College Hall on the campus of the Vermont College of Fine Arts, where I will receive my MFA in Writing in early July.

It is one of my greatest fears. I have abandoned my creativity before; this blog is my chronicle of returning to an art-committed life and working to stay there. That is also a central theme of the travel memoir I am in the process of polishing to final. But it is so easy to drift away from the creative path. That fear drives me to ponder what factors can lead us away from our muse.

In less than two months I will have an MFA in Writing from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. During this program I’ve heard horror stories about MFA graduates (of any creative field) almost immediately drifting away from their craft post-graduation. So in doing a little online surfing to find examples of this, I came across the blog of a woman who graduated from VCFA a year before me, Shawna Lenore Kastin. Here’s what she wrote about her experience post-graduation:

I graduated this summer and it was scary and wonderful and bittersweet. And then I got home and I didn’t feel like writing. But more than that, I suddenly hated writing. The whole process felt like trying to cram my head through the eye of a needle. So I stopped for a month. But I was terrified I would never start again so I forced myself back to work. And writing felt like work. Boring, miserable, “Why am I doing this to myself?” work. And why was I doing this to myself? Why not just quit and join the circus or find myself an actual pirate ship or *gasp* get a normal job like a sensible person? That would be so much easier than writing.

It took Shawna six months to start writing again. And she tells us she is still, but “very slowly.” So what factors lead us to abandon our craft, particularly when we’ve been so dedicated for so long?

1. Lack of deadlines. I’m forty-five years old. I spent sixteen years meeting deadlines in school, then about fifteen years meeting deadlines as a reporter, and now about a decade meeting deadlines in a variety of other communications jobs. I know that every one of my readers also faces deadlines in their own professions. In a low-residency MFA program, there is a looming deadline very month. A typical VCFA semester requires me about every four weeks to produce thirty pages of original and/or revised prose. I have now turned in my final packet for VCFA. I have a memoir manuscript that I completed in that program, but it’s rough and needs revision. I am attempting to set a revision schedule for myself. But no external force will require me to adhere to that schedule. I can’t tell my wife and kids or employer “Sorry, I have to meet this MFA deadline.” This is, of course, the daily existence of most creatives.
2. Lack of encouragement. I read last night my final packet letter from this semester’s advisor. It was, as these letters often are, very encouraging. He provided some direct guidance for improving the material I provided him, as well as constructive advice for revising the manuscript as a whole. But I seized on his final sentence, which I will quote here without his permission: “For one thing, your manuscript will become a book, and I’ll want my copy autographed.” How will I keep writing without these monthly injections of encouragement? Where will I find that endorphin injection post-MFA? There are family members, writing groups, local courses. But by and large I will be  returning to the natural order of things in a writer’s life: solitude.
3. Lack of quantifiable and regular measures of success. When creatives put their works out into the world, there is no guarantee of acceptance. A literary journal may sit on an essay for months and then reject it (this is the normal state of affairs for even the most successful writer). The same cycle applies for painters, photographers, songwriters, etc. A third-party validation clearly provides motivation, but they are in no way predictable, the way a monthly packet letter is. So, like self-imposed deadlines and self-encouragement, I must set my own measures of success–perhaps completing a certain revision by a certain date, or pulling off an extended metaphor that has been thwarting me for months–and hope that is enough.

I wish I could say I had the answers to these three challenges. I would love to tell you, “Okay, now here are the three actions you can take to ensure you continue with an art-committed life.” But I do not have those answers. I’ve lived in Washington, D.C., for a quarter-century, my professional life entangled with politics and policy. We are all very good at identifying problems. Developing and implementing solutions? Well, you know our track record with that.

I’d welcome your thoughts. Have I left out obstacles? Am I overlooking work-arounds? What has worked for you to keep going with your creative endeavors, or to return to them after drifting away, like Shawna did? I’d like to learn from you today.

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When I decided to start playing the cello at age seventy, I was dissuaded by well-intentioned people for all kinds of reasons. They said, “You need to start young.” “You’ll never get good.” “What’s the point at this stage in life?” “It’s too difficult, try the recorder.”

The rationale to pursue the arts as a rank beginner after age fifty-five requires a non-traditional way of thinking. It isn’t about talent, future benefits, fame, or acknowledgment by others. It’s a boundless journey or an end in itself without rules or requirements.  The decision to paint or write a memoir is often fueled by curiosity or by a rekindled interest from long past.

While pursuing the arts after sixty has a different goal than earlier in life, it also has a different trajectory. It might not start with burning passion. Instead it may begin by meandering down a path propelled by shifting priorities and nagging questions like, “What’s next?” and “If not now, when.” These could be the quintessential questions of The Vintage Years—the first stage in life without a clearly laid-out path and set of expectations. Many of us are still physically active, intellectually curious, emotionally stable, and yearning for meaningful ways to spend our time.

The neuroscience literature has happily reversed itself from what I learned in graduate school nearly a half century ago. Back then the prevailing ideas about the brain suggested an irreversible decline beginning about age thirty. In fact, throughout all of life nerve cells do indeed increase along with the connections linking brain cells! I hypothesized that taking up a fine art form at this life stage could maximally stimulate the brain and the psyche. Then I set out to see if this was true. I started by interviewing late-blooming artists, those who didn’t pursue their art until after age fifty-five.

If the decision to paint, or write short stories, or play guitar at this stage of life depended on talent or perceived creativity, the artists featured in my book would never have taken the first small step. But happily they did. Meet some of the artists:

• At sixty-eight, following a full life including the usual busyness of family, home, community involvement, and job as a butcher, Henry moved into an unplanned retirement. Not content to watch time go by, he took up whittling large blocks of wood, actually tree trunks. Ironically, this activity mirrored his childhood interest of making toy cars with his pen-knife, and his adult vocation of carving sides of beef. He hadn’t connected the common threads until we spoke when he was ninety-six—and still shaping wood figures, although now in smaller sizes. I was amazed by his memory, which he attributes to his artistic lifestyle and the physical activity required to sustain it. Henry’s brain and body have kept pace with his advancing years.
• Harold at 65 could look back at a satisfying mid-life spent raising  a family and managing his career in sales. In the early days of his retirement he took an adult-education stained-glass art class. His goal was simply to stay occupied when all the fix-it jobs in his new home ended. With no previous art training his curiosity kindled a passion that in the past twenty years has led to creating extraordinary stained glass objects and windows that grace several houses of worship in New Jersey.
• Charmion wondered whether she was creative. At 70 she decided to find out. Her science background made her feel lop-sided and so for balance she took some poetry writing courses. That wasn’t a good fit but her interest in classical music later led her to the Viola da Gamba. Very difficult to learn and play, this six-stringed baroque period instrument is even larger than the cello. Charmion couldn’t have found a greater cognitive challenge! She’s kept at it for eleven years, playing for an hour or two every morning and taking yoga and tai chi classes to maintain her flexibility and strength.

Much has been written about the need to stay physically fit as we age but only recently has there been a focus on ways to maintain cognitive sharpness. The brain, like a muscle, benefits from vigorous use and there are some activities that seem to fuel the brain maximally. I’ve identified a triad of ingredients that serve as a robust tonic for the aging brain:

1. newness or novelty,
2. complexity,
3. problem solving

Expressing oneself through the fine arts is the ideal way to harness these elements. Three years into playing the cello I would heartily agree.

The brain’s very resilient and flexible nature also gives it the capacity to change when we decide to make a change—which often cannot occur until the demands of earlier life begin to recede. It turns out that this timing is perfect. What are the changes?

• Neuroplasticity: refers to the ability of the brain to adapt, renew and reshape itself as needed throughout life. I expected that the older brain was capable of changing over time but some unexpected findings were especially delightful. For example, certain changes in the brain and endocrine system actually facilitate the artist’s journey after midlife.
• Bilaterality: Starting at midlife, the right and left hemispheres of the brain become better integrated, more interdependent and functionally intertwined, amplifying what we are capable of doing, thinking, and seeing;
• Focus: While the older brain, beyond age sixty, processes more slowly than its young or middle-age counterpart, it’s compensated for by the ability to better focus on individual tasks, because of having fewer distractions and less interferences associated with the complexities of earlier life. I saw examples of this over and over again, e.g. a writer in his sixties who used his laser-sharp focus to distract and create time-outs from illness; a bronze sculptor also in his sixties allowing his art to divert attention from a family tragedy.
• Patterning: This is a shorthand brain process that is most robust in the later years. It allows a huge number of learned ideas to come together in new combinations. This may account for enhanced creativity later in life when we can draw upon a vast storehouse of lifelong learning that can be expressed in unique, fresh, and complex ways.
• Hormones: Decreases in estrogen and testosterone in the years between fifty and sixty give way to greater emotional stability, calmness, and increased attention. These hormonal changes also increase tolerance for frustration, which significantly benefits the late-blooming, new artist.

Just like the more than twenty artists featured in my book, I focus on my art—practicing the cello daily. Hopefully I’m a good example of what is possible after sixty.

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Francine Toder, Ph.D., is the author of The Vintage Years: Finding Your Inner Artist (Writer, Musician, Visual Artist) After Sixty (2013). She is an emeritus faculty member at California State University Sacramento and a clinical psychologist recently retired from private practice. Toder is also the author of When Your Child Is Gone: Learning to Live Again and, Your Kids Are Grown: Moving On With and Without Them. She resides in the San Francisco Bay Area and practices the cello daily. You can contact her at francine@docToder.com or find her on Twitter @DocToder.

One of the modern fiction workshop laws is that a writer should always show and never tell; George Eliot did both and with sufficient success to wipe the law off the books. Tell all you want, the new law should read, so long as you remember to it brilliantly.

With far less brilliance than the prose of Eliot or Epstein, last year I wrote a satirical post arguing writes should neither show nor tell.

A key theme of this post is balance. These lily pads I saw in North Carolina on my cross-country road trip appear to have found balance with the water and surrounding flora.

I am happy for him. I am also spooked by the similarities of the beginning of our stories. I too put aside, for years, my passion for creative writing, instead surrendering all of that passion to my employers. A summer driving across the U.S. interviewing artists reawakened my creative passion and set me on this path to an art-committed life. It led me to launch this blog and to start the travel memoir I am about to complete.

But I am not prepared to make some of the choices James did for his art:

Admittedly I went a little extreme – no income for five years, six hours a day of intense practice, monthly four-day long lessons with a brilliant and psychopathic teacher in Verona, a hunger for something that was so necessary it cost me my marriage, nine months in a mental hospital, most of my dignity and about 35lbs in weight.

The Artist’s Road blog chronicles both the rewards and the challenges of living an art-committed life. Let me outline five lessons I’ve learned that have allowed me to hold on to what I consider a balanced life filled with creativity, professional pursuits and loved ones:

• Identify your passion: For James, it wasn’t just music. It wasn’t just playing the piano. It was being a concert performer, “able to perform something that some mad, genius, lunatic of a composer 300 years ago heard in his head while out of his mind with grief or love or syphilis.” For me it wasn’t just writing, or creative writing. I realized I loved to read creative nonfiction–biographies, memoirs, essays–and so for the last three years I have focused my efforts on growing in that genre. A narrowed field of vision focuses the mind.
• Manage your time. James argues we have more time in our day than we admit. For instance, he says, we only need six hours of sleep. I have learned that for me, anyway, his observation is correct. So every morning I rise before dawn to give two hours to my muse while the rest of the house is asleep. My pages get a fresh, distraction-free mind, and my muse gains the comfort of knowing I’ll be back the next day. Other successful creatives I know work out their own routines.
• Allow avenues of release. James, as he admits, prefers extreme approaches to reinvention. And, in his passage on time management, he insists you stop wasting time with television. I know creatives who have walked away from the shiny box and have felt reborn. For me, after a full day of creative writing followed by a salaried job, about the only thing my brain can do in the evening is watch TV. We only have one in our house, however, so it is a shared activity with my wife, son and daughter. Which leads to the next point.
• Win buy-in from loved ones.  I had every intention on Saturday of taking the wife and kids to a new museum exhibit. But it became clear to me that I needed that time to finish the lecture I’m giving soon at my MFA graduation residency. We have now scheduled to go to the exhibit two weeks from now. Before starting on this life, I had serious conversations with my wife and with my kids. My sacrifices would be theirs as well. I told them they would see less of me, but I would still put them first when it really mattered. So I still make the kids breakfast. I still take my wife out on the occasional date. And I continually remind them of how grateful I am for their role in my art-committed life.
• Accept the inevitable losses. You may lose a friend who resents you for spending less time with her. You may lose the opportunity for career advancement when you turn down a job that will require too much of your spare time and creativity. You may lose the joy that comes from living spontaneously, because that life doesn’t always marry well with a structured calendar designed to maximize creative output. James believes his sacrifices are worth it. If you feel the same way, you have made the right choices.

There is the path to enlightenment; the path to an art-committed life; and the path to Forsyth Fountain in Savannah, Georgia. I enjoyed this last path on my cross-country U.S. road trip.

Extremism in the pursuit of life change would certainly seem a possible path. The 2,500-year-old legend of Siddhartha is that he walked away from a wife, a son and a life as a wealthy prince to live as a hermit and seek enlightenment. That was an extreme act, but he achieved his goal, and is known to us as Buddha–the Enlightened One–as a result. This legend also tells us that at one point Siddhartha reduced his diet to such an extreme in his rejection of things of this world that he almost died. We would expect someone on the path to enlightenment to learn from that experience, and he did. From that point on he recognized that not all things of this world are to be rejected.

I know very little of the path to enlightenment. I know a little bit about the path to an art-committed life. It requires sacrifice. It also requires reason, and flexibility. For me, the path  is best maintained when art is in balance with the other aspects of my life. I am thrilled for James Rhodes. He is living his dream, the life of a composer. He has his own sense of balance, believing all of his sacrifices were worth it. That is perhaps the ultimate lesson: Own the results of your choices.

If you’re reading this post, you likely are also seeking to live a more art-committed life. What choices have you made, or do you intend to make, to pursue your passion while maintaining life balance?

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I’ve been going to writers groups for years. The first, in California, was filled with students who loved the romance of being writers. They read obsessively, wore big, pilly, stretched out sweaters, and wrote wild, experimental stuff that never manifested into anything polished. The group in Virginia had published writers, snarky and vicious; my memories are of eyes narrowed on me through arabesques of cigarette smoke when they condescended to let me read. The post meeting depression often took days to dispel. The next was in New Hampshire, and except for the accents and salt-rimed snow boots, the discouragement delivered down from on high was not much different from the Virginia group.

The Arizona Novel Writers Workshop gathers for a holiday dinner.

My husband got stationed in Italy, and that was the best thing that could have happened to me, because there were no writers groups on the island of La Maddalena. There was just me and my word processor, alone in our villa at the top of the island, French doors open to the hot, rosemary scented air and the curtains gently twisting and lifting to reveal turquoise slices of the Mediterranean. And there, without critics and naysayers all around me (and in my head), I wrote my first publishable story.

Years later, living in Arizona and at work on a novel, I found myself longing for the company of other writers. Older and wiser now, the community of writers I imagined would be knowledgeable and honest, but encouraging and fun. I began trying out the various groups already established in the valley: a group out west turned out to be a bit of an ‘old boys’ club; a central group, huge and unwieldy, met in noisy coffee joints where reading was difficult—the fun factor was there and they were friendly, but it was almost impossible to get serious feedback over the howl of the espresso grinder; another group was dominated by a tyrant, yet another derailed by lengthy off topic monologues that left me checking my watch and preferring to be home on my precious free Saturday afternoon. I felt a little like Goldilocks searching for the chair that felt just right—only I was doing a whole lot more trying than she did, and not having any success finding it.

I was meeting some good writers though. Every group had a few. The folks that interested me were writing regularly and knew about shitty first drafts and polishing what they wrote. They were as frustrated as I was with correcting spelling and punctuation, and arguing the difference between a run on sentence and a compound. We wanted to be discussing character development and plot, story arc and tension.

I was hungry to learn more; to take my writing from proficient to whatever came next. And to do that I needed to surround myself with writers who had a deeper knowledge of language and craft. I also craved the depth of feedback that comes with continuity, and that was lacking in these other groups, with their changing faces and projects.

Then one afternoon when I was whining about all this my daughter said, Mom, why don’t you start your own group?

Oh I could never . . . I started to say. But, a little voice inside me thought maybe I could. And so with the help of a couple of cool writers I’d met at one of the local groups, we did.

From previous experience I already knew what my ideal writers group would look like, and with that vision in mind we put out the word and held our first meeting. Our criteria were simple: an ability to write and a novel in progress, a passion for writing coupled with commitment, and a willing and friendly personality.

That first meeting was an incredible afternoon of listening to writers read and observing how they meshed with others. Those who did not fit the vision we were striving toward were later gently let go with words of encouragement. The rest were invited to the next meeting. We had false starts with a few folks: some could write, but lacked discipline or drive, others wanted to submit their work and have it read and critiqued, but refused to return the favor; a shame really, because they will never discover that, next to reading, critiquing is the single greatest tool to teach a writer what s/he needs to know.

Our vetting process was not without its trials and errors, but we’ve learned along the way, and we’ve achieved what we set out to create. The Arizona Novel Writers Workshop is sanctuary and literary companionship, coupled with fiery inspiration and warm support.

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Cynthia Robertson writes reviews for She Reads , is a freelance editor, and the founder of the Arizona Novel Writers Workshop.  She writes historical fiction, and is at work on a novel set in 10^th century Jerusalem and England. She lives in Arizona with her husband and their five pound Pomeranian, Zeus.

Cynthia can be found on her blog, on Twitter @Literarydaze and on Facebook.

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What has been your experience with forming or working in a writing group? Have you found it rewarding? Frustrating? Sustainable? Let’s hear from you?

If you want to be a writer, declare yourself a writer. If you want to be a painter, or a musician, or a dancer, declare yourself as such. Then go about acquiring the tools you need to become a great writer or painter or musician or dancer.

The highlight of my visit to Philadelphia on my cross-country road trip was interviewing Nebula and Hugo award-winning author Michael Swanwick. A close second was the Philly cheesesteak I had at this little out-of-the-way joint recommended to me by Michael. Mmm, cheesesteak.

Part of the problem, I fear, is the English language. We only have one verb “to be.” We don’t differentiate between our current state and who we truly are. But take Spanish, which has two. There is estar, which addresses a temporary state, and ser, which is used for your permanent identity. So if I say Yo estoy confudido, I state that I am currently confused. Should I choose to utter Yo soy confudido, I am defining myself as a confused person. I am often confused, but I would not like to own that as part of my identity.

So someone who is aspiring to create lasting value in an artistic endeavor should consider these two different verbs. Take ownership of the craft as a part of you in the spirit of ser, but be honest about your current state as a writer with estar.

I believe when people say they aspire to be a writer, they actually have a specific target in mind. It could be publication. It could be recognition by others. It could be reaching that level where they feel they are peers with the writers they most admire. But if they are already thinking of these concrete goals, they are already a writer.

For me, my aspiration as a writer is simple. I aspire to be the best writer I can be. As such, I don’t have to worry what happens when I achieve my goal, because it is in many respects unachievable. I may at some point think I’ve reached that point, but we always have the capability of growing. It would seem an unachievable goal is a poor motivating tool, but I learned from my interview with author Michael Swanwick to set my goals high. That way, when I fail, I still have produced something spectacular.

Do you find you limit yourself with labeling? Perhaps you own being an artist, but modify it with negative adjectives such as “poor” or “struggling”? I’d love to hear your experience with creative pursuits and self-labeling.

It’s a compelling metaphor. A tsunami wave rises abruptly from the sea, a giant wall of water jutting from stillness. That’s how the little hourly hits counter atop my WordPress dashboard looked yesterday after my post hit Freshly Pressed. I’ve now learned that there are more than 500,000 WordPress blogs, so being singled out like that will generate attention. But tsunamis bring death and destruction. I’m still looking for the right metaphor that will capture the joy I feel at the expansion of The Artist’s Road community.

It wasn’t a tsunami, but I encountered a hailstorm when I drove into Charleston, West Virginia on my 2010 cross-country road trip. When I told the hotel clerk that her parking lot was a lake (above), she said, “Sugar, welcome to the Low Country.”

I have also asked myself, “What can I learn from this experience?” And the WordPress editor who selected my post was there to help. She sent me a link to a useful article titled “So You Want to be Freshly Pressed.” The article itself adheres to many of the pieces of blogging advice it offers. It has a clean layout, with a visual element and no spelling or punctuation errors. It has a headline that gets to the point in a conversational manner.

Given, however, that one of my gigs is teaching blogging at literary centers both in person and online, I’d like to focus for a moment on their first three items of instruction, which address the content of the post.

• “WRITE UNIQUE CONTENT THAT’S FREE OF BAD STUFF”: My first challenge with this post is to not simply rewrite their post, right? It turns out their guidance here is basic. Give credit where credit is due, don’t plagiarize, don’t spread fear or hate. One thing I tell students is that the most powerful element of a blog is YOU. Even if your blog primarily is to educate about a cause or promote a business, we want to connect with the writer. One of the most powerful words in blogging is the personal pronoun “I.” Used judiciously yet generously, it captures us as readers and makes us come back.
• “HAVE A POINT OF VIEW”: I love this statement from the WordPress article: “Freshly Pressed posts make people think and provoke a response.” I developed my curricula for my blogging classes based in part on lessons personal essayists are taught. One of those is that some of the most powerful writing is when the author is working hard to understand the true meaning of something, and invites us in to that process before they have reached a “final” conclusion. Acknowledgment that you haven’t fully figured it out is humanizing. It also invites plenty of feedback. There’s a lot I haven’t figured out in life, so I’m never short of blogging topics.
• “DON’T BE AFRAID OF YOUR VOICE”: I’ve been blogging in various forms for nearly 20 years (yes, before the term “blog” existed), so I’ve come to understand that each blog should have its own voice, but that the voice also has to be authentic to the writer. I would add to WordPress’ advice, however, another important point I have addressed before, namely you must also not be afraid to allow your voice to evolve. Some bloggers feel they will lose their existing readers if the blog’s voice changes over time. In fact, you will recruit new readers while engaging your loyal ones, who will enjoy experiencing your growth with you.

Of course it is all well and good to be featured on Freshly Pressed, and enjoy that spike in traffic and comments. The key is ensuring that your new readers stick around. So while the advice WordPress offers gives guidance to the type of post they choose to feature, it’s good advice for each and every post. And that leads to one final piece of advice I give students when they ask what is the ideal schedule for posting. The short answer is you’ll get higher traffic with more posts than less. But the right answer is that you should post when you have something compelling to say and the time to say it compellingly.

I’ve outlined some of the things WordPress looks for in a Freshly Pressed blog post, and some of the things I encourage bloggers to incorporate into their writing. What do you look for in a blog? And if you blog yourself, what is one area–original content, point of view, voice, or something else–that you focus on to stand out from the crowd?

Two years ago I assembled a five-minute film (above) featuring eleven of those artists sharing their earliest memories of when they knew they were an artist. I’d like to ask you the same question. When did YOU know you were an artist?

Robin Hemley, a master of fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry (and direct assessments of his reality as a creative).

But Hemley recognizes that a critical eye remains essential to him prior to publication. For years, he said, he and a fellow writer for whom he has tremendous respect have shared their work with each other. He didn’t articulate at what stage they share work–rough draft, near-final, just before submission to editors–but he made clear that it was substantial in terms of the number of pages. He also made clear that the quid-pro-quo arrangement was a critical part of his creative process.

I have recently heard this arrangement referred to with a very 21st Century name–beta readers. It even has its own Wikipedia page. As I approach the completion, after 2-1/2 years, of my travel memoir, I find the concept intriguing. I belong to a writer’s group, formed just before I began my MFA program in the summer of 2011. But I have not shared any excerpts of my memoir-in-progress in months.

I have found that with that group, and with workshops at VCFA residencies, the feedback I receive on a particular excerpt provides me little value. That is no slight on my creative peers. It is because of what I seek. What I need now is a more holistic look at the manuscript. I am focused on consistency in voice, steady pacing, a logical progression of narrative lines. You can’t judge the health of a forest through close examination of one tree.

Longtime readers of The Artist’s Road know I am on a journey of discovery, seeking to unearth the many secrets that underlay a successful pursuit of an art-committed life. The practice of beta reading–a one-on-one exchange of manuscripts–is my latest curiosity. I would welcome your thoughts and experiences on this approach to creative peer review.

In the October 2005 debut episode of his influential TV show, Stephen Colbert gave the world the word truthiness. He said truthiness is when you’re talking about something that seems like the truth that you want to be the truth. That sounds a lot like the way memory works. I know a little bit about that as a journalist, piecing together different participants’ own truthiness of an event in an attempt to find the real truth.

Longtime readers will remember this as the original banner of this blog. It is from my 2010 cross-country road trip, a stretch of I-80 West in Wyoming.

I am now in my third year of learning to put the “I” on the page after years as a fact-obsessed journalist. I have learned a lot and am still learning, but my touchstone philosophy on writing about my life comes from Tobias Wolff’s author’s note from This Boy’s Life: A Memoir:

I have been corrected on some points, mostly of chronology. Also my mother thinks that a dog I describe as ugly was actually quite handsome. I’ve allowed some of these points to stand, because this is a book of memory, and memory has its own story to tell. But I have done my best to make it tell a truthful story.

In that short snippet, Wolff touches on two challenges for the memoirist–time and character. I’ll examine those challenges below.

1. TIME COMPRESSION

Most of us would view Henry David Thoreau’s Walden as a work of influential and lasting creative nonfiction. It is a diary of sorts of a year spent connecting with nature, except that Thoreau actually lived at the lake for two years. He compressed time for the purpose of story. Jump ahead a century, and we find Edward Abbey doing the same thing in Desert Solitaire, compressing two summers spent in Arches National Park into one.

A few months before beginning my MFA program in the summer of 2011, I took a class at The Writer’s Center on memoir and personal essay. I wrote two short essays in that class, both of which have since been published. When I look back at them now, I would say there is an element of truthiness about them. Both relate incidents I remember to be true, but both combine disparate memories into one scene. It increased the drama in each publication. But now I have to say “Yes, but…” if asked if they’re true.

I’ve had two more personal essays published that I’ve written in my MFA program. I did not compress time–and thus did not combine one memory with another–in either essay. I’m finding that as I learn more about creative nonfiction under formal study, I fall more on the side of not compressing scenes. The challenge for me as a writer, then, is to find a way to select details to make the actual scene sufficiently dramatic.

2. CHRONOLOGY

In Travels with Charley, John Steinbeck allows us to join him and his French poodle on a cross-country drive. I read it for craft in my first MFA semester, as my memoir-in-progress also is a cross-country road trip. But I’ve since learned that journalist Bill Steigerwald has determined that much of Steinbeck’s story was pure fiction. Steinbeck spent most of the trip with his wife in fine hotels, not sleeping under the stars next to his truck camper he named Rocinante. And many of the people he had extended conversations with didn’t exist.

I am being hyper-focused on accuracy with my road-trip memoir. Everyone depicted in it is real, and I met them at the time the book says, in the order it says. Steigerwald has concluded that Steinbeck didn’t take notes on his trip. I did, in the form of hours and hours of recordings I kept in a audio diary; hundreds of photos; and dozens of hours of video footage. But that leads to another interesting question regarding scene, namely…

3. REMEMBERED DIALOGUE

This is the photo from which I extracted the above banner. Yes, I took it while operating a motor vehicle. No, I do not recommend photographing and driving.

In the craft book You Can’t Make This Stuff Up: The Complete Guide to Writing Creative Nonfiction–from Memoir to Literary Journalism and Everything in Between by creative nonfiction guru Lee Gutkind, he writes that “[t]he use of quotation marks traditionally signifies authenticity.” Yet most of us don’t “carry around a tape recorder or video camera to record every memorable conversation in his life.” I’m here to say that even when you do carry both of those things, you can’t capture everything. Some of the most amazing conversations I had on that 2010 cross-country trip were spontaneous encounters with strangers–the kind so vividly portrayed by Steinbeck, albeit mine were real–or discussions with the artists I was interviewing after I turned the camera off.

So how do I portray dialogue I can’t be sure of precisely? As a journalist you summarize. I did that with my essay “September 12th,” a lengthy recollection over a two-day period that contains so few instances of quotation marks that their very presence alerts the reader to the importance of the words. But I’m finding that so much of my book is dialogue-driven, by dialogue I actually did record, that it is jarring if the only quotation marks that I use are in instances where I have the speaker recorded. “I like using quotation marks in recreated dialogue,” Gutkind writes. “Since my readers know it is recreated, it’s clear I am not trying to bamboozle them–and I think quotes make text read more smoothly.” So I’m okay with my use of quotation marks on the opening page of my memoir-in-progress, a conversation with a homeless man in a small town in Massachusetts. But what if I want to take liberties with the quotes of the artist I interviewed shortly after that?

4. POLISHING DIALOGUE

It is a long-standing convention in journalism that you quote a person exactly as they spoke, complete with incomplete sentences, incorrect word choices, and rambling asides. Sometimes you extract a portion of the quote and summarize the rest if clarity is needed, but you don’t put words in their mouth. What I found as a reporter, however, is that sometimes a source would have preferred that you clean up their prose a bit. We don’t speak as eloquently or concisely as we would like.

Much of the dialogue in my travel book from artist interviews is done in summary. But for awhile there, when I would include quotes, they were unaltered. My MFA advisors would trip over the dialogue at times, sometimes even saying it didn’t read like dialogue. I now have, at times, done a bit of clean-up to the interview subjects’ words in a way I think they would appreciate. I am careful to not alter meaning and to keep true to their particular voice. I have also here exercised a bit more flexibility with chronology, i.e., moving elements of the interview around. A good Sunday feature article never progresses in the exact order of the interview, so when I have found it necessary, I have reordered the conversation. This is a chronology twist I am okay with given its long standing in journalism. This leads me to my final point.

5. DISCLOSURE

The journalist who exposed Steinbeck wrote that he would have felt better had Steinbeck been more up front about the fact that the book was part fiction. And in fact the publisher, after this has come to light, now includes this in the preface: “It should be kept in mind, when reading this travelogue, that Steinbeck took liberties with the facts, inventing freely when it served his purposes, using everything in the arsenal of the novelist to make this book a readable, vivid narrative.”

Steinbeck’s opening author’s note is a fantastic read, but it doesn’t tell me what choices he made as a writer. Wolff’s opening, paraphrased above, doesn’t go into detail but gives me an essence of his intentions. I don’t know to what extent I will go into detail in an author’s note on my choices. It may not be to the level of detail above, or it may be more. But when I read a nonfiction book, I am in essence entering into a contract with that author, forming a trust relationship. So I will present in that author’s note whatever is necessary to win that reader’s trust.

What are your expectations when reading a work of creative nonfiction? To what extent are you willing to accept an author’s truthiness in pursuit of a great read? And what choices do you make as a writer?

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