A Conversation with Abigail Thomas

This month features my conversation with Abigail Thomas, whom Stephen King refers to as the "Emily Dickinson of memoirists." It was wonderful to have many of you there for this live event where she invited us into her home and her creative process, offering a rare and unvarnished peek into how she thinks about memoir; also reading from her latest book Still Life at 80: The Next Interesting Thing.

I am sharing an abridged version of the interview below, in written form, and have also posted the video replay for you to watch in case you missed it.

Be sure to check out the upcoming live author events.

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Abigail Thomas worked as both a book editor and book agent before writing her own first collection of short stories, Getting Over Tom. Her second and third books, An Actual Life and Herb’s Pajamas, were works of fiction.

Thomas’ memoir, A Three Dog Life, was named one of the best books of 2006 by The Los Angeles Times and The Washington Post, and received the 2006 Inspirational Memoir Award given by Books for A Better Life.

She is also author of the memoirs Safekeeping, Thinking About Memoir and What Comes Next and How to Like It.

In her new book, Still Life at 80, Thomas ruminates on aging during the confines of COVID-19 with her trademark mix of humor and wisdom, including valuable, contemplative writing tips along the way.

She lives in Woodstock, New York.

To learn more about Abigail Thomas, visit her site.

KARIN GUTMAN:  In all the things you’ve written, you seem to write little about your childhood. How do you think the way you were brought up shaped you?
 
ABIGAIL THOMAS:  My father [Lewis Thomas] wrote poetry in the 30s and 40s, which the Atlantic published, and I loved his poems. But he didn’t really start writing for the New England Journal of Medicine until the 70s. If he was excited about something, there would be a tremble and tremor in his voice as he talked about something I had no understanding of, and I thought to myself, That’s the way I want to live, I want to live on the verge, just where he is right now… you don’t know what’s going to happen but you know it’s going to be good. And that is what writing does for all of us, I think. You wake up in gear and you can’t wait to see where you are, where you’ve been, and where you’re going, because you don’t know half the time where you’re going.
 
KARIN:  In the process of writing memoir, you talk about going into the basement and pulling out what’s down there and raising it up to the light. What do you mean by that?
 
ABIGAIL:  Well, it has all its power in the dark, and when you bring it up to the light, you see that it has edges and it’s finite. You look at it really closely—the parts of you you’d rather not know or talk about, but we all have them in all aspects of our lives. It’s so much easier to bring them up and write about them and achieve a kind of clarity that we’re all hungering for, whether we know it or not. It’s a way of putting it somewhere else. And it’s also having control over it. Nobody can sneak up behind you and say, “I know what you did…” I’ve already told you what I did.
 
KARIN:  What does it mean to put it somewhere else?
 
ABIGAIL:  You put it in writing, and it’s no longer in you. It isn’t buried in you somewhere. You’ve made something out of it. You’ve made something different and separate out of it. It’s helpful. You find it easier to forgive yourself for things you don’t even want to admit to. It doesn’t mean everything has to go into the book you’re writing, but it is important to take a look. Who are you kidding if you don’t. It is memoir.
 
I think when you’re writing memoir, if you wind up where you thought you were going to wind up, you probably haven’t looked hard enough. You have to make room for the surprises. It saves lives. It makes all the difference in the world.
 
KARIN:  How does writing memoir save lives?
 
ABIGAIL:  When Rich got hit [by a car]… that’s the only memoir I wrote chronologically as it was happening. I don’t know how I would have gotten through any of that if I weren’t writing it down—where I was, what I was doing, whether I was in the dog park or the lunch room where he was. That saved us both, I think. If you write it... it doesn’t really make sense... but it fits together somehow. I don’t know how else to say that. When you’re going through a real crisis, to keep track of it is better than just being lost, just losing yourself in it.
 
KARIN:  You've written about your aversion to the term narrative arc. How would you define what a story is?
 
ABIGAIL:  Well, I can tell you what I don’t like. I don’t like anything approaching perfection. I don’t like anything neat and tidy. I like a big mess. I like to write in the first person and the third person, and sometimes the second person. When I make things out of clay, I like things rough as though somebody just barely put this together, and I think that must have something to do with the way I write. I don’t know how to answer this except that I like a bit of a mess. I don’t like everything standing straight with its hair combed and its teeth brushed and its buttons all buttoned. The word curiosity is in my head. I want somebody to be curious to see what she’s going to do next, although I never really thought of that before. I want to be curious to see what I do next, and that produces whichever direction I’m going in.
 
Gosh, I wish I knew how to think about this.
 
KARIN:  Well, it’s asking you to analyze your own work, which I suppose takes away from the experience of it.
 
ABIGAIL:  It’s just hard, because my mind doesn’t work that way. I’m not good at analyzing. I think that’s because I didn’t go back to college. Oh well. I can’t do it.
 
KARIN:  You’re giving a good advertisement for not going to school.
 
ABIGAIL:  I don’t think you need school to be a writer. In fact, I think you need to forget everything you learned when you sit down to start—not know where you’re going or have some vague idea.
 
KARIN:  I know you spent some time in publishing. How did that influence you? It’s interesting that you didn’t arrive to the page yourself as a writer until your late 40s, and yet you were around it and it was accessible.
 
ABIGAIL:  It was extremely helpful. I remember getting a book—it was called French Dirt by Robert Goodman. It's still in print. The book wasn't very good, but the little thing in the very front, which was his discussion of what this book would be about, was really good. I learned that if you pay attention and make suggestions, you can get a really good book out of a writer who hasn’t yet written a really good book because you saw 12 sentences that were really good, when he was paying attention. I learned that a writer with spark, or some kind of talent, could get better.
 
I spent an awfully long time crumpling things up and tossing them across the room, saying, Who do you think you are? Because I thought you had to know something and that it had to be important and deep. But no, you just have to start.
 
Anyway, that's what I learned in publishing. I loved it until they made me an assistant editor, and then I realized I'd really have to know what I was talking about. If I loved a book, I would have to speak for whether it made any money or not. So I quit.
 
KARIN:  Do you think about your audience or are you writing purely for yourself?
 
ABIGAIL:  I am writing purely for myself. I'm writing for clarity and I'm writing for fun. And I'm writing to see what the hell the back of my mind is thinking when the front of my mind is doing nothing. It’s just so interesting… The smallest detail can take you someplace. You can write 15 or 20 or 500 pages of it, and then you get to the first sentence of what you're really going to write. So nothing is ever wasted.
 
KARIN:  What do you do when you’re stuck?
 
ABIGAIL: I had a lot of trouble with the beginning of What Comes Next and How to Like It. I’d gotten the whole book ready, but I couldn't find a way to start it. I tried it every which way until suddenly I began to write I can't write this… I can't do this… This is impossible. Then I wrote about what I was doing instead of writing, which was painting, and that segued right into the book. So sometimes, if you're having trouble, just stare at it and say, I hate writing this. I don't want to write this. This is too hard. These are the following 12 reasons why this is too hard. I'm just going to stomp my foot and eat chocolate cake forever… And then you might find that you've gotten yourself right into the book.
 
KARIN:  Do you find moving between creative mediums helpful?
 
ABIGAIL:  It's nice to have something else to do. And the clay is so sensual, which is what I'm doing now. The clay has a mind of its own. You can't boss it around. You can't boss writing around either. But you really can't force the clay and that's interesting and fun and makes for something else to put in whatever you're writing. I’ve done a whole little thing about clay.
 
I think we're supposed to make things with our thumbs and imaginations. Otherwise, it's just shopping, which can be very creative, but I think that's what a lot of this country has turned to use as a creative outlet. There are more interesting things to do.
 
KARIN:  You've watched memoir evolve over the years. What's your perspective on it? I know it's your preferred genre to write in.
 
ABIGAIL:  I love that it wasn't just a fad that disappeared. People kept saying, “This is going to be over within a year's time. Don't bother.” I love that we're curious about other peoples’ lives and that people are willing to write about them. It's been a while since I could read anything of any great length that wasn't written by a student. So, it's hard for me to talk about what memoir is like nowadays. I just love that it's still alive, that it's just as vital an artform as ever, more so probably.
 
KARIN:  What do you think that it says about the age we’re living in and us as a people?
 
ABIGAIL:  I just hope that we’re curious about each other and interested in each other and need help from each other. All of those things can be satisfied in a memoir. You can read about somebody who has experienced something that you've experienced. It helps, I think.
 
KARIN: Thank you, Abby. I think we'll all do a little bit of writing today.
 
ABIGAIL: Oh, please do! You can start with the line, “This is a lie I've told before.” Of course, maybe nobody lied. And you can send it to me when you're done.



Watch the full interview and video replay.

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To learn more about Abigail Thomas, visit her site.

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A Conversation with John Truby

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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


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To learn more about John Truby visit his site.

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