Getting Quiet So I Could Hear

I’ve been ill more in the last six months than in the entire decade before. Some virus has been cycling through me, uninvited, for most of 2026. Twice in the last three weeks, I lost my voice. I don’t mean Melissa Etheridge’s rasp here. I mean zero noise coming out of my mouth with any effort. Even whispering was a push, and research quickly told me I shouldn’t be whispering at all.

Post-viral laryngitis is not a joke, but I tried to be light-hearted about what it might be teaching me. Listen more. Talk less. The universe, it turns out, has a sense of humour about delivery method.

This period of forced rest has been against my will. I’ve disappointed people, cancelled coaching calls, and missed deadlines. I haven’t been able to teach workshops, coach clients, or support people with their publishing strategies as much as I want to.

BUT, and it’s a big one,

I have been more creative in this stretch of diminishment than in any comparable stretch of health.

Here’s what I think happened. Voice and hearing are the two tools I use to know I’ve been understood. They power a feedback loop in which I sense whether my story or message is landing with the listener, the same loop I usually help writers manage on the page. Something in me that’s usually working two jobs at once, making the thing and monitoring how the thing is received, only had one job left. The quiet didn’t empty me out. It cleared a room I didn’t know was crowded.

In that cleared room, I reframed the proposal for my next memoir, giving it more ambition and reclaiming its “literary-ness,” without my usual eye on what a market might want first. I pulled potential essays from sample chapters I’d recently finished, written through feverish sleeps, sore throats, and a relationship with ibuprofen I’d never wanted, written before I knew if anyone would take them. And I finally understood something I’d been circling for a year: why I chose to keep the things I kept in my last downsize.

The keeping, it turns out, is its own kind of voice. Nobody witnesses what you choose to save from a box bound for donation. Nobody applauds the decision. You wrestle with your options alone, turning over memories of why you still have this family Bible, that box of china, this container of birth announcements. Downsizing choices are final. Things We Choose to Keep stopped being a working title for my next book and started being a thesis, worked out under blankets these last months.

My grandson, H, has been showing me a version of the same thing for over a year, though I didn’t recognize the lesson until I lost my voice and assumed I needed it, to teach him things, to be funny for him, to do Gram Gram stuff properly. But H doesn’t care much about volume. When I whisper to him now, he watches my mouth, my hands signing the basic ASL we use together, my body language, his face tilted up toward mine, reading the shapes words make before they become sound. He didn’t notice the channel wasn’t working the way it used to. He was never waiting on it in the first place.

I looked up the etymology of voice. The Latin root, vox, names the act of utterance itself, not the experience of reception. Voice is a one-way flow. It only requires a speaker.

I didn’t have a voice with volume, but my preferred method of communication, writing, took full advantage of the quiet. Message received. It’s about what we create, not about managing how it lands. I’ve told writers for years, what your readers think is none of your business. I believed it as coaching advice. This year I learned it as fact. The priority is having something to share, and I have that in spades, even without a voice. Ask H.

My father understood this without needing to name it. A compositor, a hot-metal linotype operator, a man who set type backwards and upside down, building whole lines in a composing stick before a single word could be read by anyone. The language, expression, and layout of words was a complete creative function. Writing, as typesetting, as any art, is complete before the audience enters the room.

The essay I wrote in my voiceless quiet, about my dad, the print shop I grew up in, and the three linotype cases I’ve carried through eleven moves because they are too precious to hand off to movers, published in Open Secrets Magazine today.

Open Secrets Magazine

Object-ives #40: The Linotype Cases I Couldn’t Leave Behind

For eleven moves, I’ve carried three linotype cases myself because they are too precious to hand off to movers…

Read more

11 days ago · 4 likes · 2 comments · Patti M Hall

I’d love for you to read it. Though, like I said above, that part is none of my business.

Subscribe now

At the start of a Writers Room session, I asked everyone to name one thing they wanted to finish before we closed.

BT rustled some pages, and I waited. This is tough way to open a free writing session. I don’t do it that often. BT put his two fists on the desk and said, “I just want to write one sentence I don’t hate.”

An hour later, during closing, he reported back: “I wrote a paragraph. I don’t hate it.”

“What made that possible, B?” another writer asked?

“I just showed up here because I had it in my calendar. And kept trying.”

This is what Writers Room does—it shrinks the task to something survivable. Did you read my post about author Caro Claire Burke who wrote well when she didn’t have a deadline and just followed her curiosity and wrote what came up?

It’s a cliche, and its true: One sentence. One paragraph. One hour that belongs to you and your book.

Stop promising yourself the three hours of undistracted time on Saturday. You’ve been trying to do that since February. Don’t think about “just the right” writing retreat is going to come along and you’ll write that opening chapter. Don’t wait to be woken up in the night with the perfect opening sentence.

This is the writing recipe I used to create Writers Room for people in my coaching community:

Commit to time.

Arrive ready to receive inspiration.

Have other writers for company.

Be in a space where expectation is low,

attendance is celebrated,

and support is off the charts high.

Find your Writers Room.

I get to watch the joy of it over and over.

Writers who show up consistently—briefly, with barely-combed hair, wearing sweats they slept in, and guzzling their third coffee—get something surprising on the page. They leave with FUEL to #WriteOn.

Paul Silvia, author of How to Write a Lot, has the research to back this up. (Fellow rabbit-hole geeks, I love you.) Scheduled, frequent writing sessions consistently outperform binge writing. Not sometimes. Consistently. And Writing Accountability Group (WAG) data confirms the same: writers who wrote in frequent short sessions outproduced writers who held out for long uninterrupted stretches.

The mood, it turns out, is not coming. The schedule is what comes.

This is Your Brain on Writing (Again)

In part one of this series, I talked about the social facilitation effect. The presence and proximity of other writers shifts something in us and makes the blank page less montrous.

The hardest part of writing isn’t the writing. It’s the negotiation with yourself.

You know how it goes:

…should I try to write today? is it even worth it? I’m never going to get the whole book done. I should be doing something that pays me. My high school English teacher was right, I can’t write. …

I designed Writers Room to be what I need. I write with you. Mondays and Thursdays we show up. We say hello and high five each other for showing up. I give you a custom Reflection Frame every single time. I offer answers to questions plaguing everyone. Before we close I lightly coach whoever asks for it.

Here is Yesteryear author Caro Claire Burke said about writing what comes up when you just go to the page as planned:

“… it was such a boot camp in writing. Every week you just have to write something, and you’re not waiting for the muse to speak to you. And that was 100 percent why I was able to write Yesteryear pretty quickly. I got used to a deadline, and I became much less precious about it, and that was a huge turning point for me.”

Your book doesn’t need a perfect situation, it wants an appointment with you.

Get a room, pre-book the time, hold the hose [#patti-ism] for what shows up. I built you a Writers Room. See you in there on Monday or Thursday.

Want more info? Drop me a DM or leave a comment.

Subscribe now

Unless you’re living under a rock (muldarking reference intended) you’ve seen or heard about Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.

It has a dark humour undercurrent that I love and appreciate even more because I’m reading it on audio. It’s the debut novel everyone is talking about. Among other things, it’s an unsettling story of a “tradwife” influencer who wakes up one morning in what appears to be mid 1800s. Yesteryear had fifteen publishers in a bidding battle any agent would salivate over. New York Times bestseller list, and “Annie” Hathaway snagged the film option to produce, and will star in the film adaptation. I loved seeing author Caro Claire Burke being interviewed by Jimmy Fallon and saying this just isn’t possible to believe, and that day after day she talks herself out of its truth.

And It All Started With a Word

Caro Claire Burke told BookPage: “Strange, I know, but true: The idea for the novel came from the title. I woke up one morning thinking the word Yesteryear. It felt so expansive to me, like such a universe unto itself, that the story unspooled very quickly thereafter.”

But there was more before that word, and this is the writing inspiration.

Caro Claire Burke had been writing for a decade. In 2024, she had an already fully-drafted, and manuscript. She was feeling low. She didn’t know if her agent even liked it. She felt “on hiatus”.

All writers know this feeling. One thing feels done, for now. (There is never anything real done.) Manuscript in the drawer. You pour yourself into something and then step, fall, or stumble away from it.

Burke says that when Taylor Swift’s Folklore came out, she started thinking about the stories in it. And she put pen to paper on some short stories, put them online, and published them. She didn’t know what this was. It was action, not strategic thinking.

She was writing something she felt jazzed about, and had no deadline. Creativity ignited again in her. (Check out this piece for more.)

She wasn’t precious about it. Just write something every week. She calls it boot camp.

I’ve got more Behind the Book ,though. In the winter of 2024 when the tradwife noise was happening, she was on TikTok and went down the proverbial scroll hole. The idea of the novel happened. She wrote what she could daily before work. There was no time to consider what people would think, she just got into Natalie’s voice and followed her curiosity to see what happened.

Writers, the stories Behind the Book never make the headline. This is the alchemy of the writing life…we never know what we’re gonna get or what is going to turn into gold.

We write because we can’t NOT write.

The title came first. The writer made herself ready for it.

What writing season are you in right now?

Did you catch my mudlarking posts? What the hell is mudlarking, Patti? I found something that feels so much like memoir writing to me I’ve gone down every rabbit hole possible. Read Mudlarking for Moments and Mudlarking and Memoir Writing (preview for all, paid subscribers get the full deets and some writing coaching too!)

Our writing lives can mimic nature’s state, unless we introduce a pattern interrupter. I’m here to be that for you. If this is your “low season”, write on.

If you’re like me, the physical and emotional feeling that winter dragged on too dang long has your writing energy laying fallow. Are you questioning the plot (maybe even the genre), your skills (whether you ever had any), and saying a lot of “What the heck was I thinking?” and “I must be out of my mind!” s, and way worse.

Trumpets!! I’m bringing the INSPO!

Get in community, feel the power of coaching and get writing. I created this little community for people in my orbit…that includes you.

Know someone that is reading Yesteryear, or would love to know how writers actually think…forward this.

Share

“Consider the book that changed everything for you,” I told him. I expanded on my vision for this page cracker. “Think back to a book that left a mark on you for some reason. Maybe it was a book that left an impression, marked a milestone moment in your life, or because you read it at a particular time, it had an impact on you.

He had an idea and began writing while I poured into the page about my rereading of Frankenstein,(have you read about Mary Shelley and me?) and how I didn’t realize until recently why that book was so important to me when I was 18/

“That really worked for me,” he said, after 20 minutes. “I remember reading an adventure series when I was going through a rough time. I loved the main character because I wanted to be more like him. Now I realize that I actually enjoyed that character because I know now I AM like him.”

We sat this way for a moment. It was a modern fiction series he was talking about. Not a classic, or something he had to read in high school. He was talking about something he’d read in the last twenty years that let him explore himself and learn who he was by looking back.

He knew himself better because he saw himself in a character.

That’s the power of books. But that’s the power of writing now, reflecting back on the meaning of things we’ve chosen in our lives.

“You’re really good at this,” he said. I had no reply. I’m terrible at compliments. He knows it.

That’s what books do. They hold up a mirror for us. It’s angled a little, and we don’t look directly at ourselves. But the reflection is more powerful when you look straight at it.

Reflective writing brought clarity. That insight came from writing about books he’d read many years ago. He wasn’t expecting to learn that about himself today. Writers Room gave him time and a place to think back and make meaning. Something that had been quietly true for years became something he could say out loud. I am like him. I always was.

Writing together in these open times brings writing that reveals, content that captures something you didn’t know you needed for your book.

Give yourself twenty minutes and write your own answer to the question: What book changed everything for you?

Let me know what comes up.

Subscribe now

Read more about the magic of writing in community “Writers, Get a Room!”:

You Write Better With Other People in the Room

Pulling Gold Nugget Memories from the Mud

When the non-tidal Amstel River in Amsterdam was recently drained to make way for a new train line, archaeologists recovered almost 700,000 objects from its riverbed. Buttons that fell from pockets and vests. Buckles that got yanked from fancier shoes than sailing folks should have been wearing. Rings that might have been tossed in goodbye or slipped from unsuspecting fingers. And all the detritus of humanity, from pipes to crockery. Ordinary people's things that tell the story of a moment, and a life lived.

Lara Maiklem writes that, “It is often the tiniest of objects that tell the greatest stories.” I see the struggle to accept this with my writing clients and folks in Writers Room all the time. I hear the Tink! of a triangle being hit with a little metal mallet when a moment is mentioned by a client…the moment they MUST write, not the myriad experiences that they think will tell their story.

In my memoir Loving Large, I chose to share a moment where my grown teenage sons are bending to hug my father, their Poppa, in a hospital bed. I wish I had a camera at that moment, but I don’t want to sully the sanctity and magic by grabbing for my phone. I see their curls, and his curls united in a love far deeper than DNA. They were my father’s proudest gifts, my sons. We all have my father’s hair, his curls, and that is part of our collective story. I chose to include the curls moment from thousands of memories.

Not the most dramatic or rarest. It isn’t the moment you might expect such as a prognosis, heart crisis or funeral. The tiniest.

Memoir writers, take note.

I’m turning this into even more writing instruction…

You’re sitting on a mountain of content you COULD include in your book, and you really want a way to discern, distill, and decide, right? Read on.

Gazing: considering everything

Lara Maiklem crouches low on the foreshore, nearly level with the mud. This is different from the beginner’s posture — upright, scanning, excited and grabby. She has been on the Thames long enough to know that the foreshore will show her what it wants to show her. Her job is to be ready to receive it.

She works with her eyes only first. She doesn’t excavate on a hunch. She respects the foreshore. Moving of material only happens when she is really sure there is something there she wants to know more about. Sensitive, careful, and still excited is how she sounds in her book Mudlark. This is how memoirists should approach their old journals, family photos, and memory mountains.

Experienced mudlarkers call what Maiklem is doing getting your eye in. I love this. It doesn’t mean sharpening your focus. It means softening the gaze over the foreshore, waiting for something to Tink! that little triangle. You don’t chase treasure; it finds you.

This is the first thing I suggest to memoir writers.

Before you decide what your book is about, choose which scenes to write, or shape anything you cast your gaze over all of it. Let your attention settle nearly level with a particular time in your life.

A year. A relationship. A house you lived in. A room or even a piece of furniture like the arm chair or bed. Gaze at who you were then, what mattered to you or broke your heart then. Don’t hunt or reach, and don’t think what it all means yet.

Read more

I watch through their gaze. From standing height, the foreshore is all mud and stone—nothing much to see. Then the mudlark bends from the waist. The field of vision narrows. What was an undifferentiated mass starts to resolve into texture and individual rocks, shapes, and other things. Then they crouch. Knees bent, close to the ground now. They’re in it. I see a glove index finger reach toward something I hadn’t seen.

A fragment of pottery. A worn coin. A clay pipe stem, three hundred years old. Something that looked like nothing becomes itself upon closer inspection. Mudlarking is exactly what memoir writers do when selecting what moments to include.

Lara Maiklem is a writer and mudlarker. Her account got me hooked. She has written three books on the topic, but they aren’t catalogues or skills guides. Maiklem has a relationship with the river. It plays an active role in her life. “It’s always been there when I’ve needed someone or something to talk to. It’s my place I go if I want to work through my problems. Whenever I’ve had issues in my life, it’s where I’ve gone just to be on my own.”

(Another post about Maiklem is coming soon; sign up to become a Paid Subscriber.)

That is what writing is.

The standard mudlark works the surface. Eyes only. They are not permitted to dig or scrape, and they can’t use metal detectors. Just like your memory when you work on your book, you will only find what it brings you. Mudlarkers only see what the tide reveals today. The foreshore can’t be convinced to “give up the good stuff”. Coming back again and again is the practice, not the limitation. Just like in writing. Write on!

What You Can See With Your (Mind’s) Eye

I found out that a person needs a permit to mudlark on the Thames. You can’t just throw on some Wellies and get in there with a spade or a pickaxe. Visiting the foreshow is fine for all, but poking about requires approval, and the waiting list is capped at 10,000.

The Thames foreshore is an archaeological site. Its history, back to 10,000 BCE, is protected and managed. Because what lies in the mud is not detritus. It’s more like a layered record compressed into a riverbank.

I teach a process I call Excavating. It asks writers to go looking not for the story they’ve already decided to tell, but for the moments that show up with some effort. Mudlarkers spot the edge of a human-made shape, geometric angle, or unnatural colour. The raw, ungrouped, unsorted inventory of a life is the raw material of memoir writing, and we sift that unceasingly while working on a book.

Read more

Writers only figure out what they need by doing without it for too long. (#patti-ism)

amiright?

Tales from Writers Room

N.F. is working on a hybrid memoir. He did a mastermind with me late last year. He came back to Writers Room after a three-week absence and during check-in said, “I thought I could do it on my own. I kept sayin’ ‘I’ll write tomorrow.’ Three weeks went by.”

Sound familiar? This is the most common story I hear. The stall. The stymie. The distraction. The no man’s land. The intention is real. The desire is there. You hear the book talking to you all the dang time. But without a container — a time that belongs to the writing — life pours into the space, doesn’t it?

N.F. wrote for an hour that day. He was waving his notebook like a pompom when we closed up, and he hasn’t missed a session since.

Turns out he didn’t need more willpower. He needed a room. (He got a room!)

The research backs this up, for those of us who like our intuitions confirmed by data (fellow rabbit-hole diving geeks, I love you!) Just the presence of other writers creates accountability. Production, however creative, loves social comparison. You don’t even have to interact to benefit from people nearby doing a similar thing.

A 2023 study by virtual co-working platform Flown found over 90% of people say they had above-average improvement in focus and productivity, and 85% rated their quality of work as higher, when working in virtual co-presence with others. [more details in Note 1 for us neuroscience and data geeks]

This is Your Brain on Writing

Psychologists call this the social facilitation effect.

We perform better when others are present.

But here’s what I’ve noticed after years of running Writers Room: you don’t even need to interact. Feeling seen does the same work as being watched. The quiet presence of other people writing — cameras on or off, notebooks or laptops, memoir or manifesto — is enough to shift something. The loneliness lifts. The page stops feeling quite so, blank. The book stops feeling so enormous.

I’m not interested in pressure-to-perform. What I’m after is presence, and the particular kind of courage that comes from not being alone in the room.

Every session we check in. We write for an hour. We have open mics and cameras (if we want) as we close up. 75 minutes and I bring the inspiration to write from (one of my signature Reflection Frames) and light coaching.

You might recognize faces from a previous session. You might find the same people showing up week after week and realize you've quietly built a community of writers who know what you're working on. Either way, if you want to say how badly the writing is going or celebrate nailing a scene that's been fighting you for months, we're here for it.

I built Writers Room for my clients years ago because I kept watching talented writers lose momentum between sessions. They had material, book maps even, but they didn’t know they needed company.

N.F. gets it now. He needed someone else at the desk. He hasn’t missed a session since the pompom incident. His hybrid memoir is moving.

Your book is talking to you too. Come write with us.

Writers Room meets Mondays and Thursdays, 75 minutes each session. (Times vary. We use the Circle.so app which makes calendar marking a cinch.) Reflection Frames, community, light coaching. First month free. $99/month after that.

[Join Writers Room → https://writers-room-d3b789.circle.so/checkout/bookbuilders]

Not sure yet what your book is or where it starts? That’s what Foundation Masterclass is for — six modules to excavate your material, build your scene list, and write your opening chapter. [$997 · Enroll here → https://patti-m-hall.mykajabi.com/foundation-program]

**Get A Room and Writing Time Too. I’ve run pre-scheduled open writing meet-ups for my clients and masterminders for years. Early in 2026, I opened WRITERS ROOM to those in my community who wanted in. You’re welcome too. (first month is free and you can sign up by clicking here.)

Interested in:

• Prescheduled open writing space in your calendar

• Time with your own writing community

• 75-minute meetings Mondays and Thursdays

• Reflection Frames to write from; guided writing prompts designed to unlock new scenes, memories, or ideas.

• Resources in the Circle.so hub

• ACCESS to a Library of Reflection Frames to use when and how you wish. Hundreds of custom created prompt-like writing stems.

• BONUS: Paid access to my Substack “Behind The Book” — a private look at the craft, process, and publishing world from the inside, shared exclusively with members

Note 1:

Source

It’s worked for me a dozen times. A decade and a half ago, when I was trying to tap into my writing as a future after my marriage, I would escape to a lakeside cottage for two nights and come back with pages, motivation, and intention. I knew how to make use of the time when I wasn’t with my sons. My hot little motor had intention.

It seems like now I have less obvious priorities; the time imperative has lost its power over me. Sure, I left the house, partner, dog, and to some extent writing coaching client deadlines. But despite my excitement to get sh$t done, even if it was post-drafting, pitch material for my next memoir, or edits on a manuscript I’m hybrid publishing this year…full body rest called me. An insatiable desire to collapse and mindlessly lay there was all I could do that felt right or comfortable. (I even bought awesome thrifted sweatpants to hang in.)

The weather was annoying. Winter’s last April blast in central Canada is a piss off. The buds are on the trees, but a pounding of drifting powdery snow still swirls around your ears and drops the temperature by 20 degrees C. No other way to put it. I went to the city in a trench coach and found myself and my bestie trudging to a huge thrift store to find a puffer coat to layer on. Five clothing layers later (fashion is NOT a Canadian consideration when weather kicks our butts), we went to see Kate Bowler’s event for her new book Joyful Anyway. (Isn’t it ironic, thanks Alanis Morrissette earworm I had all through the event.) I heard it, laughed out loud, felt her message and loved her. But still, collapse on a soft surface with a pile of blankets, wishing for my dog tucked behind my knees prevailed.

I gave in. I didn’t sleep through the night. Either night. Wakefulness. Brain on the ruminate setting. Dream-like stretches about project delays, breaking bad news to clients and errors in judgement stole my night. I have a multi-decade close relationship with nightmares. I couldn’t nap. I tried the last-ditch effort…stationery store!!!! Cool new markers, huge ACOTR notebook. Airpods Max on noise cancelling mode. Nothing.

“I’m exhausted,” I said to Val, my bestie. “Run into the ground.”

“Yeah.”

“But there are so many things I want to create. I just keep making lists of what I want to build this year. Posts, courses, hybrid published books, mastermind curriculum.”

“Maybe that’s what you’re supposed to use this time for—to create.”

Mic drop.

My most used coaching line slammed me in the side of the head and I buried my face in fantastic hotel sheets and pillows: THIS IS WRITING TOO.

I really need to take my own medicine. Again.

On the way home on the subway, I just sat. I absorbed, observed, caught my bestie’s eye when male rider got too familiar with a woman travelling alone and we prepared to move in.

I came home with extra clothes I don’t need and more stationery than I can ever use with the Patti-isms pounding in my ears. Lessons learned again.

This is writing too.

Time passed is time used, not wasted.

Expectations are the enemy of creativity.

Edit the self-talk you have around your writing today.

Amend “I have to get this done,” to “What can I do with this today?”

Let em know if this resonates.

Write on.

Subscribe now

She bought the tickets. I confirmed that I could meet her in “the city”, what everyone refers to downtown Toronto as if you live within a four-hour drive of the place. Then I started to contemplate what I envisioned as long runways of writing time.

Ahhh … open writing time. I’ll work on a chapter of my next book.

No, I won’t. My agent has it in circulation to editors. I know better than to work ahead before I have a deal and a dedicated editor. They will have opinions about shaping the book. (excuse type: justifiable prioritization based on experience I think I have lots of.)

I’ll take a single notebook and some pens.

Just my fountain pens. All of them, though. I have 20-plus Lamys alone. And I’d also have to freshen their ink. They all have different ink colours in them. Duh, I’m a Virgo. Everything must match. Dried nibs and no ink when I get there would be a distraction. Can’t have that. Three pens, then. No, that will involve thought and choice. I will take whatever is in the bottom of my tote bag that my grandson hasn’t run off with.

I just need a quiet room, nothing else. I’ll grab snacks and only pop out for a second to get a coffee.

Or, I’ll get a subway day pass, jump off to meet a writer I want to know better for wine and Greek food. I’ll walk long blocks because I can just to see what has changed, and duck into stores for funny socks, notebooks and markers I don’t need just like the ones I decided not to pack from home. More subway hopping. Then I’ll answer emails at the hotel in my jammies because I can’t face seeking out a warm beverage. Oh yeh, the laptop will end up coming along because, what if a client needs me? (As if phones don’t have email now.)

I’ll tuck into lovely sheets, pull my memoir from my bag and upon rereadings, I’ll fall in love with my book again.

Or, I’ll make a to do list because that is me clearing the neural pathways for creativity. Then I’ll remember I haven’t been sleeping well, and I’ll say out loud in the hotel room: “a good night’s sleep would be a gift to my brain, though.”

Words read, revised, drafted, edited or looked at askance? Zero.

A really productive first few hours of writing retreat, I’d say.

If you understand this so well that you could have written it yourself, let’s just admit we are normal writers. Drop me a note of commisseration, my friend.

Subscribe now

Share

Oh, and share this with a writer friend that will say, “I get it” rather than suggest I have a focus problem.

A #1 New York Times bestseller was written in the dark.

Not metaphorically. Virginia Evans cleared her husband’s clothes out of their bedroom closet, slid a small desk into some space on a blank wall, and wrote The Correspondent surrounded by stacked boxes with no windows and no natural light. She didn’t know when the sun came up.

I call BS on the sunlit conservatory myth every chance I get. I think truth, even if it needs to be irreverent is what writers deserve from their coaches and mentors.

If you missed Part One about The Correspondent yesterday, start there — this post picks up where that one left off.

We have to keep the magic, but remove the romance.

Evans kept asking herself one question as she drafted: What does the reader need to know, and who can Sybil tell it to? That question is the engine of the entire novel. It is also, if you are writing memoir, the only question that matters in revision.

The Shows of Character

In Part One, I drew attention to Virginia Evans’ selectivity as a technique memoirists can lean into. The Correspondent is a masterclass in characterization using letters as viewpoints. I want to deepen the craft talk here and go into how to show and develop character — a key skill for memoir writers.

There are three classic techniques for developing a central figure. Virginia Evans uses all three, entirely inside the letters between Sybil and others, without relying on the classic novel tools — no omniscient narrator, direct dialogue, or elaborate scene descriptions.

Character Voice

Evans herself noted that Sybil’s written self is “so proper and so perfectly articulated” — and that some of that is authentic, and some of it is Sybil “being very careful to keep it all looking quite perfect on the outside.” I call this on stage Sybil. The word choice, sentence construction, and formal tone she uses is the bedrock of her characterization. We feel what she is like to others. We begin to build a Sybil in our minds by gluing together fragments from the book with real people we have encountered in our lives.

Memoirists craft their own voice — the narrator’s voice — in foundational characterization. One can think easily of unselfconscious narrators who are quite the opposite of Sybil, those who may be less sure what they are revealing and really don’t care. Mary Karr and Abigail Thomas come to mind. Both approaches work. There is no strength in the middle ground. We can’t be both vulnerable and trying to keep up our on stage image as the narrator of a memoir. Our tone invites the reader in from paragraph one and they expect us to keep showing up that way.

Illustration is the key. Revision is the answer to ensuring that you nail this aspect of characterisation. How you tell the story shows the reader who you are. Don’t tell them who you are or what you’re like, show them.

Illustrate, don’t pontificate.

Character from Afar

Every person who writes to Sybil in The Correspondent lends a nuance. Fiona’s anger reveals Sybil’s emotional withdrawal. Harry’s dependence shows her warmth in contrast. Theodore’s attentiveness and patience shapes our sense of her wariness, and desirability. These letter writers never tell Sybil what they think of her. They don’t shame her or label her. They reveal her by engaging with her in writing.

Memoirists select interactions based on what they show about us. A second classic way to characterize is by showing a character interacting with another character. This wasn’t possible in The Correspondent — Evans could only use letters — and there can be powerful memoir scenes with no one else in them. My point is to choose the content based on the shade of its filter. Choose what to include because it develops something about your main character—you!

If you are dealing with fear of abandonment, you may include a scene of a past relationship ending noisily. You might show yourself in front of the mirror practising the break up speech, and then write the two sentence text message you sent with shame instead. Don’t spend paragraphs telling us how worried you were about what you were going to say or how scared you were about his reaction. Show us you practising in front of the mirror. Show us that you decided to text. We get it. Give the reader some credit when it comes to characterization. We are humans too.

Illustrate, don’t pontificate.

Character in Action

Sybil refuses to attend her ex-husband’s funeral. She just can’t do it. She hides her failing eyesight from everyone. She hesitates to contact a potential genetic relative. We know people who act this way. We are those people too. These are writerly decisions. Evans can only use letters to develop Sybil here — Sybil learns that Fiona is hurt through her sister-in-law’s letter. There is never a confrontation in Sybil’s living room. There are only letters.

Memoirists choose the scene that shows what they did. We don’t write about why we did or didn’t. Save the space and pick up the pace. Back to the breakup scene. We know more about the narrator because she ends up texting the breakup message than we would if she spent three pages talking about her fear of his reaction.

Illustrate, don’t pontificate.

Radical Selectivity

Memoirists can learn from the radical selectivity of The Correspondent.

Virginia Evans invented each character as she needed them to show a shade of Sybil. Only the essentials were created and, undoubtedly, remained. This is the most difficult part for memoir writers to do. Choosing which memories or scenes to include — and especially which ones to render fully or leave out entirely — is the most important craft decision you will make in memoir revision.

You’re not a reporter. What you include must illustrate exactly what you want them to see.

Coming in April — The DISTILL Series

I want to introduce you to something I have been teaching my clients for years.

DISTILL is my revision framework for memoir and nonfiction writers. It is not a selection or drafting tool — it is what you reach for after the first draft, when you are asking: what is this scene actually doing, and is it doing enough?

When you choose to include a fragment, memory, scene, experience, slice — call it anything you need to — run it through a series of lenses. I like to think of these as prospecting pans, separating gold from gravel and sand.

The five lenses are Experience, Reflection, Story, Scene, and Moment.

Starting in April in the Foundation Masterclass section, I am publishing a five-part series — one post per week, one lens per post — with worked examples from books like Eat Pray Love, and my own Loving Large. Each post will show you what the lens looks like in practice and how to apply it in revision. But it will be behind the paywall, where my deeper craft coaching lives in posts like these two on The Correspondent.

April OFFER note:

• If you want more of this, Foundation Masterclass is the place to go deep — six modules, worked examples, worksheets, and audio. Use code WRITEON at checkout to save $500. Enroll here →

Publishers Weekly called it “an appealing family drama.” The New York Times named it Book of the Week. Ann Patchett called it “a cause for celebration.” And yet The Correspondent by Virginia Evans (Crown, 2025) sat quietly on bookstore shelves. Published in April, it went straight to # 1 on the New York Times bestseller list in December. Prior to that, it had sold 550,000 print copies by readers pressing it into other readers hands.

Some reviewers noted that the book asked some patience of readers. The typically “it takes a while…” It is a demanding, well-paced, intentionally crafted read, I’ll grant and celebrate. #Bigfan. It is told entirely in letters (epistolary), so the reader needs to be on their toes. And thank the goddess for that!

The central character reveals herself slowly and deliberately, showing glimpses of what she is about one mental screen capture at a time. One page of sent, received or unsent writing paper at a time. I’m talking about handwritten letters, folks. Like the kind that use an envelope and a stamp.

This is what great memoir aspires to.

Patti-ism: “If you wanna write, you gotta read.”

Get outside your genre, typical reading choices, and known structures, if you want to fuel your craft. I just finished The Correspondent. I loved where it was going on audio so much, that I ran to my local bookseller and grabbed the hardcover.

Behind the Book for Virginia Evans

The house wasn’t for sale yet but when she and her family were moving back from Ireland to the US, Virginia Evans asked the owner (by letter, I believe) if she could take a look at the place. was house hunting when she encountered the woman who would become Sybil. The woman “dropped little things, like breadcrumbs, little details from her life.” There was incredible art on the walls, music was playing and Evans saw lovely things around the place that had been collected over a lifetime. There was also the interesting career, grown children, social life, and classic taste. Evans kept the fragments for her later Sybil character, but passed on the house.

Behind every book is something a writer can’t ignore. I call this the bubbling cauldron. It is undauntable creative fuel. For Virginia Evans, it was the revelation of a whole life visible only through its edges; a life built from breadcrumbs.

This is exactly what memoir writers are doing. You are not writing your whole life. Thi is not reportage, where every detail of an experience is offered up to a curious bystander. Memoirists selecting the thin slices a reader needs in order to arrive at the moment you want them to inhabit with you.

Virginia Evans knew an hour of her. Yet from that partial view, she got a scent on the wind of a way to craft a character. Virginia Evans couldn’t leave that woman alone, or perhaps it was the opposite.

Memoir is a character-driven genre. You are that central character. Once you get fascinated by selecting the thin slices that need to be shared, and only those that are essential, you can build your memoir.

What Memoir Writers Can Steal from Fiction

Evans told The Rumpus that she is not a meticulous planner. She “just dove in,” and kept asking herself: What does the reader need to know, and who can Sybil tell it to? Or who can tell something to her? This is golden craft advice for memoir and hybrid nonfiction writers.

Each correspondent in Evans’ novel hold up a different lens to see Sybil through. Or perhaps it is a filter on the lens. The reader never sees Sybil directly — only through what those lenses and filters. There is no one Sybil, she is a multi-faceted cut gem stone.

When Sybil sends letters she shows up heavily curated, formal, and a little caustic and judgey. We see the managed or controlled version of herself leading with her manners and opinions. The people that write to Sybil have relationships only on paper and although we only see them this way, owe have a very good sense of them.

This is the craft I hope memoirists take from Evans’ book: the adept selectivity, intentionality, choice of details offered and withheld, and which characters. They are defined solely by their reaction to her.

We see Sybil’s inner life in the letters that she never sends. She is making meaning of her experiences and her memories in the unsent letters. (I won’t spoil the plot here.) They satisfy the craving we have to know a more vulnerable Sybil.

Memoirists can lift a lot from fiction craft. For me, characterization by craft has the strongest influence on the eventual reader experience. You are the lens. You are peering at yourself through the writer’s eye.

Consider carefully the filters you apply. Which memory will you mention in passing, and which will you render as a full scene? Which scenes will you bring other characters into? This intentionality shapes what your reader will relate to, and connect through. The selectivity of which letters and writers appear in The Correspondent is exactly what makes it work. She had the confidence to leave things out. She trusted her reader to be intelligent enough to do some of the work.

Virginia Evans wrote The Correspondent in a bedroom closet. No windows. Boxes piled around her. Her husband’s clothes relocated to make room for a small desk. She wrote one of the most celebrated novels of 2025 in the dark, by intention, one chosen letter at a time.

In Part Two I’m talking about the selectivity that takes a broad human experience and distills it down to the moment your reader can never unknow. I call it illustrate, don’t pontificate. And Virginia Evans, whether she knew it or not, built an entire novel on it.

I’ll drop part Two tomorrow. And get into how I teach this craft in my groups, classes and one-on-one coaching.

Write On:

For more craft talk, check out the Foundation Masterclass section of the page and posts like: 15 Things To Remember As You Write About Your Life. Here it is — written in your voice, plain and direct:

If this post landed for you:

• Leave a comment below. What keep of leave out scene are you wondering about in your memoir?

• Forward this post to one writer you know. Just one. That’s how good writing finds its people, like the Evans book, by one reader pressing it into another reader’s hands.

• Become a paid subscriber, because this is the kind of craft conversation I go deeper on in paid posts.

• Follow me on Instagram @patti_m_hall

…do you side on the unignorable, practical motivators like the 24-7 butterflies in your belly, middle of the night mental outlining sessions, or daily reminders from clients and friends that the world needs your book?

Writer, there will come a time when the book needs you WAY more than you need your book. Trust me.

When the Curtain Falls on Your Flow

sad trombone..wah-waw. The writing group you loved has come to an end…a week without seeing them put your writing in vacay mode. Again.

heavy sigh..arghh. You watched as your coach waved their pom-poms, as you read your polished first chapter out loud, proud. Then turned to the messy excerpts from which to draw the next chapter. A complete start over.

palm to forehead…you sat on it for two days, reread the pages, and (eyes to Heaven) they aren’t even close to singing. They’re wailing in flatness. You don’t think you can do this anymore.

See yourself in those glimpses? We all do. Me included.

in FOUNDATION Master Class I start with Excavating right up top…excavating your why. If we don’t know what where the idea first lighted in us, or have lost the answer to our What the heck am I doing this for? question…we won’t have the energy to keep going when the book needs us.

Getting back to ‘Why’ is how you haul that curtain back up

WRITE WITH ME: It’s time to step aside from your blank page and dig into your Origin Story. Here are some of the ways in from Lesson One of FOUNDATION. Start a fresh document of BETTER yet, pull out your pens, pencils and markers and a notebook or gorgeous stationery…

Q: How long would you say this idea has been brewing for you?

Q: When was the first “poke” from the universe that you want to write a book? (Sometimes this is called the origin story, but really, I’m just asking you about a moment when the idea of you authoring a book didn’t seem crazy to you, for the first time.) Write the scene, moment, or awareness time.

(Paid Subscribers get another ten guiding questions and a FREE pdf Printable Workbook BELOW. )

Read more

“Living while writing” should be a sticker on every writer’s laptop. Truly, it could be the email signature for most of us. If you’re a memoirist or lean heavily toward non-fiction, what you are living today is surely going to find its way onto the page. Granted, not always quickly or recognizably, but it will be there, shaping tone, influencing choices, and forging meaningful connections you don’t have language for yet.

Every ordinary thing you do—brushing your teeth, showing up for the appointment you’d rather cancel, negotiating a boundary, explaining a feeling, doing the work that feeds you or pays you, is life. But more than that, it is the container that will hold the story you one day tell. As I remind writers in my coaching practice and masterminds, we don’t write from some elevated perch outside of our own experience. We write through our days, our questions, our contradictions. We write while living.

Craft comes later; life comes first.

The order of operations matters.

Søren Kierkegaard gives us this anchor:

“Life can only be understood backwards, but it must be lived forwards.”

There is waypoint here that every writer needs to encounter We cannot see the meaning of the content as we’re walking it. I couldn’t see that my child was teaching me about resilience while we were navigating medical tests and horrible decisions in Loving Large. We cannot know which detail will matter, how one of dozens of moments or scenes will illustrate the theme. We don’t know when we land at an unexpected midpoint, or sense the quiet hinge that later becomes the emotional centre of a chapter. We live forward. We are uncertain, unprepared, and without an outline of chapter summaries! Only later do we understand backward in the shaping, arranging, and revising where our discovery of meaning emerges from the drak waters of a well that we never realized was fueling our creativity.

This is why I tell writers to stop trying to “figure out the story” while they’re in the middle of living it. You can’t. And you don’t need to. Your only task is presence. You don’t know what the medical news will turn into for you. Right now, not getting into the community college personal support worker program nixes your job plan. But in three years when you found a beauty brand to empower women disfigured by violence, you will be glad. Meaning made later, is the result of a life lived in full acknowledgement that it is a waypoint in the journey.

You’re living while writing. You are gathering scenes. You are accumulating metaphors. You are developing a voice shaped by what you’re learning, resisting, grieving, building, and letting go. You are living the raw material of your next essay, your next memoir, your next book—even if you would never choose its curriculum.

So today, instead of forcing clarity, allow yourself to inhabit the moment you’re in. Trust that your future writing self—the one who will understand all of this more cleanly—will meet you on the other side.

For now, live forward.

Later, write backward.

And when the story arrives, you will recognize it not because you planned it, but because you lived it.

Subscribe now

I’m posting while coaching. Did you see my others posts in the Foundation Writing Master Class?

“Self Trust In Writing Means Acting on The Words in Your Head”

“Are You Ready to Write?”

Trust is the bedrock of creativity. Not confidence, clarity or even certainty.
Self-trust.

Receivership.

Arms held open, listening.

When I work with writers, I am not trying to give them ideas or answers. I am guiding them back to a place of trust—trust in the process, trust in their own capacities, and trust that what is meant to be written will, in fact, emerge.

Most writers are less vigilant than they could be. They cling tightly to every idea, feeling precious about the gold nuggets that come to them in the night, and afraid it will disappear if they don’t capture it immediately. Sometimes the best thing we can do is scratch some part of it down somewhere. (Have you heard about my 10 notebook method?)

But one of the earliest things I teach is this: important ideas return. (and even better, they return with the sparkle of revision on them!)

When a story idea, or a memory is big enough and alive enough, it will not leave you. You don’t have to chase it down or pin it. Trust that it’s coming back. Trust that it belongs to you. If scratching some bit of it down gives you comfort, great! Speak it aloud while walking, repeat it to yourself and your brain will understand it is important. But don’t stifle your creativity with anxiety at its loss.

This kind of trust runs counter to how many of us have been trained. We are taught to hoard insight, prove productivity, and perform urgency. But creative work doesn’t thrive under spot lights. It won’t flow any better under surveillance. A watched pot never boils, and all that. Your mind knows what it’s doing, even when it’s quiet.

Writing Without Validation

We writers also have to trust without rvalidation. There are long stretches where no one is clapping, liking, publishing, or approving. You will be writing without reassurance alot of time; trudging through a blizzard of words. The writing asks us to believe—again and again—that we already have what it takes to uniquely tell this story now, not someday.

This is not a new idea. In 1841, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote in his essay Self-Reliance.

“Trust thyself: every heart vibrates to that iron string.
Accept the place the divine providence has found for you, the society of your contemporaries, the connection of events.
Great men have always done so, and confided themselves childlike to the genius of their age, betraying their perception that the absolutely trustworthy was seated at their heart, working through their hands, predominating in all their being.”

Emerson is talking about obedience, not bravado. Trust, not confidence. You are the conduit for this work.

He encouraged readers to be non-conformists, and surely every writer who bangs their head against the brick wall of resistance qualifies. The very act of continuing…to writing without guarantees or permission and in a vacuum without applause, is an act of self-trust.

So when you feel stalled, distracted, or doubtful, don’t ask what’s missing. Ask where you are withholding trust. That is almost always where the work begins again.

Trust yourself.

Don’t Think. Write.

Subscribe now

More writing coaching posts like:

“Writing Will Change You…”

Some are behind the Paywall where I drop extra long and more frequent content for Work-In-Progress writers ready for coaching:

Share Behind the Book by Patti M Hall

“Words gain power when they’re brought together with intention.”

Read more

Readiness is less about preparation and more about permission.

Many aspiring authors wait for the mythical moment when life aligns—more time, less stress, perfect …

Read more

when we write from what we feel, it gets imbedded on the page.

Overthinking how the reader will respond, is effort wasted. Trust this truth: what transformed you, will move them. Writers who are moved by you, that trust you, will want to read everything you share.

Illustration is the most essential tool of non-fiction

Choose the scene you include, case study you mention, or experience that you use, carefully. This is at the heart of the craft—selective illustration.

Neuroscience offers a useful clue about why this works. When readers encounter vivid scenes and relatable emotional language, the brain does more than simply process the words—it begins to simulate the experience. Regions involved in memory, sensation, and emotion light up like they would if the reader was living the moment themself—like a pseudo reenactment. This is called “narrative transportation,” but in my coaching language it means: Story Takes You Into The Moment. This is why illustration matters so much in nonfiction: a scene allows the reader’s brain to participate, while abstract explanation only asks it to observe.

My writing coaching is focused on the acknowledgement than when we feel, we connect. When we connect with a writer, we want everything they offer.

I teach “The Scene Is The Thing” in my Foundation Masterclass and this teaching is at the heart of my Book Building Masterminds.

Sure, you can drop a piece of data or include a stat produced by researchers or another author but…a scene recruits the entire brain of your reader, rather than more crumbs of information. And engaged brains cling to experiences more than explanations.

I’m dropping a new Series here on Substack: This is Your Brain on Writing.

This is post #1.

Come on back in a couple of days for the next one or Subscribe to get it in your Inbox.

Subscribe now

a. Memories are the protein (meat, if you will or you eat it) of your writing. Get access to them. Record them. Unearth them.

b. Jot down notes when something occurs to you. Don’t wait for a perfectly worded sentence of ideally formed thought.

c. Trust a memoir to return when you get a glimpse of it through a song lyric, perfume smell, or feel the satin edge on a hotel blanket.

d. You remembrance of something will not be identical to that of someone you think had the experience with you.

Find Your Sparks

e. As memories arrive, note the details that keep them vivid: facial expressions, time of day or season, and colours, texture, light. Visual reminders have more reconstruction power than most.

Read more

I don’t talk a lot about my work here on Substack. Let me quickly say this here: I am a book builder, writing coach, and publishing strategist to nonfiction writers and memoirists. I’ve built book proposals that have sold for multiple six-figures to traditional publishers, and shepherded manuscripts to publication through my own imprint that have sold upwards of 80,000 copies. I work on both sides of publishing and get picked by agents to book doctor for their clients. I’ve had the honour of supporting memoirists, coaches, thought leaders, advocates, and intellectuals to construct books that serve their future readers. They are writers who are experienced content creators and focused on having impact. I witness writing changing the writer every day. I’m privileged to have my hands in dozens of books, and be trusted by writers at every stage of the work to create their books.

My coaching style developed in response to my clients. The phrase I use the most is “method in my madness.”

I rarely reveal why I’m encouraging a writing tactic as I’m suggesting it to someone. Why? If I told you how hard it was going to be, no one would do it!!

Two Writing Truths

Two things inevitably happen when I work with writers on their books:

• their true message appears if they expose themselves to the material enough (work their behinds off) AND

• they will be changed by the writing of it.

The meaning making result of writing is why I coach writers, and have been writing my whole life. I write to see what became of the things that happened—how they wedged themselves between my feathers, imbedded themselves in my eyelids, and became the icing on the lens through which I view the world. I’m a non-fiction writer, a memoirist, and personal narrative is my voice in the world. Voice and its elevation, is what I was put here to do.

Healing Is Incidental

We don’t know that writing is bringing healing when we are in the thick of it. We can’t tell we’re changing. The memoirist who is unable to forgive someone and finds comfort in closure, didn’t go looking for. It happened because they wrote. The Honestly, we don’t even want to hear anyone say it. The people I work with don’t need me to announce, “I see you healing, Margaret.” I’m neither looking for appreciation, or promising a cloud nine destination. We don’t write TO heal as much as heal because we write. You’re very lucky if have the experience of working on multiple books and go into later projects prepared to be altered.

This truth is best realized by the simplest rule of writing: Don’t Think! Write. The book will do the rest. I promise.

Some posts that might inspire you:

Fear of Finishing: The Quiet Monster All Writers Face

Ruthless, I think now as I read this. This feels almost criminal; like I criticized one of my children. I feel sympathy for my manuscript, the hundreds of hours of my time, and that beautiful book.

I read on in my journal from that time. I silently demanded of myself how I justified my low measure of satisfaction and that bold criticism. I saw listed out the things that weren’t in Loving Large. The missing parts of me, of my history. Talk about glass-half-empty thinking.

Writers, we can be cruel. We would NEVER say about someone else’s writing or book, what we tag our own work with.

I slammed the book’s shortcomings regardless of the years of drafts, coaching, revising and editing. I also didn’t mention that 10,000 words were thoughtfully cut to maintain both momentum and cohesion in the final manuscript.

One of the cardinal lessons I offer my book coaching clients is the difference between leaving out and choosing to set aside. I hadn’t taken my own medicine then, and truth be told, I’m not great at taking it now.

Paraphrasing Hannah Ray’s words to me this morning… “What if you used your skills to support yourself.”

The coolest thing happened though…those “missing” elements as I called then in 2020 are key content to my current book in progress Rambles.

Nothing is ever lost that you set aside for the right book and the right time. Now I’m listening.

The Book Will Decide

I found some wise writing coaching in my journal too.

Books move through us. They bloom and shrink, put their bare toes out into the cold air, and then pull them back to the cozy mustiness where they can take any form they wish. They come out when they are damned good and ready. Books are always a surprise. Books can be fearsome creatures when you’re in their bellies, trying to peer out. Writing is like standing in a torrential downpour with no visor or wipers but seeing the world in its wetness is a lens change not destruction.

Finding the wisdom in my own words when I can…

As a writing and book coach, and publishing strategist I get to pull stories and build books with impactors, memoirists, non-fiction teachers and coaching, and artists of every kind.

Some posts that might inspire you:

Fear of Finishing: The Quiet Monster All Writers Face

Backwards or Forwards: It’s the Life Your Got and It’s Writing Gold

Share