A Conversation with John Truby

I had the great honor of interviewing John Truby, a revered story consultant, legendary writing teacher, and author of the seminal book The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller, which guides writers towards constructing effective, multifaceted narratives.

His latest book The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works is another deep dive, this time into the study of genres. We talked specifically about the unique advantages and challenges of the memoir genre, and John gave some incredible insights about how blending memoir with another genre (can you guess which one?) can offer a brilliant solution.

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John Truby is the founder and director of Truby’s Writers Studio. Over the past thirty years, he has taught more than fifty thousand students worldwide, including novelists, screenwriters, and TV writers. Together, these writers have generated more than fifteen billion dollars at the box office.

Based on the lessons in his award-winning class, Great Screenwriting, his book The Anatomy of Story draws on a broad range of philosophy and mythology, offering fresh techniques and insightful anecdotes alongside Truby's own unique approach for how to build an effective, multifaceted narrative.

Just as The Anatomy of Story changed the way writers develop stories, The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works will enhance their quality and expand the impact they have on the world.

The Anatomy of Genres is a step-by-step guide to understanding and using the basic building blocks of the story world. He details the three ironclad rules of successful genre writing, and analyzes more than a dozen major genres and the essential plot events, or “beats,” that define each of them.

Simply put, the storytelling game is won by mastering the structure of genres.

KARIN GUTMAN: In your book The Anatomy of Genres: How Story Forms Explain the Way the World Works, you say that everything we've been told about story is actually the opposite in reality. What do you mean by that?
 
JOHN TRUBY: We think about stories as entertainment, as what we do at the end of our day to escape reality. It's actually the opposite. Stories are first. Story is not a luxury, it is the reality itself.
 
Story heightens reality, so that we can see the deeper patterns underneath. Just as there is a deep structure to a story, there is the deeper structure to the reality that we live in, and what stories do at their best is show us that deeper structure in our lives, so that we can control it, we can work with it, we can do what we need to do to make it better.
 
It's why the first chapter is titled “The World as Story.” We don't just tell stories, we are stories. That begins with the very first story that we become when we're born. We go through story stages that I talk about in my first book, The Anatomy of Story, which are the seven basic story structure steps. The first step is weakness/need, and the second is desire.
 
As soon as we're born, we have that weakness/need, which is we've got to have some food and mother's milk is the desire line. That's the goal. As we get a little bit older, we start to distinguish other characters in the story besides me, the hero, and we realize some of those people are allies and some of those people are opponents who are preventing us from getting our goals.
 
Story tells us how the world works, and it tells us how to live successfully in the world. Genres, as different types of stories, offer us different windows into the world. Each genre gives a different understanding of how the world works. It gives us a moral vision, or a different life philosophy, for how to live a successful life.
 
I start off each chapter talking about what these life philosophies are and how they differ from what we think about these genres.
 
KARIN: Can you share some of the life philosophies?
 
JOHN: Sure, some examples are:
 
·       MYTH represents a journey to understand oneself and gain immortality. In other words, myth is all about immortality. If you can't get it in the afterlife, is it possible to get some kind of immortality in the life we live here?
 
·       MEMOIR is not about the past, it's about creating your future. When I say that to people, it's always a big moment, because Oh no, memoir is the most past oriented of those story forms. In a certain way it is, but that's not the purpose of it. The purpose is about changing our future in a very deep and meaningful way.
 
·       FANTASY is about finding the magic in the world and in ourselves, so that we can turn life into art, and so we can make our own lives a work of art.
 
·       DETECTIVE FICTION shows us how to think successfully by comparing different stories to learn what is true.
 
·       And finally LOVE STORIES, which I talk about as the highest of all the genres. Love stories reveal that happiness comes from mastering the moral act of loving another person.
 
KARIN: Why is the study of genres so important for storytellers?
 
JOHN: First of all, as writers we need to know what the plot beats are in these genres that we're writing. Because if you don't have that, you're not even in the game. But that's really only the beginning, that's the first step.
 
What's really valuable about the genres, and what is really the key to getting the most out of them and affecting the reader, is to be able to express the life philosophy that each genre has embedded inside the plot. That aspect of theme is the thing that most writers don't get. I consider the theme to be the most misunderstood of all the major writing skills. The only thing writers know is that you don't want to preach to the audience. You don't want to write on the nose, and so they avoid it altogether. And what they've just done is given up the most powerful aspect of a story, in terms of affecting the audience, that you have.
 
KARIN: How do you define theme?
 
JOHN: I define theme differently than most people. The usual definition of theme is subject matter; for example, it might be racism. That is a subject to me.
 
Theme is the moral vision of the author. It is a view of how to live successfully in this world with other people. How do we get our desires without hurting or destroying others? Oftentimes when people hear this definition of theme, they think, Oh, you're preaching to the audience. Not at all, it’s the reverse of that. You express that through the characters, as the hero and the opponent compete over the same goal. Both of those characters should have moral flaws, and in the act of competition we explore the deeper moral issues of what each is going through to try to get what they want in this life.
 
KARIN: I love that you say “memoir is not about the past, but creating the future.” Can you offer some perspective on memoir as a genre?
 
JOHN: Sure. For each genre I list, what I call, the life story that the genre is really about at the deepest level.
 
So for Horror, the deeper life story is religion. Action is really about success. Myth tracks the life process that anyone would go through over their entire lifespan.
 
Memoir and Coming of Age—I put them in the same chapter for a reason—are about creating the self. So, memoir is very deep. The difference is that memoir is about creating the self through nonfiction techniques, while the Coming of Age story is about creating the self through fiction techniques. But they're doing the same thing.
 
Memoir is brilliant at allowing us to look back at our entire life—we're able to pull out what is unique and valuable, what makes us a unique individual. It's already been shaped quite a bit as we've lived our life, but the act of telling our memoir refines that to a much greater degree because now we can see the larger patterns, the deeper structures that have been hidden from us. Oftentimes what we track is the script that may have been formed from a very early age. Maybe it worked for us to solve the problems at that age, but we're much older than that now and there's a good chance that that script does not work to solve those problems. It actually is part of the problem. And so, memoir gives us this big picture view of our life, and then that allows us to be able to make choices going forward, into the future, to create the rest of our lives in a way that is much more beneficial to us and to be the person that we want to be.
 
KARIN:  You say that some people tend to get caught up in the tropes of a particular genre. What do you mean by that?
 
JOHN: It's one of the biggest misconceptions that writers currently have. They think they know the value of these tropes, these individual story beats, but they think about them individually. They say, “Well, I'll grab this trope and that trope,” and it can be a character type, it can be a plot beat, it can be a symbol, it can be a tagline. “I'll grab these different tropes and put them together in my story.”
 
No, it doesn't work that way. The difference between trope and genre is the difference between an individual beat and an entire story system. By that I mean it's a plot system where the beats have been worked out and in the right order. When I say ‘right order’ that doesn't mean you have to do them in that order. But they've been worked out over decades and sometimes centuries to give us the most dramatic version of that genre that we can get. It is the sequence of these individual beats that really gives us the powerful effect of genre.
 
If you're thinking in terms of tropes, you're getting about 1/10 of the true power of your own storytelling ability. You're not even scratching the surface.
 
In fact, the first requirement of a writer, in whatever genre you're working in, is to know what those beats are and their basic order. There's typically 15 to 20 in each genre. Once you know that, then it's your job to transcend the genre. Transcending is how you do a story form in a way that no one else has done it. It's the way you stand out and separate yourself from the crowd.
 
KARIN: With memoir, you say that the genre itself is transcendent.
 
JOHN: That is correct, because transcending the genre, in broad terms, is about getting into the deep theme of that form. Memoir is about the deep theme in every single beat. It's automatically about that. It's the most explicitly thematic of all the genres and that is both a strength and a weakness. It's a strength because it means the most powerful of all elements of storytelling—expressing the theme of how to live—is part of your story. Even without you doing anything, it's going to be there. The negative part is that it can be preachy and on the nose, and you have to be very careful about that.
 
KARIN: Can you talk about the first story beat—weakness/need—as it pertains to memoir?
 
JOHN:  It's the first of the seven major structure steps in every one of the genres that I talk about.
 
Weakness has to do with the internal flaw that is so severe that it is ruining the hero's life. In Anatomy of Story I describe two major types of this flaw. One is psychological. This is a flaw that is hurting the hero but no one else. The other type is a moral flaw. That is, the hero is hurting other people. Typically, it's because they don't understand their psychological flaw, and therefore they lash out and say, I can't figure out what's hurting me, so I'm going to make you pay for it. So, it has negative ramifications for others. The need then of that character is to overcome that flaw, or flaws, by the end of the story.
 
Writers tend to think of the word ‘need’ in a negative way. It's actually positive. It's what the character needs to do to fix their life by the end of the story. What the story is really about is solving that internal flaw and if you don't solve it, you fail as a storyteller.
 
KARIN: How does this relate specifically to memoir?
 
JOHN: Since memoir often focuses on childhood, this can be problematic for writers. For one, the younger the character is, the less able you are as the writer to establish a moral flaw, because kids can do things that hurt people, but then aren’t responsible for it because they're completely unaware and have no control over that. So that limits what you can do in terms of setting up what the character needs to fix.
 
The other problem is that the main opponent is usually a family member, where the imbalance of power between the child and the parents is so great. It makes the hero a victim, and it makes the parents come across as evil opponents. You never want to tell a story where the hero is a victim. Typically, the weakness/need of the child in a memoir is simply that they don't understand. The parents are doing things that are hurtful to them. It leads to a passive hero, which is why I say in the memoir chapter to always look for both a moral as well as a psychological flaw for this character that can play out over the course of the story.
 
To be a moral flaw, it's got to be an internal flaw that is explicitly hurting at least one other person in the story. Otherwise, it's strictly psychological. Memoir is especially strong in the psychological flaw area. They're very focused on that. But again, for various reasons, they typically are not as good at setting up the moral flaw of the individual. Instead, they give the moral flaw to the opponents in the story.
 
KARIN:  What would you recommend? That they grow into the moral flaw?
 
JOHN: Exactly. The older they get, the more responsibility they get, and the more they are responsible for any hurt they inflict on others. It's also quite realistic. So, in solving the story problem, you're also matching reality, which is that a child may start with strictly a psychological flaw, but at some point, they're going to become an adult and at some point, they've got to take responsibility.
 
KARIN: With regard to the antagonist of a story, memoir writers often feel like they are their own antagonist. From your perspective, isn’t it also important to have an external opponent?
 
JOHN: Yes. I hear this all the time. Writers say, “Well, my opponent is myself.” Well, that's good. That's the weakness/need, the first structure step. Every good character and story have an internal opponent. You also have to have at least one external opponent. And if you want plot, you need to have more than one. It’s that simple.
 
The best stories attack from outside and they attack from inside.
 
KARIN: You write that point of view in memoir doesn't simply show what happened, it's a different way of sequencing time. What do you mean by that?
 
JOHN: Let's be honest, there are large chunks of your life that aren't dramatically interesting. And yet, a story is about the most dramatic beats of your life, or of that particular story. So you run into a problem, which is: how do I tell a story that hits the seven major structure steps, which are the seven steps required for any good story? It's why so many memoirs use the storytelling frame, which is a way of sequencing the story where you typically start at the end point of the story. You start at the end of the battle scene that creates a trigger for the author to say, how did I get here? How did this happen?
 
That triggers them to go back, into the past, which is where we establish the weakness/need of that character, and then we sequence the plot going forward.
 
KARIN: I think Mary Karr refers to this approach to structure as a “flash forward” in her book The Art of Memoir.
 
JOHN: Yeah, there are different names for it.
 
Now, why is that so valuable? It's because as soon as you are in the mind of a character who's telling you a story, it gives you tremendous freedom with the reader to say, “I am going to tell this story, not necessarily in chronological order. I'm going to tell it any way I want, because I'm in my head.” And the mind goes all over the place. It gives you a lot of benefits, which includes taking out all those boring time periods. It densifies the story, it compacts the story, it makes it much more dramatic, and it makes it much more appealing to the reader.
 
It allows you to revisit time in the sequence that you want. Normally it’s chronological, but it's curated chronological. It's the most important chronological moments. But it doesn't even have to be that. Once you're in point of view, I can start off with, Okay, this is something that happened 30 years ago, but then that reminds me of something that happened just last year, but they're related. So, I'm going to talk about that now, and so on and so forth. It gives you a better plot.
 
It also gives you much more of an emotional identification with that character. So, the use of the storyteller frame gives you tremendous advantages when doing a memoir, in terms of solving the unique problems that memoir poses for writers.
 
KARIN: You say that most stories are a combination of two to four genres, and I'm wondering what memoir can be blended with? You mentioned that the Detective genre is a good match.
 
JOHN: It's important for all genres because in terms of selling the work, in terms of it being popular, this gives readers two for the price of one. In the same length, you're giving the viewer twice to three times the plot that they would normally get. It just so happens that over the last 30 years or so, plot, in every medium has become more dense. This is the reality that we live in as storytellers.
 
When you're doing fiction story forms, there are almost infinite permutations of what you can mix and match. Again, memoir poses certain specialized problems. If you talk to most people who are not writers, and don't really know how the sausage is made, they think memoir has got to be the easiest thing to write. Because all you do is just remember what happened in your life. You just put those events in sequence and you’ve got your story. Right? Totally wrong. It is one of the most difficult forms to write.
 
Its greatest challenge is plot for various reasons. One is that you're covering a lot of time where there's not dramatic events happening. Another is that the life you led may not be as exciting as a detective story where you're trying to find out who killed someone, or an action story where somebody is fighting somebody else. Those other genres are souped-up plots. That's what genres are for, that's why they were invented, to give you maximum plot.
 
With memoir, we're talking about real events. It gives us real power emotionally, because we know those events really happened to that writer. But it gives us great challenge of plot. So, this is where mixing genres become so valuable for the memoir writer and why it is typically combined with detective story, using that storytelling frame we just talked about. When the writer triggers back to what happened, they become a detective and are looking for clues. It allows you to sequence the plot based on a sequence of clues and a sequence of reveals. Reveals are the keys to plot. The more reveals you have, the better the plot is. So, by making the writer the detective of their own life, you're getting the power of memoir, which is essentially the power of personal drama. You gain that advantage. But you're also getting the advantage of the plot of the detective form. And it turns out, the detective is the most dense and complex plot of any genre. It's a marriage made in heaven. If you are the memoir writer, it gives you a solution to so many problems that you're going to have to solve.
 
KARIN: I love that. That’s a brilliant insight.
 


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To learn more about John Truby visit his site.

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A Conversation with Lisa Dale Norton

I have the great pleasure of introducing you to someone whom I've long admired. Lisa Dale Norton is an author and memoir coach who wrote the fantastic guide to writing memoir, Shimmering Images—a book I highly recommend to anyone embarking on this journey of writing personal stories.

She talks about the most important requirement for a memoir to be publishable, and also shares her heartening take on what is being born in this unusual time we're experiencing. She calls it “an opening” available to all of us to step through, provided that we recognize the opportunity.

There is something about what she says that deeply resonates based on what I'm feeling personally and noticing around me. What are you noticing? If you have a moment, I'd love to hear from you.

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Lisa Dale Norton is an author, developmental book editor, and a dynamic public speaker. She is passionate about layered writing structures in narrative nonfiction that reflect the complexity of life experience, and about the transformative power of writing a memoir. 

For many years she taught in the UCLA Extension Writers’ Program. Currently, Lisa works privately as a developmental editor with writers completing book manuscripts. She earned degrees from Reed College and the University of Iowa, and lives in Santa Fe.

She is the author of Shimmering Images: A Handy Little Guide to Writing Memoir (Griffin/St. Martin’s Press), America’s go-to guide for writing memoir, and Hawk Flies Above: Journey to the Heart of the Sandhills (Picador USA/St. Martin’s Press), a book of literary nonfiction—part memoir, part natural history writing—that won comparisons to the work of Annie Dillard. Her new book of literary nonfiction has just been completed.

KARIN GUTMAN: Where did your journey begin as a writer?

LISA DALE NORTON: I've always been a writer of some sort. When I was very little, I loved writing letters. I'm not sure where that came from, but there was this natural interest in expressing myself on the page. I wrote to everybody and anybody and my mother, I loved it so much. She even helped me find pen pals all over the place whom I would write these letters to.

So early on, I loved the written word. I remember one other story that I've never forgotten. I was in grade school, and we were writing book reports. For some reason I chose a very mundane semi-adult book. I have no idea why I chose that book. But I remember while writing the report for school, I had an absolute, clear image inside me of exactly where I was headed with what I was going to say and the point I was going to make.

I never forgot it, because I thought it was kind of cool and weird. And I think that those kinds of little experiences led me forward, always writing. It’s been what I've always done. Eventually there developed, as with most young writers, the obsession and deep desire to write a book and to be published.

We all know that as writers there becomes this moment where you really are committed to this life; for me, it was the only thing that I could see in front of me. I had to have it, it was an obsession. And so, I went off on that journey and it was a long journey, but I actually got there.

KARIN: When you eventually focused your attention on writing a book, did you know what story you wanted to tell?

LISA: I knew there were things that I cared about, and I had written vast quantities of that wandering journal-esque. I suppose in the midst of that, I was defining that which resonated on the deepest level for me. But no, I did not set out to say, "Hmm, I'm going to write a mystery novel or..." No, it wasn't like that. It was very organic. I came to it slowly. I knew what bothered me, so I knew what the problem was, although I couldn't have spoken of it that way then. And I knew what I loved and I just followed that.

KARIN: Was it personal narrative?

LISA: The first book I published was, yes.

KARIN: Was it about a certain period of your life?

LISA: It was, but it was about much more than that. This turned out to be a story set over a certain set of years and based in the Sandhills region of Nebraska—and my relationship with that place, a little cabin that's there and the family history. But it was really in large part about environmental issues of that region, and that involved not only water, but looking at soils and talking to ranchers. So it was deeply journalistic. I traveled and interviewed for many, many months. It was a weaving together of what grew to be my adult concerns about the landscape and my childhood concerns about this story that was in my heart.

I use the word heart. The Ogallala Aquifer is this huge aquifer that fills the porous soils beneath the sands of the Sandhills and is the throbbing heart of that whole region. It's drying up. That was the whole thrust of the environmental concern.

KARIN: How did you end up publishing it?

LISA: I wrote and wrote and wrote and had developed a certain set of chapters that seemed to be getting at something. I was doing the best I could at the time, but I was passionate and young. I also remember that summer getting ready and saying to myself in my young 20-something mode, “I'm going to make something happen.”

I went to a conference at which I was speaking and teaching. At that conference, I met an agent and she was interested, and having zip knowledge about how it all worked, I was thrilled and I gave her my chapters. Before the conference was over, she said, “I'd like to represent you.” This is the little magic story from the sky.

Over the course of months, she helped me craft these chapters and helped me put together a package, which included what I realize now is a cover letter. She went out to 50 agents and 50 editors. No one took it. And so, she came back to me with the feedback she was getting, and we looked at the feedback together. It's hard discerning what they're really saying, because everyone's very careful, but we did decide that they were saying something vaguely similar.

And so, I rewrote the entire book based on what I thought they might be saying to me. And when that product was ready, I sent it back to the agent and she went out again. I did then get two responses, one from Knopf and one from Picador St. Martin's. There was a little bit of a battle, it was all very exciting. And I went with Picador.

KARIN: Nice. Do you remember what you changed when you rewrote it?

LISA: Gosh, it's been so long. I think it was something like ‘more of me’ in it.

KARIN: You eventually became a teacher of writing and a memoir coach. Did you study writing or did teaching simply emerge from your own background as a writer?

LISA: My second degree was in journalism. So that was a form of writing. When I went to the University of Iowa to study journalism, there was no nonfiction program in the writer's workshop. They didn't exist. At that time, there were no nonfiction programs in America. It was a club. There was fiction and poetry.

KARIN: What year was this?

LISA: I was at Iowa in the eighties. If you wanted to study nonfiction writing, you basically had two tracks. You could get a degree in English and focus on the essay. But you couldn't major in that. And then, in the journalism program, there were two people who were innovative and open, and one of them was a writer and she was writing what we would have called narrative nonfiction. That was her field. I gravitated to her. Patricia Westfall was her name. She was willing to be inventive with me. So along with her and John Bennett, another member of the journalism program, I basically invented a creative thesis in the journalism program to write narrative nonfiction.

I wrote my thesis as a narrative nonfiction product. It was not what the program normally did, but I realize now I was really on the beginning of a wave of people who wanted to study that, but there was no path to study that—no official path. So I had studied writing, but in a kind of a nontraditional way.

KARIN: Were you surprised when personal narrative took hold?

LISA: No. I saw it coming.

KARIN: Do you have a sense of why memoir has emerged in the way it has?

LISA: Well, I can give you my experience of that history.

I was interested in it already, but I was approaching it with this journalistic backbone, or reportage. You had the essay voice going on, but you also had reportage, which I think is important. I think it's important also in memoir today, having something more to say than your own personal thing. So I had been reading a lot of essays and environmental essays because I was crazy about the natural world.
 
Then along came Terry Tempest Williams's book, Refuge. Terry was huge. She was doing exactly what I was already leaning toward. She wrote this very deeply personal story about her mother dying from cancer, which was very related to the land because she grew up in Utah which had been influenced by the nuclear bombs that were being tested. They were downwind and she did die. The book was all about the environment and her mother.

This happened at about exactly the same time I was moving in my own circle of expression. She deeply influenced an entire generation of women writing about a personal experience and that melding with the natural world. So there was a whole movement that happened in the early nineties of women writing about the land, and inside that were these deeply personal, feminine stories.

What then happened was those deeply feminine, personal stories began breaking away from the relationship with natural history issues and they became their own thing.

Then along came Mary Karr and she wrote The Liars Club. I remember when I read about that book and that it was coming out, I said, "That's going to be a huge hit." And indeed, it was. That then signaled women speaking and unhinged from the natural world and in some ways unhinged from really anything else, but the personal story itself. That was the beginning of where the personal story felt no need to attach itself to reportage of any other topic, and the subject itself—me, my life—became the whole thing. If you're a stylist like Mary Karr, you can get away with that. If you're not, here we are today.

KARIN: What do you mean, “If you're not, here we are today”?

LISA: What that means to me is, you have lots and lots of women writing deeply personal intimate stories about their lives, but those stories aren't necessarily attached to any other topic that can add depth for publishing and a good portion of them are not a stylist like Mary Karr. And you have a saturated memoir market, which when Mary Karr came on the scene, you did not have.

KARIN: How do you talk about publishing with a writer?

LISA: Well, I always do clarify because sometimes clients do not have that as their first goal, but I would say 95 to 99% of people say I want to get this published. Or how do I get this published? They may not have actually even written it. So that looms as this myth about what it means and will mean to be a published writer. So right away, I determine whether the writer is interested in that.

Then I have a general conversation about publishing and the various forms available for one to pursue publishing. Then I talk about the kinds of writerly necessities of a story to find a home in the big publishers. And then I let all that rest. And then we try to turn our attention back to producing the best product that that particular writer can produce without ghostwriting.

KARIN: What do you emphasize for a memoir to be publishable?

LISA: I have come to the conclusion that one of the smartest things any memoirist can do is to broaden their story so that it is about more than just their own personal experience. I'm going to give you a simple example. You're writing about a loved one dying with cancer, and half of the story is about cancer or some research or something about science. It's not just about the traumatic journey that the narrator has gone on. It is in part about that, but it's also about this other topic. And when I find memoirists who are willing and able—because it's a different skill when they are willing and able to step up to that and actually produce market-worthy material—they have a hell of a lot better chance of making it in the door.

So that's number one on the list. I would say that 90% or more of people don't want to do that. Beyond that, I basically say, “Your writing has to be stellar, knock my socks off. Wow me,” and 90% of people can't do that. I know I'm sounding horribly jaded and there's nothing wrong with the writing that they are doing, but to get into this elite club, there are certain things that have to be done to play that game.

KARIN: What do you think about the self-publishing and hybrid publishing options that are emerging?

LISA: I think it's great and horrible. It depends on each particular case. It has certainly opened up publishing and that's wonderful. It has also segregated publishing and that's not so wonderful. It has also contributed to the whole redefinition of publishing, at least in our country. And that's sad.

KARIN: Sad because...?

LISA: I used to think of publishing as this well-intentioned marketplace of broad ideas in which many publishers really were committed—deeply, ethically and morally committed—to the dissemination of differing ideas and voices. That is not where we're at right now. I mean, the most recent upsets all rising out of George Floyd and his death point directly at the ongoing and even more deeply embedded inequities in opportunities for publishing and for voices. It's not what it was. One could argue, “Oh, in the good old days, it was just a bunch of old white guys who got published.” Maybe that's a good argument, but still it has narrowed the field and many of those voices are then sent off into the hinterlands of self-publishing, which has a long and potholed-filled journey ahead of it.

KARIN: What has happened?

LISA: Once upon a time, it didn't matter if a publishing house made money, and hence they were more free to publish books they felt were good or important, but which they knew they might lose money on. That was part of what publishing did.

And now it is not like that, or a whole heck of a lot less like that. Because the publishing houses—at least all the imprints at the big 5 in New York—are owned by conglomerates, the bottom line is just exactly what it is for any other arm of a business: It must turn a profit.

When you apply that capitalistic requirement to art, well, you have the situation we now have today, which is: Many books that once upon a time might have made it into a publishing house, will not today, and not because of their merit or worth for society, but rather simply because they will not turn a profit.

KARIN: Now during this time of Covid and George Floyd, I think we’re all experiencing a kind of disorientation. But at the same time, I’m noticing that people are moved to write the stories they haven’t yet voiced. What are you noticing?

LISA: I do think there is a great deal of disorientation that I am picking up on personally and also among colleagues and clients. And yet there's this other thing happening, which I find it very heartening and exciting. It is a place where I have always believed personally that openings come. And one's ability to take advantage of those openings in one's life depends on being aware. Do you see them? Do you recognize them as openings? Are you open to the openings? If we are closed off and tight and inflexible and frightened, we often don't see those openings and they pass us by. The universe delivers them and they dissolve into space-time if we don't grab them.

There's some kind of opening—a black hole, a space-time opening in the universe—and large quantities of people are seeing it. Maybe they're just feeling it; maybe no one can name it. There's nothing we can all call it. I'm calling it an opening. There is this opening for people to step through and what is on the other side we don't know, but what people are coming to the opening with is art and stories and ideas. They're stepping through this opening. They're walking into the unknown, and out of that will come new voices and new stories and new art forms and things we can't even imagine.

It's all very unknown and wonderful and scary. Now there's a lot of people still saying, "I don't know what to do!" And that's okay. That's where they are. But what I'm seeing are all these other people taking the door, walking through the opening and they're making art and they're writing stories and they're doing TED talks or talking to people in their community, on the street corner. They're voicing their stories. And I think there's going to be an incredible blossoming, the likes of which we cannot yet get our hands on.
 
KARIN: That is so heartening and exciting.




To learn more about Lisa Dale Norton, visit her website.

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A Conversation with Tristine Rainer

This month I had the opportunity to interview someone I've long admired. Tristine Rainer is a trailblazer and well-known expert in the field of memoir, having written two classic books on the subject: The New Diary and Your Life as Story —both of which have provided enormous inspiration to me as well as a wealth of practical tools on the craft of writing memoir. I am forever grateful to Tristine for pouring all of her heart and knowledge into these master works. For anyone serious about the art of journaling and memoir, put them on your reading list!

Tristine and I enjoyed an extensive conversation on everything from the ethics of being a memoir coach and her approach to working with writers, to the unique structure and process behind writing her novoir Apprenticed to Venus, which is about her relationship with mentor Anaïs Nin and is being released in paperback this summer!

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Tristine Rainer is a recognized expert on diary and memoir writing and the author of two renowned classics on autobiographic writing continuously in print.

Her mentor Anaïs Nin wrote the preface to Tristine’s first book The New Diary, calling it revolutionary. Published the year of Nin’s death, 1977, The New Diary popularized contemporary journal writing and created its lexicon. According to Amazon, after hundreds of offshoot books on journaling, thirty-eight years later it is still the bestselling book on journal writing.

In the 1970’s Rainer taught literature and writing in the English departments at UCLA and Indiana University, co-founded the Women’s Studies Program at UCLA, and created that university’s first Women’s Lit courses.

In 1997 she published Your Life as Story: Discovering the New Autobiography and Writing Memoir as Literature (Tarcher/​Penguin-Random.) The book anticipated the rise of contemporary memoir writing, and Tristine returned to lecturing and university teaching, at University of Hawaii and for eleven years as a faculty member in the Masters of Professional Writing Program at USC. Privately, Tristine has coached many authors to publication.

As founder and Director of the Center for Autobiographic Studies, a nonprofit since 1997, Rainer promotes the creation and preservation of autobiographic works, teaches, lectures and consults.

In her novoir Apprenticed to Venus, eighteen-year-old Tristine Rainer was sent on an errand to Anaïs Nin’s West Village apartment in 1962. The chance meeting would change the course of her life and begin her years as Anaïs’s accomplice, keeping her mentor’s confidences—including that of her bigamy—even after Anaïs Nin’s death and the passing of her husbands, until now.

She “blends memoir and imagination in this engaging examination of her relationship with author Anaïs Nin,” an intimate look at both the blessings and risks of the female mentor-protégé relationship and “a fascinating personal journey” (Publishers Weekly).

The paperback will be released July 16th!

Karin Gutman: How did you become a memoir coach?

Tristine Rainer: I think I invented the job. The first time I used the term "memoir coach," was in Your Life as Story and I added, "Say what?" because it was such a novel idea then. Certainly, there were editors who had worked with, usually, well-known people in publishing memoirs. But the whole field was being increasingly democratized. And we began to see the beginning of people who simply had a good story, or something important to say, who didn't have any name, begin to get published and to write literary memoirs.

The first time I worked as a memoir coach, I had been teaching autobiographic writing—memoir writing—at UCLA Extension. I think it was the first time they ever had a class on it.

Karin: What year was that?

Tristine: Probably 1988. There was a woman who was a well-known Brentwood psychic in the class, and she was writing about her life and how she became a psychic. She came up to me, and said, “Would you work with me individually on this?” And I said, “Well, I don't know. I've never done that. And I wouldn't know what to charge you.” So she said, “Well, how about $100 an hour?” I said, “Okay, let's try it.” That was the first time I did it, and she had sensitive material.

Karin: We’ve talked about the importance of ethics in being a memoir coach. How did that evolve for you?

Tristine: I don't think I was aware then. I think at that time, it was instinctual for me that if people were confiding in me, and they were within the protection of just writing, at that point, for themselves, that I would have to create some standards for myself. But I don't think they were conscious at the time. I think that I am a person who keeps confidences. It's just my nature.

Karin: We know that from your memoir, Apprenticed to Venus. 

Tristine: Yeah, I kept Anaïs Nin's confidences for more than 30 years before writing about that material. It has always been true that people feel comfortable confiding in me. And I've always taken it as, you know, somebody says, “This is between us,” and I say, “Yes,” I consider that a contract.

But I actually made a mistake once. And that's when I became conscious that I needed, at least for me, to formalize my ideas about what the ethics and procedures of being a memoir coach should be. I had a newsletter for the Center for Autobiographic Studies. This was way back; I mean, we didn't have the internet for sending out newsletters. We actually folded and sent them out with stamps. 

Karin: That's awesome. 

Tristine: People loved getting them that way. It was somehow very intimate. So each time, I would write on a theme related to autobiographic writing, and for one, the theme was about ethnic identity. I used an example of a woman who had consulted with me. I didn't think that I'd revealed anything intimate, but I had revealed that this was a theme of her work. And she came back to me, and she said, “I trusted you. You've now given away my theme.” And I said, “Oh gosh.” I immediately realized, oh, I really had done something wrong. And I refunded her money. And I then, at that point said, “Okay, I speak about autobiographic writing, and I like to include examples, but I'm going to have to have permission anytime I do that.”

So in terms of confidentiality, I thought that the best thing to adopt is the same standards and ethics that psychotherapists adopt. Because the work is so very similar, though, I think, for me, far easier. I would not want the responsibility for somebody's mental health without having the tools of writing to direct them to. That's just me. Because I think that it is a, you know, “Don't give me a fish. Teach me how to fish.” Somebody then can use those tools and take them forward with their own writing.

For each of us our story is precious to them, and there's an energy in keeping it within the creative cauldron when you're working on it. I'm of the belief that neither they nor I should talk about it much. But they're free to talk about it as much as they want, and some of them do.  

I think the best example was Elyn Saks, who wrote The Center Cannot Hold. I was teaching memoir writing at USC then and she was on the faculty. She came to me and said, “Would you work with me privately? I have a memoir. But I don't know whether I want to write it.”

So she told me her secret, which I now can tell because she's published it herself, and also gave me permission to talk about having been her coach, which not everybody does. Not everybody wants anybody to know that they even were coached. In her case, she was a highly functioning law professor, psychoanalyst herself, and has schizophrenia. And she felt the need to write the book because it really was not known that somebody who has schizophrenia could be very high functioning. She, even though she had tenure, was terribly afraid of how the knowledge that she had schizophrenia would affect her colleagues, her job, and her life, and she wasn't ready to come out with it.

So we worked provisionally, that she might never publish it, share it at all. She was going to see what it would look like if she wrote it. We went through a draft and she decided at the end of that draft that she didn't want to do anything with it. So she went her way, and years went by. Eventually she got to a point that she had an agent, and she decided it was time. And really, I was so delighted. The book that we did is pretty different; it's gone through evolutions since that first draft we did together. I, all that time, felt this was such an important book, but that it wasn't for me to make that decision to publish or not.

When she did, it was so liberating for her. She ended up getting the MacArthur Genius Award as a result of publishing the book. It was on The New York Times Bestseller List and turned out to be a wonderful thing for her life. She's helping so many people now, people who have schizophrenic children will write to her, and she always writes back. It fulfilled herself and her purpose in life.

Karin: Do you think it’s more helpful to write for yourself or with an audience in mind?

Tristine: I feel that anticipating audience in a first draft can create blocks, writing blocks. And so I suggest, even if somebody has to write on every page, “This is for my eyes only.” They don’t have to show me everything they write. This goes back to the question of privacy, which has been flipped around on the internet, where people write the most intimate things, share the most intimate things online, and they don't care about it. But I feel that for reaching the myth, which is what I'm going for, the healing myth inside each story, that there has to be a safe place for that. 

Karin: What do you mean by myth? 

Tristine: I guess I mean the story, and the story in its simplest terms, that leads to a realization. That realization is either for oneself, to change oneself, or to expand oneself to grow in new ways, and to be a different person, or it's to be shared and given to the community. So in Elyn Saks's case, it was to share and be given to the community, and I do think that that's very appropriate at the level of a second or third draft.

Karin: How do you coach people about writing sensitive, often deeply painful, material?

Tristine: Emotional flooding?

Karin: Yes, when you’re concerned someone may head down a rabbit hole. I believe you use a tool called ‘containment’. Can you talk about that?

Tristine: It's related to what Kathleen Adams has done with journal writing, with working with people who may have psychological problems, where the idea of just free and unlimited journal writing is not a good idea for them. She has them set a timer and only write for 10 minutes. So I suggest they deal with it in the same way. Time it. Maybe do it in the morning, write for 25 minutes. And then it's important to stop writing.

My daughter and I are working on a memoir now that's going to have a lot of dark and difficult material in it …

Karin: That’s so exciting.

It really is exciting. I mean, she is just such a wonderful writer. It's such a gift to me. We haven't gotten to the really tough stuff yet, but we've already talked about containment. And the very way we're doing it has containment built into it because it's just one scene at a time. We also talked about looking for the light, the moments of beauty, of love, even in the darkest times.

I watched the film Beautiful Boy. I had read the memoir and I think that the memoir worked for me because the author's intelligence as a journalist, and his personality, kept me safe. But the movie really did not. It was so hard to watch. It's an important movie about an important subject, and brave, but just not enough light in it to allow the audience to stay. And that's hard when you're dealing with a subject like addiction, which doesn't have a lot of light in it. 

So my daughter has a good way of writing that may help her. And by the way, in terms of confidentiality, she's given me permission to say anything. She is so brave. She really wants her life to have purpose, and she is doing so well. But she does not stay in the present moment. She writes very free association style and she will move through time so she can bring in almost anything she wants. I mean, you can move through time very easily in memoir writing if you have the right voice. And therefore, even if it was an extremely dark time, you can bring some light to the reader while they're going through it.

Do you mean by invoking other moments from her life in the darkness?

Well, it can be from another time, but it can also be from that time itself. I mean, even in the darkest times of her addiction and her homelessness, there were moments when she and I got together, and our love was still there. The desire to connect with love was still there, and it's a thread. In my case, we are writing a spiritual memoir, so we're looking… You know, God isn't absent even in those times.

The way I see it… if someone is writing about a difficult time or memory, they are writing about it from the perspective of having arrived here. So there must be a light force in them, even in darkest hour, that got them through.

Yes, completely. If there isn't that, then people are dehumanized. But nevertheless, they need the right circumstances to heal and finally be able to get that.

What is your approach when working with people, particularly someone who knows she has a story to tell, but is unclear how to tell it?

I work differently with everybody. But I do like to use Your Life as Story. I like them to have the book and be able to direct them to certain exercises to do, or chapters to read, so that I don't have to repeat all that material, and say, “Okay, this would be a good time for you to read the chapter on writing dialogue because you need some dialogue in here.” I like them to do the story structure exercises and refer back to it.

Frequently, it seems that they'll have already written several chapters but they got stuck because they don't know where they're going. So I like to read what they have before we start working together. And maybe correct in those chapters, where they haven't found the voice yet, to lead them to find the voice. I find that once they have a structure and the voice, and they can identify it, they then can run through a whole first draft and I don't need to look again until the first draft is finished. 

I kind of tell them when they've gotten enough from me. Once their momentum is going, I like to let them loose and say, “Don't contact me until you have a problem.” Because, boy, once that motor gets going, I am amazed how quickly they can write.

Somehow structure is the thing that eludes people the most. Do you find that?

Oh, yeah. And for some reason, my gift is to tell them their story. I will tell it back to them. “Here's what I hear, I think your story is…” I think that comes from all the years that I worked in television movies, and pitching stories. I mean, I was dealing with five stories a week that I would go and pitch. I was constantly taking material, true material, and trying to figure out how to shape it into an entertaining story, and looking, “Is there a genre that this fits?” In working with clients I get excited about the story, then they pick up my excitement and then they take it and run in ways that I never could have imagined. 

Do you talk in structural terms, using the three-act structure?

Yes, and most of all, it seems to be giving them an ending; for them to understand what a crisis, a climax, and the realization is. Understanding that they think they know what it is, but they don't. Really understanding what the climax of their story is, which doesn't always happen exactly the way it needs to be expressed in a story. So I think I add my imagination as a storyteller for them and then we find a way to make it real.

I carry their story with me once I get their material. I carry it with me when I'm taking a shower, when I'm going for a walk. It's working its way through my imagination. And so by the time I talk to them and tell it to them, I've got an excitement about the story that they pick up. That seems to be what works. People get themselves so tangled up in their story, because they don’t realize what they can leave out. We figure out, "This is the story. All this other stuff doesn't need to be in it. That character doesn't need to be in there, who's still alive, who's going to give you trouble."

The structure of your memoir, Apprenticed to Venus, is so unique and eye-opening—the two voices, weaving your story with Anaïs Nin’s.

Oh, it was so hard. For me, emotion comes last. It’s like an Asperger's thing almost. I see structure and I wanted to do something very difficult in the structure of my book. I had to play more fast and loose with memoir, in terms of chronology and freedom to imagine where something could be placed, more than really anything I've ever worked on with somebody else.

But I had said for myself, “I want to see how the myth, the story inside one person's life, can change the trajectory of another person's life,” and that’s what Anaïs and I did for each other. I wanted to tell her story not as biography, but as it influenced my story. And so, to interweave them, boy, I just had to leave so much out, and jump through time, and pick out those moments where one of her turning points would influence me, even if it influenced me in a way where it was a misinformation that influenced me, or carefully revealed information that would make me go in the wrong direction.

Your memoir really pushes the genre forward. Do you feel like that’s happening elsewhere, in terms of the evolution of memoir?

Well, it's happening in France. It's happening as autofiction. That's their term for it. It's the most popular genre in France. They're frequently ahead of us, in terms of experimentation, and having a readership for experimentation.

Do you think this new territory makes memoir more interesting? Or do you think traditional memoir, being as true as you can be to your story, is just as valuable?

Well, with Anaïs, people have written straight stories about knowing her. People have written biographies about her that were carefully researched. So if I was going to write about Anaïs, everything has been kind of used up. So I wrote the book for myself, to see what I could do with this genre, which was taking it as far as possible, and to have fun with it for myself, and for the reader. And now I'm working on a book that's going to be strictly non-fiction. I'm not going to make up anything. I don't need to.

Sometimes what is a great idea, or inspired by a true story, doesn't fulfill what you need, in terms of story structure. But if you go deep enough, I often find that it does. Certainly, I'm not encouraging my writers to fictionalize. I'm encouraging them to look within the emotional story, what could be brought out in terms of making a true story more powerful. Sometimes those may be things in one's imagination. One's imagination is true too. “I dreamt that this would happen.” “I wanted this to happen.” Those are real. And they allow you a great freedom without lying to the reader.

The perfect example is Mary Karr's Liar's Club. She's in the car with her mother and she writes “I didn’t think this particularly beautiful or noteworthy at the time, but only so so now. The sunset we drove into that day was luminous, glowing; we weren’t.

“Though we should have glowed, for what Mother told absolved us both…” You forget that she's saying it should have happened that way because you get the emotional relief of it happening that way. What's important is the emotional release for the writer and the reader. But that is the power of fiction. The power of fiction is, “What if?” And I don't see any reason why a memoir writer can't use, “What if?” as long as the reader knows that's what they're doing.

Speaking of Mary Karr… In her book The Art of Memoir, she shares a quote by Philip Gourevitch who says that his works of memoir are just as great as his works of fiction. Still, the publishing world seems to hold fiction in higher regard. Do you think memoir has gained more respect in recent years?

I think that's it gotten better in quality because it has incorporated the techniques of fiction—scenes, dialogue, story structure, thematic unity, character development, character arc. That's what the new autobiography is, and that's what interests me.

One of my favorite writers is Pat Conroy, who was writing autobiographic novels long before there was such a thing as autofiction, or what I call novoir. He admitted that he was writing autobiographical novels. He was so committed to language and craft that, for me, it's tremendous that it's coming out of this man's experience who experienced of all macho sides and damage of being a man, and that he has the ability to write emotionally about it, and artistically, and with the craft that really makes it into a satisfying story with multiple characters.

And what about the evolution of publishing? Do you recommend following a traditional publishing path or self-publishing?

Most people that I work with, and that I like to work with, have a sense that this story has been given to them, and they have a life purpose in sharing it, realizing it, for themselves, and for others even if that might be a limited audience of family or self-published. I probably have a lot more people who are writing for publication, and I like to recommend them to a commercial publisher. Because I just think, for a writer, that getting somebody else to do all the things that are involved with publishing a book, it's just really nice to have somebody else do that for you. Self-publishing, well you just have a huge learning curve, but I greatly admire those who self-publish.

What advice would you give to someone who knows they have a personal story to tell, but might not be sure where to begin?

Well, I still think I have the best book on memoir writing, in terms of giving concrete advice on craft and covering the subject. So I'd tell them to get Your Life as Story. I think it untangles a lot of knots for people and gives them a roadmap and encouragement.

In terms of Apprenticed to Venus, which I hope people will buy in softcover, now that it's more affordable, I would say read it in terms of the freedom of how far you can go in experimentation. It's got two different voices in it, and it’s sort of funny. When I ask people, “You want me to tell you what I made up? Where I changed things?” People will say, “No, don't tell me.” They want to keep for themselves the story as I told it.

To learn more about Tristine Rainer, visit her website.

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