue includes articles about how and when to use song lyrics, what to do if no one comes to your book talk, and suggestions for supporting self-published authors. Plus, your favorite columns like Building Better Worlds, Agent Alcove, Meet the Agent, Publishing Insights, For All Ages, and much more!

Subscribe to Writer’s Digest today for this to be your first issue!

The post Writer’s Digest January/February 2025 Cover Reveal appeared first on Writer's Digest.