Grandma was in her 90s and more than 60 years had elapsed since the family left Cuba, but my mother was not making a point about the passage of time; she was showing me a family tree made not of DNA or birthdays but one made of stories, shared experiences, and memory. As my mother’s only daughter, someday I too would be my mother’s memory. Perhaps that was already underway. 

I did not intend to use my grandmother’s and mother’s stories in my travel memoir A Little Piece of Cuba: A Journey to Become Cubana-Americana. This book is about the five days in Cuba that changed my life and my view of myself as a Cuban-American woman. But, as a young child learns from the world around them, I learned about Cuba from the words and actions of my mother and grandmother.

They made a mysterious foreign embargoed land accessible: My mother showed me Cuba’s place on a world map and told me that our family’s presence in Cuba that dated back hundreds of years, and my grandmother demonstrated what a day looked like in Cuba by introducing me to Cuban food, speaking a little Spanish around me, and teaching me about Cuban customs, hobbies, and pastimes. When I asked questions, they answered and added a little story or two. Their perspectives wove together, complemented, and informed one another, giving me a starting point for exploration and curiosity.

As I grew up, my mother’s stories evolved not because she had learned something new or because she had eureka moments of sudden remembering, but because my mother realized that she had become the custodian of a collection of my grandmother’s memories. My mother told me stories from Cuba and those first few years in the United States that my grandmother was a part of but never told me herself. My mother vividly recalled struggles faced as they adjusted to life in a new country. Those early challenges compelled my mother to safeguard her story, so that for years all I knew was, “We left Cuba one day and never went back. The End.”

She was not being vague or secretive; she was learning how to tell both her own narrative and her mother’s. She has embraced all aspects of her story from the harrowing tales of a child growing into adolescence while stuck between two worlds to lighthearted tales threaded with humor and joy. Her relationship with and her stories about Cuba will always be hers alone, and so will my grandmother’s. No story is ever complete and I have to acknowledge and respect that there are likely other custodians holding other parts of their stories. Still, I am glad that “The End” has been abandoned in favor of a flowing continuum and layering of stories from my grandmother to my mother to my mother’s version of my grandmother’s story and finally to me.

When I traveled to Cuba as an adult, I unknowingly packed a carry-on bag of matrilineal oral history that came to life as I experienced Cuba myself. As I walked Havana’s famous sea wall the Malecon, I recalled both my own memories of beach days with my mother and my grandmother’s stories of her beach visits when she was a young girl in Cuba. As I tucked into a plate of arroz con frijoles, fragrant with garlic, I remembered my mother’s innovative adjustment of the classic recipe for a slow cooker so that weeknight dinner cooked itself and how my grandmother guided me through a recipe for the classic Cuban dish arroz con pollo.

My memories and my matrilineal narratives came to life and re-invented themselves in my Cuba, and I leaned into them as artifacts, no less solid than a fossil in a museum or a document in an archive, overindulging in detail in early working drafts of the memoir. A few years had elapsed between my trip to Cuba and my first drafts of the memoir, yet I could rely on photographs from my trip to Cuba to jog my memories of Cuba and of my childhood and earlier years. As I spelunked the cave of my own memories from my past and my experiences of Cuba to form the book’s arc, my mother’s and my grandmother’s stories surfaced and joined mine as the scaffold for my own Cuban narrative.

Because family narratives are handed down in images, snippets, stories, food, and tiny acts that seem insignificant, it’s easy to dismiss them as unimportant or lacking in meaning for others. But many women exist from day to day in the small spaces where barriers between cultures, customs, and languages dissolve. When readers start to tell me a story about their grandmother and her recipes and stories from her country of origin, I see the universality in my experience. What I have found in sharing my story built from my matrilineal line is that women seek a custodian for their stories, someone who can dust off the artifacts, make meaning by bringing an experience from long ago into the present day, and mark the individual swirls of fingerprints left on this world.

Check out Barbara Caver’s A Little Piece of Cuba here:

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(Dyslexia Is a Writer’s Superpower.)

I did not grow up believing I would write a book. I grew up with spatial dyslexia, which meant lines could tilt off the page, paragraphs blurred into brick walls, and sequences—left to right, up to down—refused to behave. But I also grew up with a father who believed the point of writing wasn’t to look smart; it was to be understood. When I finally sat down to write my memoir, Nobody’s Girl: Mother, Model, CEO On My Own Terms, I leaned hard on his newsroom rules and found my way through the maze—one clean, true sentence at a time.

Phrases and ideas fly in and out of my head on an ongoing basis, and the trick is to make note of them when it happens. Ultimately, I had an editorial village, too, but gathering your thoughts and crafting cohesive communication is quite a solitary process.

The lead is a lifeline

Writers talk about “finding the heartbeat” of a book. My dad called it the lead. “If you can’t tell me the story in one sentence,” Bill would say, “you don’t know it yet.” Because spatial dyslexia makes large outlines feel like quicksand, I wrote a one-sentence lead for every chapter before I wrote the chapter, starting with: WHO, WHAT, WHERE, WHY, WHEN.

Those five words were my compass. When a paragraph wandered, I held it against the lead. If it didn’t serve the sentence, it didn’t survive. That discipline kept me from drowning in backstory and helped me write with the forward momentum a memoir needs.

Writing out loud

Spatial difficulties make tracking lines of text exhausting, so I drafted much of the book by speaking. I recorded scenes. Later, I transcribed the audio and edited on the page. That two-step process gave me three gifts:

• Voice. When you speak your story, you hear your rhythms, your humor, your silences. The page sounds more like you.
• Honesty. It’s harder to posture out loud. Whispered details found their way into the manuscript because I heard myself reach for them.
• Stamina. Talking let me cover emotional ground without simultaneously fighting the mechanics of reading.

For revision, I flipped the process and used text-to-speech to listen back. Hearing each line read aloud made clunky phrasing obvious and highlighted where I’d lost the thread of a scene.

Short lines, strong verbs

The newsroom taught me to trust short sentences. Spatial dyslexia reinforced it. I pared paragraphs to their bones, then added only what clarified or revealed. Strong verbs did the heavy lifting—”confessed” instead of “said sheepishly,” “bolted” instead of “ran quickly.” I broke long blocks with subheads and white space, both to help me track ideas and to welcome readers who read the way I do: in focused bursts, with frequent breathers.

Fact-check the feelings

Memoir isn’t journalism, but journalistic values serve it well. My father’s second-favorite question (after “What’s the lead?”) was “Who says?”

When I wrote about a pivotal conversation from years ago, I felt in my gut it was the truth, which doesn’t necessarily have corresponding documentation. If two memories conflicted, I wrote that conflict into the scene. Paradox belongs in memoir. Confirmation through intuition gave me the courage to tell how it felt without hedging.

Build a reporter’s kit for your life

Reporters carry notebooks or index cards. Each card can hold a scene: where it took place, who was present, and the sensory specifics that tether memory to the body. In my case, this “reporter’s kit” was so burned in my memory and my upbringing I had no need to keep a physical card. I’ve lived my life with the phrases as a steady and repetitive understanding of how to approach many situations: Who? What? Where? Why? When?

When my brain was tired, I could still sort notes into a timeline. Moving the story physically helped me see the arc when the screen would not. That was another of Bill’s lessons: If the copy won’t behave, change the format, not the truth.

What my book set out to prove

We are more than our test results or advanced degrees, and we have many untapped resources within us. In addition to my innate problem-solving skills, I was blessed with a sharp tenacity and bundles of energy. I also had a profound instinctive awareness that I didn’t fit any traditional mold, either in academia or jobs, and had to amass the skills to be my own woman. Penning my memoir took an extraordinary effort. My mission of helping others do great things with their lives against sometimes seemingly insurmountable odds kept me going page to page.

Find editors who see you

In a newsroom, copy doesn’t go to print without an editor. Neither did my chapters. Because spatial dyslexia makes it easy to miss a missing word—I “see” what I meant, not what’s there—I recruited a small, steady crew for structure, continuity, a bit of cheerleading, and the ultimate finish.

In truth, I wrote a book about potential and belonging—to my own voice, to the people who held me accountable, and to a lineage of journalists who believe the truth can stand up to questions. Bill Crago didn’t make me a writer; he made me a reporter of my own life. The lead of Nobody’s Girl is simple: I learned to stop letting the shape of my brain be an apology and started letting it be a method.

If you are rigorous with facts and generous with feelings, others will feel your experiences. Hopefully, they will be inspired to live life on their own terms.

Check out Amber M. Brookman’s Nobody’s Girl here:

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(Don’t Scrimp on an Editor.)

If I did it, I knew I had to do it honestly. No smoothing the rough edges. No skipping the messy middle. Because it’s the complex parts—the cracks in the foundation—that readers connect with. That’s where the truth lies, and I had a lot of truth to share.

However, when I looked back at my childhood diaries, stories, and poems, I slipped into a kind of emotional fog. That numb nostalgia—the kind that coats everything in gauze—made the memories feel blurry and just out of reach. I needed to write about things that were murky, confusing, and not entirely resolved in that time. It wasn’t easy.

To write a book that would keep the reader turning pages, I had to do more than recall. I had to focus those memories into moments and describe them with clarity and momentum. I had to stop passively reporting what had happened—and start actively showing it.

This is the story of how I learned the difference between active and passive voice.

Or, to show you the passive version: This article was written by me to show the difference between active and passive voice.

See the difference? One has me rolling up my sleeves, engaging with you directly. The other sounds like I left the room and let my computer type it.

I’ve wrestled with this idea of active vs. passive voice for most of my writing life—which, to be honest, hasn’t been that long. I dreamed of writing for decades, earned a degree in English Literature (which, let’s face it, doesn’t automatically make anyone a writer), and wrote a boatload of papers. But that was a lifetime ago. By the time I finally sat down to write my memoir, I realized I’d been so busy living that I’d forgotten some of the most basic writing rules.

Here’s one I had to relearn the hard way: Use active voice—no matter if you’re writing in past or present tense.

I recently read a friend’s forthcoming memoir written in present active voice. The author captured her younger self’s point of view so vividly that I forgot I was reading about the past. It was as if the story were unfolding right before our eyes, happening in real time. Her use of active voice made it raw, moving, and unforgettable.

Writing in past tense, especially when recalling emotional or traumatic memories, can be a trapdoor to passive voice. We slip into explanation mode. We describe instead of evoke. It’s natural, maybe even necessary in early drafts. But in revision, we must breathe life into the retelling. We must turn passive explanations into active remembrances.

In my early drafts, I wrote lines like: “I was looking at the dolphin as it swam by.”

It’s not technically wrong, but it meanders. The emotional current is weak. I’ve learned to write instead: “I saw the dolphin swim by.”

Same moment. Sharper image. Stronger sentence. I’m no longer observing from a distance—I’m in it. The verb is doing the work.

Over time, I developed a radar for passivity. If a sentence leans too heavily on “to be” verbs—was, were, is, are—it’s often a clue I’ve drifted into passive waters. Not always, but often enough to matter. “To be” verbs aren’t evil, but they’re slippery little lifeboats when we’re afraid to swim into the emotional depths.

Another flag for me is the use of -ing words, such as “looking,” from the example above.

Active voice gives the reader something to grab onto. It’s grounded, assertive, alive. Passive voice, while sometimes useful—like when the actor is unknown or irrelevant—tends to blur the edges and slow things down. And memoir can’t afford to be blurry. It demands intimacy. Urgency. Truth in motion.

So if you’re writing your truth—your survival, your reckoning, your hard-won healing—don’t let your sentences whisper from the sidelines—step inside them. Be the subject. Own the verb.

Passive voice distances the reader. Active voice hands them the oars and says, Come with me.

Check out Leslie Johansen Nack’s Nineteen here:

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(The Art of Imagination and Finding Voice in Memoir.)

I knew all of this and still, writing Flood—a memoir that aimed to act as a house that could hold the story of my husband’s affair, the birth of our twins, and the clownish care I received in response to an aggressive tumor in my right breast—I fell prey to doubt. Doubt was delivered through other people’s opinions in writers’ workshops that I charged on my credit card and also in graduate school where earning an MFA required producing an effective manuscript. The stakes felt high. I could not fail in the telling of my own story.

The overwhelming advice I received was to write the entire memoir in past tense. But I wrote it in present tense. This isn’t happening now an advisor wrote on my manuscript with a red pen.

There is nothing more immediate than bad news about your health. Far less immediate is writing about that news and having it become a book. Or not having it become a book. What I did have were two legal-sized boxes filled with past-tense drafts. Each was a natural evolution of the one before and also not right. Immediacy—that elemental thing that keeps a reader turning pages—was missing, like a house without a foundation.

Immediacy, urgency, and pacing are sometimes used interchangeably when describing a piece of writing, but they are different. The pacing of a story is the speed in which it travels. Urgency is the engine that drives it. Immediacy is akin to prioritizing. In a moment of crisis, there is no time for reflection. There is only do this now. For me, this was whatever the moment required: couples counseling, caring for two babies, chemotherapy—crying.

The French philosopher Gaston Bachelard had a great deal to say about immediacy. The entirety of his Intuition of the Instant from 1932 is devoted to unpicking Gaston Roupnel’s dramatic novel Siloë. Specifically Roupnel’s idea that “time has but one reality, the reality of the instant.”

The reality I was working so hard to describe was a series of instants lived underwater. But first I had to see the waves.

The following is a three-step blueprint that I developed for Flood:

1. I printed the complete manuscript and laid it out, chapter by chapter, on the floor.
2. Reading the last paragraph of chapter one followed by the first paragraph of chapter two, I asked myself are these paragraphs in conversation with each other.
3. When they were, immediacy was present. When they weren’t, I considered the penultimate paragraph of chapter one. I often found that the last paragraph of any chapter could be eliminated.

With my manuscript spilled all over the living room, I dug through a diary I’d written contemporaneously. What was remarkable was the effusion of exclamation points: Things are great! I shaved my head! The babies cried all day! I rarely use exclamation points. Their presence in the diary was like a series of red flags around a construction site.

I excavated those exclamation points as if I was digging for the first time. Rewriting the series of medical events in present tense and letting flashbacks remain in past tense resulted in the manuscript reading organically. The wave of one event led to another. A house appeared before my eyes.

Bachelard’s understanding of Roupnel’s novel is concerned with the sensation of immediate comprehension, “a moment when we suddenly understand our own message.” It’s in these flashes of insight that we know how to behave. Why when we cut our thumb slicing cucumbers for dinner, we don’t keep slicing cucumbers but instantly determine what’s appropriate: bandage in the bathroom or stitches at the hospital.

When I adopted past tense, something vital was lost. It was as if I was writing my way out instead of writing my way in. As Roupnel wrote in Siloë, “It is in the virtue of this present alone—in it and through it—that we become aware of existence. There is an absolute identity between the feeling of the present and the feeling of life.”

As the authority on our own work—even if it means going against the advice of seasoned writers we admire and respect—we have to be willing to swim. Past tense or present tense, fast or slow pacing, sustained or relaxed urgency, all of these are secondary to the immediate.

When Flood was accepted for publication, I burned the boxes of wholly past-tense drafts in my backyard. Then the rain came.

Check out Christine Kalafus’ Flood here:

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(Using Magic as Metaphor in Fantasy Novels.)

When we started opening the crates holding the old props and equipment, I flashed back on being backstage—walking through its fluid darkness, the humming crowds through the curtain, and my mother in black sequins smelling of hair spray and fresh lipstick. Then we rolled out the big gold top hat; I had jumped out of it in the opening number. It was a large stylish prop of ribbed wire and shiny gold plaster. And there she was—my stage-struck 14-year-old self in her first high heels jumping out of that hat to a round of applause. I viscerally felt her excitement and dewy optimism. Everywhere she looked was the promise of magic.  

A magic I had not found in my adult life. I didn’t like my job or where I lived, and my romantic relationships always fizzled out. I felt a little lost and sad, and yet I’d had this incredible adventure in the big magic show. To see and touch again all the old props—the musty foulards, foam birds, wire lady, battered wardrobe trunks—reminded me I had once experienced something grand. I wanted to understand that and write about it. I didn’t know why exactly. I just hoped it would lift me out of my malaise.

There is something intrinsically entrancing about a magic show and it doesn’t matter what side of the curtain one is on. A woman rises off the ground in inky blue light. All the backstage maneuvering to make this happen cannot diminish the feeling we are being lured into another way of seeing. Even backstage, amid all the secret compartments and angled mirrors, I believed something extraordinary could happen at any moment, and it wasn’t just my youthful exuberance.

We innately want to be released from a narrow, predictable world. As I began writing the book, I started to see what I had found, lost, and wanted to find again.

In writing The Magician’s Daughter – A Memoir, I had to embody the young girl I once was. I began reading my journals from the road. I had filled two 200-page notebooks with my musings, and apparently, I believed my father’s show was going to make me a famous magician’s assistant. But before the magic show, I’d had another dream. Stashed in my kid’s bedroom closet, were still my old music albums. They were reminders of my biggest dream of all—I wanted to be a famous rock-n-roll star. When the fancy illusion show came along, I traded my dream for my father’s dream even though all I had to do on stage was dress up, hand him props, and jump out of boxes. That’s when I realized this memoir would be about my journey back to myself within the light and motion of a magic show. 

A magic show with plenty of mishaps and disappointments. 

My father’s one cherished dream inspired this tour. He wanted to be a Las Vegas headliner and hoped that tour would be a springboard to a casino booking. Before I was born, he had manned his own traveling illusion show, and now he wanted to revive it in a big way.

Click to continue.

In The Magician’s Daughter – A Memoir I share his excitement for a steady venue in neon-lit Las Vegas, and also his discouragement as difficulties mount on the road. Each time I’m so disillusioned. I assume my father will pack-up the show and sweep us all back home, yet each time he keeps on. As I wrote, I recalled his determination and great belief in himself, people, and life. It’s what sent him on that quest for glory in the first place. What a great example he was to me. At least when I was a kid.

My adult relationship with my father was strained. I had discounted all his best, most inspiring qualities and even the magic show had become tainted. That was one reason why I was in such a mess. I was determined to—do it on my own. Each time I sat in front of the computer screen, I had to be honest. I’d been handed magic on stage and off. It was time to journey back to myself again, and love and appreciate my father and his magic show once more.

I worked on the book for many years unable to complete it. Finally, I admitted I didn’t want my father to read it because I had revealed many of his tricks and illusions. Some of the illusions were so intertwined with the plot, I had no choice. Other times it was purely poetic ornamentation. I also revealed tricks to give my readers a true backstage view into the artificial innards of a magic show. But the main reason was this—in order for my young self to find real magic on the road, I had to first know what isn’t magic. And there is nothing very magical about a magician’s secrets—a clip on a boater hat, sliding doors, black thread, eyelids on a floating ball, an extra card in an inside pocket. So uninteresting and hush hush.

When I joined the magic show, I understood nothing about its inner workings. What better way to bring the reader into the story. I discover the secrets, wonders, curiosities of the magic show as the reader does. We both watch my father for the first time load his pockets behind his wardrobe trunk. We both see that little claw on his thumb—a  thumb-tip with a razor blade duct-taped to the top. And we wonder, what act does he use that in? 

I had told my father I was writing a book and offered no other details. Each time I thought of publication, I wondered: How would I break the news I had exposed his floating piano? And everything else? He was guarded and cautious regarding his illusion show. Secrets are the beating animal heart of every magic show. No way I’d get by unscathed.

Throughout all this, author and poet Mark Doty was on my mind. His memoir Firebird cost him his relationship with his father which he wrote about in the essay “Return to Sender.” This line always stayed with me: “I have told the truth, which may indeed set you free, but not without the price of betrayal.” Betrayal, as strong as the word is, feels right in this situation. I wasn’t a stranger but a daughter whom he had trusted as an assistant. 

I shared the dilemma with a few writers. Some sympathized, others were dismissive, and one writer was angry. “Are you kidding me? You’re going to let him stop you. You have a right to tell your story.” 

What I’ve learned is that only I know what to do. It’s a personal decision without a right or wrong. Despite the issues between my father and I, there was love. He’d been generous to me in many ways, and in exchange, knowing my memoir would upset and embarrass him, I decided, at the age of 40, not to publish it till he was dead. This wasn’t exactly going to be soon. At the time, he was a happy and active senior citizen galivanting around Las Vegas and Hollywood performing and attending professional magic functions with my mother. I waited 13 years. He died in 2015. And the memoir is publishing this year. 

I cannot explain how the magic show changed me, without explaining how writing this book changed me. I went back to the beginning and saved myself. Magic. If I really look, it’s everywhere.

Check out Katy Grabel’s The Magician’s Daughter here:

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(Why I Decided to Write a Memoir—and How I Did It.)

I had been through a slow-burning transformation—one that didn’t have a single, cinematic turning point, but rather, a series of subtle ruptures. Some joyful. Some painful. Most hard to explain in plain language.

I didn’t feel called to tell my story. I felt called to understand it. I felt called to transmit it. And for that, fiction felt like the only form honest enough to hold what I was trying to say.

The Truth in Fiction

It’s not that Captains Wanted is entirely made up. Much of it draws from the emotional terrain of my own life—conversations I’ve had, places I’ve been, choices I’ve wrestled with. But it’s not a memoir. It’s not a blow-by-blow of my biography. It’s not even a thinly-veiled self-help book wrapped in anecdotes. It’s fiction. And that distinction matters.

Because fiction gave me room. Room to explore questions without needing to answer them. Room to shape scenes for resonance instead of accuracy. Room to be honest without being literal.

Memoir often says, Here’s what happened to me.

Fiction, when it’s working, says, Here’s something I’ve felt. Have you felt it too?

That felt like the deeper offering.

I wasn’t interested in writing a story that led readers from Point A to Point B in 10 tidy steps. I wanted to make something that left space—for curiosity, for discomfort, for mystery. Captains Wanted isn’t a roadmap. It’s an opening.

Life Is Already Surreal

One of the things that kept tugging at me during the writing process was how strange it all is—being alive, being in a body, trying to follow rules that no one really remembers agreeing to. We move through the world as if it’s governed only by logic, but that’s a trick the mind plays. The deeper truths—the ones that change us—often don’t make logical sense. They emerge from dreams, from gut instincts, from the in-between spaces we’re taught to ignore.

Magical realism became a way to reflect that back to the reader. Not because I wanted to dazzle anyone with cleverness, but because it felt honest. Life already is surreal. We just forget. Or we’re trained not to notice. The cracks in the matrix are everywhere—those moments when time bends, when coincidence feels like choreography, when grief and beauty exist in the same breath.

I wanted the book to hold that sense of the unexplainable. To invite readers into a space they already know but maybe don’t allow themselves to visit. A place where logic loosens its grip, and something more intuitive—more ancient—can emerge.

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A Voice That Invites, Not Tells

From the start, I wrote the book in second person. Not to be experimental or edgy, but because it felt necessary. I wanted the reader to be inside the experience—not observing it, not judging it, but living it. Second person can be disorienting at first, but then something happens: You stop resisting it. You start to see yourself in it.

I also chose not to assign a gender to the narrator. Not as a statement, but as a widening. I wanted the story to feel personal to anyone who read it. Not because they shared my identity, but because they shared the ache, the longing, the confusion. The deeply human stuff. When we strip away labels, we sometimes get closer to the core.

The craft decisions—the form, the perspective, the structure—weren’t academic for me. They were spiritual. Every choice I made was in service of one hope: that this book could help someone reclaim their agency. Not by telling them how. But by reminding them it’s possible.

The title says it plainly: Captains Wanted. Not found. Not perfected. Just willing. I wrote this book for anyone who suspects there’s more to life than what we’ve been sold—and who’s brave enough to take the wheel, even without a map.

Nonlinearity and the Myth of Arrival

One of the things I kept bumping into while writing was how little progress actually feels like progress when you’re in it. We expect growth to be vertical, to feel like momentum. But more often, it feels like circling the same wound from a new angle. Like forgetting and remembering over and over again.

If I had written a memoir, I might’ve been tempted to tie it up with a bow—to frame the chaos as clarity. But fiction allowed me to leave the edges raw. To honor the fact that change rarely announces itself. That we often grow in the dark, in the silence, in the stretch of time when nothing appears to be happening.

This mattered to me. Because I’ve given up before. I’ve told myself the lack of visible movement meant I was stuck or broken or failing. But sometimes, the soil needs to go still before the seed breaks open. I wanted readers to feel that. To know that the story continues—even when it doesn’t look like it.

What I Learned

Writing this book taught me how to hold contradiction. How to trust feeling over form. How to let a story lead, even when I didn’t know where it was going. It showed me that vulnerability doesn’t require confession—it requires presence. That truth can wear many costumes. That sometimes, the most generous thing you can offer a reader isn’t an answer, but an honest question.

And maybe most importantly, it reminded me that we don’t have to be finished in order to be free.

We just have to be willing to begin, again and again and again.

Check out Andres Schabelman’s Captains Wanted here:

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(Walter Mosley on Characterization.)

Overcoming my surprise, I blurted out that I was a big fan of his crime novels, that I’d written a memoir called Constant Comedy, and that I’d just finished writing a thriller called What She’s Hiding.

“You wrote a memoir and then a thriller? That,” he said, “is like going from wrestling to boxing!”

I laughed. “Can I quote you?” He nodded yes, smiled, and ended the conversation shortly thereafter.

Mr. Mosley’s insight stayed on my mind for weeks, but was he right? In parsing his metaphor, I concluded that while wrestling is spirited grappling, boxing involves getting hit in the face, losing teeth, risking a concussion, and, occasionally, dying. My takeaway from Mr. Mosley’s observation? Writing fiction is more treacherous and takes a different kind of writer. But the more I thought about this, the less I felt it applied to me and my writing.

My memoir, Constant Comedy: How I Started Comedy Central and Lost My Sense of Humor, recounts how I started the Comedy Central cable channel in the late 1980s. I hoped that readers of Constant Comedy would see how difficult it was to start the world’s first all-comedy network; and that they knew that after HBO launched the channel, it was ravaged by the press and almost didn’t survive its first year! The memoir was my story of how I was overwhelmed by a tough business situation of my own making.

But I wanted the book to be more exciting than that, so I started writing toward cliffhangers: the dozens of times that I faced some seemingly insurmountable problem that would mean the end of my quest to bring a comedy channel into the world. Despite knowing the eventual outcome (the channel survived and ultimately thrived), I hoped writing it with cliffhangers would keep readers wanting to find out how I persevered despite facing impossible odds. Mortal danger? No, but certainly career-ending danger, damaged self-image danger, and failure danger. These would be the high stakes that would propel my story.

The first time someone said to me, “It’s a page turner! I couldn’t put it down!” I knew I’d succeeded in the eyes of at least one reader.

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Unlike my memoir, my thriller, What She’s Hiding, isn’t about me, but rather about something I’d pondered for most of my life: How does a non-violent person (like me) face mortal danger? How would someone (like me) react? So, I began the story of a mild-mannered lawyer (Henry) who finds himself in a life-threatening situation. I kept writing to see what would happen to him. Writing in the first person enabled me to envision Henry’s dangerous world through his eyes. I got to know his quirks, his sense of humor, and his values. As I wrote, I discovered how Henry would handle his unfamiliar yet dangerous situation. It soon began to feel as if I were writing Henry’s memoir!

One thing that supported my feeling that I was writing Henry’s memoir is that it’s written in the first person. Had I chosen to write my thriller in the third person, it would have been a much different writing experience. First-person narrative of any sort, fiction or nonfiction, limits the writer’s ability to do anything other than observe. There’s no way to know how others feel unless they explicitly show their feelings or voice them in dialogue. Only the narrator can have internal monologues. I chose to write What She’s Hiding as a first-person narrative from Henry’s point of view because after writing my memoir, I liked telling the story from one person’s vantage point.

So, do I agree that moving from memoir to fiction is like going from wrestling to boxing, as Walter Mosley suggested? For me, it was more like going from wrestling with your big brother to being on the school wrestling team and facing an unknown opponent. Similar, but with surprises.

Check out Art Bell’s What She’s Hiding here:

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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.

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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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(Why I Decided to Write a Memoir.)

After years of writing, classes, and getting recognition for my work, I was asked: “Will you publish it?” I wasn’t sure. Could I share the deeply personal stories I wrote as I made sense of my family life? My mother’s struggle with schizophrenia, our struggle with her anosognosia, the profound impact of WWII on my father as a child, my reckless youth? The stakes felt impossibly high.

As I battled through the millionth revision, I realized I had long ago stopped writing for myself. I had started writing for that one reader—someone like me—who might find solace in my truth. Reading great memoir authors like Mira Bartok and Minneapolis-based Laura Flynn opened secret passages to truths about my own life. Their courage and vulnerability inspired me to embrace my own. Literary writing can be cathartic. It’s not just about the writer finding healing; it’s about readers connecting and being transformed, too.

While I had achieved my goal of finishing my memoir, the unpublished nature of my manuscript was unfinished business, a monkey on my back, a syncopation in the flow of my daily life. I had embraced the alchemy of memoir writing and the magic that can take place between an author and a reader. Publishing this project, that had begun as a journey of personal healing, became imperative for my mental health.

Once it felt essential to put my work out into the world, I was astonished to learn how effed up the traditional publishing industry is.

A Minnesota-based literary agent recently said on Minnesota Public Radio that she receives between 7,000 and 10,000 queries yearly. A query is a writer’s letter to agents hoping to gain their representation. Agents are very important to the process, as traditional book publishers will only accept agent submissions.

The agent on MPR mentioned, to emphasize the lightning-strike scenario nature of signing with an agent, that she represented two of those thousands of queries last year. Let’s say in another year, she decides to represent four out of 7,000. If we extrapolate these chances for a writer who submits to 100 agents with similar numbers, the chances of that writer signing with an agent is 5.5%. An endeavor that could take a year and a half or more. Keep in mind that your agent may then never sell your book to a publisher. Publishers have specific things they think readers will buy. I have seen webinars teaching writers how to write books publishers will buy at that trendy moment.

Financially, traditional publishers ask nothing of you. They may give you an advance, but otherwise, you won’t see any money until they make theirs back, and then they take 85-90% of your book sales. Your agent will then take 20% of your 10-15%. You may get $2 on a $20 book sale someday down the road.

I had thought traditional publishing was the only real route to go. It is an excellent route for unicorns and known authors with large readerships or millions of followers. Still, I could never see how it made sense for me. In addition to the lottery aspect of the process, traditional publishers are doing very little by way of marketing, spending 2% of their revenue in this area. They give up on your book entirely if sales don’t come in immediately.

Most readers don’t care how books are published. Why would I, having spent years writing and revising a book, bang my head for more years if there were alternatives to explore?

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I was surprised to find some very compelling options for getting my book into the world besides pure self-publishing. There are reputable, selective independent hybrid publishers that turn the business model upside down and put out compelling and beautifully written books (no noticeable quality difference from traditional). With hybrid publishing the author pays for the project management, edits, proofreads, art/design, and distribution; however, the author then takes home much, if not all, of the book’s profits without waiting for a publisher to make their investment back. Since there is no agent, in many cases, all proceeds go to the author compared to 10% or less from a traditional publisher.

I started to think of my manuscript like an entrepreneur considering their innovative new product. Many inventors may, instead of or in addition to loans or savings, accept help from early-stage investors with the money and expertise to get their product off the ground. The investors take on the financial risk and likely end up owning much of the product and profits.

In an author’s world, the traditional publisher is the money and expertise. Is this publisher/investor necessary? Maybe, for some. Or, a writer can dig into their savings, crowdsource funds, take pre-order sales from supporters, or apply for literary grants. The writer can then self-publish or submit to select hybrid publishers. Decisions about art, title, design, edits, and distribution are then guided by experts and decided by authors. Since traditional publishing only spends 2% of its revenue on marketing, writers don’t miss out on much here. Many hybrids have a wide range of marketing services included in their packages or for additional fees.

No one I know has published a book to get rich. Regardless of how writers publish, most hope to get their story out into the world and break even. Of the 58,000 trade titles published yearly in traditional publishing, 90% sell fewer than 2,000 copies. 90%! (Number from the antitrust trial, DOJ v PRH). No one is making money on those titles, certainly not the author.

After deciding to go independent, I submitted to three different independent publishing models nationwide before choosing one. I decided on a hybrid publisher in the Twin Cities, Wise Ink Media, and I couldn’t be happier with that decision and all the other decisions I was allowed in bringing my book to life. Mostly I’m happy to have not spent years banging my head against the wall of traditional publishing.

You’re Too Young to Understand will be released May 6, 2025. The publishing journey so far has been almost as liberating for me as writing the book and nowhere near as brutal.

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(9 Things I’ve Learned Writing a Memoir.)

In the beginning, we are surveying the land of possibility, searching for firm ground that might support the story we want to tell. We start digging trenches to test that ground. Perhaps a question rises from the sea of possible questions. It grabs hold of us and doesn’t let go.

The first question that grabbed me as I was writing my memoir, My Mother in Havana, was why, at age 49—30 years after I’d lost my mother—I missed her more than ever. And why that missing was calling me to Cuba—a country neither she nor I were from.

The lines and angles that connected my story with the island’s felt both impossible and inevitable. It would take the writing of My Mother in Havana—a memoir about traveling to Cuba to find my mother among their gods and ghosts and mother saints—for that geometry to click into place. And that writing process felt more akin to building than it did to writing.

Building Foundations/Framing Walls

We are sensory creatures, taking in the world around us and translating those bits of sensory experience into meaning, which means that when we write we are constantly deconstructing and reconstructing the world in a way that makes meaning both for us and for our reader.

As I found my way into the architecture of My Mother in Havana, I studied memoirs like Cheryl Strayed’s Wild and Helen MacDonald’s H is for Hawk that seemed to adhere to this building principle. I was particularly interested in the way Strayed structured her book so that each chapter begins on the Pacific Crest Trail, a decision that creates the foundation upon which the reader moves along the narrative of that arduous hike while allowing Strayed to set the posts that frame its themes of grief and loss, motherhood, and survival.

Similarly, all but one chapter of My Mother in Havana begins on my pilgrimage to Cuba. I poured that foundation in a mad fever, laying down the narrative that led me from sacred dance to séance, sacrifice to pilgrimage. But there were also multiple layers of backstory I needed to introduce my reader to: who my mother had been; why her death had plagued me for so long; how my grief over her loss had morphed over the years. And why I was looking for answers in a country and spiritual experience so far from my own.

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Materials

As I wrote my way into those themes, I scoured family letters for backstory; puzzled over how and where to insert memories of my mother into the more linear narrative of my trip to Cuba. Devoured books about the mythology and practices of Santería and the Afro-Cuban gods known as the oricha. I made numerous trips to Cuba to scour archives and deepen my understanding of the rituals that lie at the heart of this book.

I laid down these materials like a brick layer lays down bricks, or a teacher lays down transparencies—with each new layer illuminating and building upon what lies beneath it.

An Incomplete List of Materials to Try as You Build Your Memoir:

• Memory
• Photographs
• Letters
• Genealogy & family lore
• Timelines
• Interviews
• Archival research
• Immersion into your subject matter
• Image & Motifs
• Narrative
• Lyricism
• Inquiry & Speculation

Time

We live in times that privilege speed and efficiency, doing vs. being. But there is a beauty, even a subversiveness, in allowing ourselves to take our time. As we try out different materials, we trust that the ways they’ll find their way to one another will lead much deeper than the surface of any single narrative. And it is often only after the writer turns off the conscious part of their writing brain—say to take a nap or go for a walk—that the new arrangement comes.

At first our manuscript looks like a big mess, and perhaps this is one of the most challenging aspects of writing—to resist simplification. Turn off the part of our brain that craves instant results and lean into the mess, climb the ladders of our scaffolding to survey our work in progress, move or add walls and plumbing as necessary. Make room for the process to take as long as it needs to take.

Patterns

What keeps our work from staying a mess are the foundation and walls we’ve put in place, and the patterns and repetitions that emerge from and support that framework.

And so, once we’ve waded into the mess of possibility that is our manuscript comes the time to seek pattern and connection, and prune away any element that detracts from those patterns.

The first drafts of My Mother in Havana resembled a cross between a Pinterest and a forensic murder board. I wrote themes and images on index cards and Post-It notes. Arranged and rearranged them across pinboards and floors.

With each revision, I found myself making choices—saying yes to images I believed were central to the architecture of the writing, and no to those that led the reader away from that center.

There is something intuitive and dare I say magical about this process. You must trust that all those carefully placed note cards and Post-Its are leading somewhere. Because, at the end of the day, the beauty of building vs. writing is the element of surprise. Whether it’s a poem or a book-length memoir, both the writer and the reader enter the piece not knowing how these seemingly-competing materials and patterns will resolve themselves. And then, if you’re lucky, somehow, both impossibly and inevitably, they do.

Check out Rebe Huntman’s My Mother in Havana here:

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