Latest news with #CristínLeach
RTÉ News
3 days ago
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Get Creative: The craft of non-fiction - writing groups and first readers
Ever thought about writing non-fiction, be it an essay, a memoir or even a brief snapshot of your life? Why not take the leap? In a new series, author, critic and broadcaster Cristín Leach explores the craft of non-fiction. I'm going to start with a touchy topic and end with a complicated one. I have heard more than one tale of an emerging writer sharing their work with a writing group only to find their idea appropriated or coming back at them later, recognisable in different but similar form. The only advice here is to never do that to someone else, and to be careful about where you share your works in progress. The best first readers, advice and feedback-givers are symbiotic not parasitic. I recommend finding a reader-writer peer at a similar stage in their writing career to pair with. Attending workshops with a focus on the kind of writing you interesting in doing can be a good way to meet someone. In a pairing scenario, you give some time to their writing and they give some time to yours. It's the kind of fruitful attention bartering that can be invaluable because it is free and mutually respectful. It can also be helpful to have a first reader who is not also a writer; a reader who treats your work with joy and respect, and requires nothing back other than the pleasure of doing this important early-response job for you. It goes without saying that you should not join a writing group where the traffic is all one way. Watch: Demystifying Submissions - advice from the editors of Irish literary journals If possible, another option is to find a professional mentor. The Irish Writers Centre in Dublin runs an annual open-submission 32-county National Mentoring Programme, which includes writers of creative non-fiction, pairing selected mentees with professional writers over a period of six to eight months. If your first reader is someone close to you and you are writing non-fiction in the form of memoir or personal essay, you may hit the second topic quite quickly. It's a question of ethics, and voice, and how to own your story in public when it is a personal one. Personal essays tend to have real life other people in them, unless the account is of an entirely solo adventure, and even then no one exists in a vacuum. Listen: The Prompt - RTÉ's new showcase for fresh Irish writing There's no definitive, foolproof way to approach this. I can offer a few steps. First, give yourself permission to tell your own story. Second, identify what elements of the story are in fact yours. Third, don't try to tell the story from a perspective that isn't yours. Anonymise where possible. It is also acceptable to change names and other details to protect identities. After that, whether to invite comment, feelings, thoughts, or permissions has to be a personal choice. Melissa Febos' Bodywork: The Radical Power of Personal Narrative (2022) is an excellent resource on this complicated territory. She writes, "it is difficult to predict what will upset people… Each person who was present for the events about which I have written has a different true story for them." And she offers this pertinent advice for the memoirist: "There are good essays that there are good reasons not to write."
RTÉ News
18-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Get Creative: The craft of non-fiction – on self-editing
Ever thought about writing non-fiction, be it an essay, a memoir or even a brief snapshot of your life? Why not take the leap? In a new series, author, critic and broadcaster Cristín Leach explores the craft of non-fiction. One exercise I give myself when I'm editing a draft of something I'm writing, is what I call The Headline Test. In a variation of Denis Johnson's advice to write "as if you are never going to get home again", I imagine I'm on the phone and the line is about to go dead. If communication is about to be cut, what is the single most important message to get across quickly? Or, if this was a newspaper story, what would the headline be? Once you've got that, write it down, put it on a sticky-note, stick it on the wall. This sentence or phrase is not a sentence that will appear in your writing, but it is the guiding light that will help you to edit it. The exercise produces two results. It ensures you will write what is most urgent. And it helps you understand what you can cut. To continue the news journalism analogy, it's a question that forces you to decide, what is the most important angle here? Picking a headline doesn't mean the piece of writing can't be complex, nuanced or layered. It is just that every one of those complications, nuances, and layers must serve the same purpose: to speak in some way to the headline that gets to the core of the piece of writing. Think of it as a version of an elevator pitch. Listen to Cristín Leach's audio essay Take a Seat, for Sunday Miscellany Sometimes stepping back and asking yourself 'what is this piece of writing actually about?' and identifying a one-line answer can be the editing question that unlocks the whole. Once you understand the main thrust of the piece, you can edit so that every sentence, anecdote, tangent, side-quest, and unexpected aside still talks back (in some way) to this angle. You can cut whatever does not. Something missing? You can also glance back at your 'headline' when you are wondering what it is that you have left out. The other question I ask myself when I'm editing my own work (and that of others) is really five questions in one: why are you telling me this now? 1. WHY are you telling me this now? 2. Why are YOU telling me this now? 3. Why are you telling ME this now? 4. Why are you telling me THIS now? 5. Why are you telling me this NOW? The five answers will help you to: identify the impetus behind the work, consciously establish an authorial voice, know your intended audience, figure out what to include or leave out, and understand what is most pertinent about this particular piece of writing. 'Why are you telling me this now?' can also help with The Headline Test. If you don't know the answer to any one of these questions when you are self-editing, it's likely the piece is falling down somewhere. When you figure out the answers to all five, you can fix it.
RTÉ News
04-05-2025
- Entertainment
- RTÉ News
Get Creative: The craft of non-fiction
Ever thought about writing non-fiction, be it an essay, a memoir or even a brief snapshot of your life? Why not take the leap? In a new series, author, critic and broadcaster Cristín Leach explores the craft of non-fiction. When I'm writing, I think of the late American author Denis Johnson's oft-quoted three rules. He advised students to: 1. Write naked. That means to write what you would never say. 2. Write in blood. As if ink is so precious you can't waste it. 3. Write in exile. As if you are never going to get home again, and you have to call back every detail. That said, when it comes to writing personal essays, it might be useful to pair those rules with Stephen King's evergreen editing advice from On Writing: A Memoir of the Craft (2020), to: "Write with the door closed, rewrite with the door open. Your stuff starts out being just for you… but then it goes out… it belongs to anyone who wants to read it. Or criticize it." The first personal essay I wrote and had published was written with the door slightly ajar, because I wrote it as I sat with my grandmother who was dying in a nursing home. The room was warm, her breathing steady, and she didn't wake up while I was there. The door was being kept just barely open as nurses came and went, stopping and popping their heads in to check if everything was still ok. Of course, nothing was ok because my grandmother was dying, but at the same time it was ok. She had lived a long life. She was comfortable. We were quiet and resting and waiting together. And, because I am a writer there was a notebook and pen in my bag, and so I began to write. Sometimes, your initial job as a writer is to just capture those words as they land. The essay was published almost three years later in Winter Papers 5 (2019), along with four photographs I took that day. While She Was Sleeping is one of those unusual essays that almost fell out of me fully formed. The stream of consciousness I wrote in my notebook by her bed was only lightly edited by me before submission, and barely touched by editors Kevin Barry and Olivia Smith, who suggested minor changes to some words and came up with the title to form the final version. Not every essay arrives like that, but opening or closing lines, or significant phrases attached to important observations, often do. Sometimes, your initial job as a writer is to just capture those words as they land. Right now, the island of Ireland is pulsing with a vibrant network of literary journals that are open to non-fiction writing, including personal essays: The Dublin Review, The Stinging Fly, Banshee, Gorse, Winter Papers, The Four Faced Liar, Profiles, Howl, The Pig's Back, Storms, Sonder, The Belfast Review, The Martello Journal, The Ogham Stone, Púca Magazine, Ropes, The Tangerine, Trasna. Tolka focuses exclusively on non-fiction (inviting submissions of essays, travel writing, reportage, and creative non-fiction hybrids like auto-fiction). They don't all pay for accepted work, but many of them do. And with publication comes something else: that early nourishment that can lay the ground for future themed anthologies, memoirs, and books of collected essays.
