Almost Everyone Has a Book in Them

It’s not necessarily a novel, but perhaps a memoir of how they got through a critical time in their life, a history of a period or event that fascinates them, a delve into a social or scientific phenomenon in which they have expertise, or some combination of the foregoing. 

But not everyone knows how to go about writing their book. They might try, as I did many times before I went back to school and earned a master’s degree in creative nonfiction writing, and they might find, as I did, that they quickly get bogged down in background details or take what they think will be a slight detour from their story and end up lost down a deep, dark rabbit hole. 

As an editor with more than 30 years’ experience, I’ve spent much of the time since I finished my Master of Fine Arts degree in Creative Nonfiction Writing (class of 2015 at University of King’s College) putting my knowledge to use by helping aspiring authors write their own creative nonfiction books.

As well as enjoying my ability to help others reach their goal, I’ve found this to be a great personal learning experience. I’ve learned so much about rising to the challenges creative nonfiction writing can present that I’ve begun sharing it in webinars, workshops, and with regular LinkedIn posts.

After a hiatus over the summer of 2026, when I was preoccupied with getting my own book published, I decided to repost all my previous posts here so readers could refresh their memories before moving forward. In future, I’ll return to publishing my weekly posts on LinkedIn and add my summaries here when I go on my next summer hiatus.

If you enjoy this instructional writing and would like more personalized help, please visit my services page, where a describe a number of services I offer. One of these is a 12-session coaching series (sometimes called developmental or substantive editing) for aspiring writers who have a partial or complete draft of their book and need help getting to the next stage. I also offer stylistic and copy editing for writers who are further along, and proofreading of finished and laid out manuscripts.

Or if you just want to read what I post below and then begin following my LinkedIn posts, that’s great too. My goal is simply to help you learn to write a story that’s meaningful to you in the best way possible.

Finding the Narrative Arc in Creative Nonfiction, Part 1: What Is It?

One of the first things I tackle when I coach clients trying to write their first book draft (or revising what they’ve already written) is a narrative arc. A narrative arc is a technique borrowed from fiction. It helps structure a story in a way that builds tension and keeps the story moving forward and readers turning pages. A narrative arc consists of at least five points: 

• Exposition—the reader gets the most basic facts (setting, protagonist, maybe antagonist).
• Inciting incident—life is going along normally for the protagonist and then (gasp!) something happens.
• Rising Action—plot points form little peaks in the action/tension and valleys for additional exposition (helps avoid information dumping; we’ll come to that later). 
• Climax—the tension finally reaches a peak, after which comes before … 
• Resolution—loose ends are tied up and the action winds slowly down to a point that feels, well, resolved. 

A narrative arc is often graphed out to help writers visualize what they are trying to do. Google “narrative arc template” to see dozens of examples of narrative arc, or story arc, graphs; most of them free to download.

On some of these arcs you’ll see other points, such as a sudden of reversal of fortune before the climax: just as the reader thinks they know how the story is going to work out, something happens to make them question what they thought. Another point may be falling action, which occurs between the climax and the resolution, perhaps because there are more than the usual number of loose ends to be tied up before the story ends. 

That’s fine in fiction writing because the author can build the story to fit this arc structure. But how does this work in a memoir? After all, life’s events rarely fall into place in a neat arc shape. How does it work in a story about scientific research that moves forward in tiny bits and pieces? Or in a self-help book? Or historical nonfiction? 

Finding the Narrative Arc in Creative Nonfiction, Part 2: What’s It For? 

In any creative nonfiction story, countless pieces of information could be included. But you can’t use all of them because that would bog your story down in details, many of which might not be relevant to the part of the story you want to tell or the audience you want to tell it to. 

A narrative arc can help you decide which pieces of information to include and, perhaps more importantly, to exclude from your story. But to use it this way, you have to find a place to start. Others may do this differently, but I always start with the climax. 

How do you find the climax before you even have a narrative arc drawn? Think about the story overall and try to isolate the most interesting or exciting part of it. In a self-help book, it might be the point where your reader has learned (you hope) what you’ve been trying to teach them. In historical nonfiction, it’s probably the event that your background story is leading up to. 

But what about a story about scientific research? I recently read a book called Overrun by Andrew Reeves (ECW, 2019) about the Asian carp crisis. I’d never heard of it, but it follows one of the most dramatic and potentially devastating cases of invasive species in the world.

In less skilled hands, it might have been a much less interesting story. But Reeves tells it by starting in the lower Mississippi region, where the crisis began innocently enough, and following it over the years and up the river system to a climax where it’s now threatening to invade the Great Lakes. 

Finding the Narrative Arc in Creative Nonfiction, Part 3: Finding the Climax in Memoir

How do you find the climax of a memoir? Here, most of all, life doesn’t happen in the shape of an arc. One part of life is coming to a head while the many other parts of your life simply carry on. How does a writer manage this?

In her memoir of divorce, You Could Make This Place Beautiful (Atria, 2023), Maggie Smith notes that she couldn’t find a way to impose a narrative arc on her life, so she didn’t use that technique. Although it’s been a while since I read it, I’m not sure I could find a narrative arc in Joan Didion’s memoir of losing her husband, The Year of Magical Thinking (Vintage Books, 2005). 

Both of these books were bestsellers, so if you want to see examples of memoirs written without using a narrative arc to structure them, by all means read one of these.

Personally, I like a story that has a clear shape to it. So when a client brings me a story where finding a climax is particularly difficult, I consider it a challenge to my writing skills.

One time, a client brought me a manuscript where the highest point was almost at the beginning of the book and the rest of the book was all falling action. I suggested he break down the climax, which happened over a few days, into manageable chunks in every other chapter throughout the book. The alternating chapters told the story of his life after the climax and how that event had shaped him into the man he became. By having two timelines, we were able to place the climax in timeline A (the author won an important race that he’d always felt defined the rest of his life) at the appropriate point in the book, and follow it in the next chapter with the climax in timeline B (the ways that event shaped the rest of his life, which peaked when he was retiring, looking back on his life, and realizing that, in fact, it wasn’t the race itself that shaped the rest of his life but everything in the four years that came after it.

The key was not getting stuck in a chronological timeline but creating two timelines unfolding in parallel. (We’ll look more at timelines later.)

The point is to find the most exciting point in the narrative and use your creativity and perhaps some other creative nonfiction tools to draw the narrative arc from there. 

Finding Your Narrative Arc: What Is Exposition in a Creative Nonfiction Story? Part 1

Exposition is the part at the beginning of a story before the action starts. During the exposition, the author gives the reader the most basic facts: perhaps a rough outline of setting, and an introduction to the protagonist and perhaps the main antagonist. The exposition in Kelly S. Thompson’s memoir Still, I Cannot Save You: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Love, and Letting Go (McLelland & Stewart, 2023), is an excellent example:

“I waited for Meghan on a bench at Georgian Mall in Barrie, anxiously tapping my foot as acid gurgled up my throat. Everything smelled like damp down and the greasy food court, a combination that made me nauseated. At twenty-three years old, I was sure I had an ulcer—another thing to blame my sister for, along with the dark rings around my eyes, the literal pain in my neck, the deepening divide between me and our parents.”

Although the exposition continues for a few pages, that first paragraph sets the stage: the author is the protagonist, her sister is the antagonist, the opening setting is a shopping mall, and there is immediate awareness of ongoing conflict. We quickly find out that it’s Christmas and Meghan is an addict as well as a survivor of childhood cancer. The stage is set for the inciting incident. 

The exposition in Aaron Williams’s Chasing Fire: A Wildfire Memoir (Harbour Publishing, 2017) is quite different.

“The edge of this fire is supposed to be somewhere around here, but a fire this big doesn’t have edges, at least not from the perspective of two guys walking down a dirt road in the dead heat of the afternoon.

“Balsam and spruce tree candle on the hills around us. It’s hard to distinguish the sound of distant burning from the gusts of wind shooting across this barren logging block. Brad and I continue along the logging road. We’re looking for a small escape fire that has popped up on the north side of the road, the wrong side. This breach is one of many in the tenuous containment of the Chelaslie River fire, a massive blaze in north central British Columbia monitored by a few dozen firefighters and a few helicopters.” 

Opening in the middle of the action, it can almost seem as if the author has skipped the exposition entirely and dived right into the inciting incident. But in this case, as might be the case in a story that opens on a battlefield, the action is the backdrop and remains so through much of the book. A particular moment on the battlefield (in this case, a wildfire) will likely be the inciting incident while the continued and mounting action on the battlefield will drive the story. 

Finding Your Narrative Arc: What Is Exposition in a Creative Nonfiction Story? Part 2

The single most important aspect of the exposition is that it sets the stage for the inciting incident, which in turn triggers the action that will lead to the climax of the story. But this can look different in a memoir than it does in a popular science story or historical nonfiction. Consider this excerpt from Andrew Reeves’ Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis (ECW Press, 2019):

“We first crossed paths in 2012. Through the haze of research, travel, interviewing and reporting that has marked my time since, I can’t recall how I first heard about Asian carp. It feels as though they’ve always been in the ether. In early 2012, I was reporting for the Toronto Star, one of Canada’s largest newspapers, covering energy and the environment at Ontario’s legislature. I read somewhere of a grand, $18 billion plan from the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers to hydrologically separate the Great Lakes from the Mississippi River watershed by severing the aquatic links in Chicago. No simple redrawing of continental maps, the Corps’ scheme aimed to reset nature to how it once was.”

In a single paragraph, Reeves introduces the protagonist (the Asian carp), the antagonists (everyone trying to wrestle this invasive species to the ground), and the setting (the Mississippi watershed from its mouth on the Gulf of Mexico (not America) north to the Great Lakes, which include Lake Ontario (not America). After a few more paragraphs of background/exposition—how the Asian carp was innocently introduced to the United States (not America, which includes much more than the US)—he moves quickly to the inciting incident:

“Their takeover was dramatic.” 

Although Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Penguin Random House, 2019) covers a very different subject, the exposition is structurally similar:

“The Highway of Tears is a lonesome road that runs across a lonesome land. This dark slab of asphalt cuts a narrow path through the vast wilderness of the place, where struggling hayfields melt into dark pine forests, and the rolling fields of the Interior careen into jagged coastal mountains. It’s sparsely populated, with many kilometres separating the small towns strung along it, communities forever grappling with the booms and busts of the industries that sustain them. At night, many minutes may pass between vehicles, mostly tractor-trailers on long-haul voyages between the coast and some place farther south. And there is the train that passes in the night, its whistle echoing through the valleys long after it is gone.” 

Like Reeves, McDiarmid then goes on for several paragraphs providing background. She writes about the geography of the area, the history since first contact with Europeans, the pre-contact history, and finally how Highway 16 was known as the Yellowhead until it was renamed by its sadly accurate current moniker, the Highway of Tears. The inciting incident is then:

“No one knows who the first Indigenous girl or woman to vanish along the highway between Prince Rupert and Prince George was, or when it happened.” 

Two very different stories with structurally similar approaches to the exposition, which is very different than the approaches we saw to exposition in a couple of memoirs, even though each approach accomplishes the same goal: to set the scene for the inciting incident.

Finding Your Narrative Arc: Identifying the Inciting Incident in a CNF Story, Part 1

The way inciting incident was first described to me was:

“Our hero is going along, through his life—la-la-la-la-la—when suddenly (gasp!) something happens!”

To put it another way, the inciting incident is the moment when an event triggers a sequence of events that build, one on another, toward the climax of the story. Think of a race: participants move toward their starting positions, limbering up as they go (exposition); the starter pistol fires (inciting incident), with the shot setting off the tension that builds throughout the race to the climax at the finish line. 

But defining the term “inciting incident” can be easier than identifying the best moment to serve that role in your story. While true stories often do unfold the way they will best be written, just as often they don’t. Sometimes the highest point in the story happens closer to the beginning than the end, as we saw in a previous post subtitled “Finding the Climax in Memoir”; other times, the event that will serve as the best inciting incident triggers the action happens closer to the end than the beginning.

The latter happened in a manuscript I worked on several years ago, with a client who went on a week-long hiking trip with his wife almost every year. In a memoir recounting what their years of hiking had meant for them as individuals and a couple, more than half the manuscript was exposition. The most logical and dramatic trigger event—an ankle injury that could have put her in a wheelchair, never mind hiking again—came quite close to the end of the story. 

My first suggestion was to remove (or move to another part of the story) a lot of the detail the author had information-dumped at the beginning of his draft (we’ll come back to information dumping later). That positioned the most exciting moment in the book closer to the beginning of the story. But part of the problem was that chronologically—and his story was best told chronologically for the most part—this incident occurred in the middle of the story.

I suggested the author deal with this dilemma by using this same event as the inciting incident and the reversal of fortune. I mentioned this briefly in “Finding the Narrative Arc: Part 1.” A memoir doesn’t always include a reversal of fortune, but this one did. After nearly a decade of week-long hiking trips, which had become crucial reset buttons in the author’s marriage, his wife fell and experienced a bone-jutting, foot-backward ankle break that threatened their ability to continue these trips—and that even threatened her ability to walk at all. Here’s how he ended up dealing with it:

The story opened as the author and his wife were enjoying a short vacation a few months before their annual trip. He set the scene by describing a lovely beach restaurant in Corpus Christi. He and his wife have finished their meal and decide to go for a short walk on the beach. All of that was exposition. They start walking toward the beach and then, as they’re descending a small dune—gasp!—the wife falls, twisting her ankle so severely that they both heard a series of loud cracks as multiple bones in her ankle and foot broke. The author finishes describing the horror of this injury as his wife is driven away in an ambulance, both of them knowing this is a serious injury, both of them uncertain about the future of their annual hikes.

He then inserts a text break—a larger-than-usual break between paragraphs that often includes some kind of symbol to visually identify a significant shift in the text—after which he backtracks to their love-at-first-sight meeting 40 years earlier. The story then moves through their years as a couple and family, describes how their hiking trips started the year they both celebrated milestone birthdays, traces their journey as a couple and how the annual trips strengthened their marriage, finally arriving at the moment of the horrible ankle break.

The story then moves forward from there, through several surgeries and months of physiotherapy, building tension as she begins undertaking longer and longer walks around home, and reaching a climax as they reach the moment of truth—they plan their first long hike in two years, set out on their first day anxious about how her ankle will hold up to the physical stress, and triumphantly reach the end of the first day, which they celebrate with a champagne toast to her grit and determination, and their lasting love as a couple.

The resolution is then a continuation of their annual treks, with the exception of the pandemic years, with no end in sight even as they move closer to more milestone birthdays, now 20 years after they started. It makes for a strong narrative structure and a compelling but happy ending.

Finding Your Narrative Arc: Identifying the Inciting Incident in a CNF Story, Part 2

Here are two more looks at books where a narrative structure, including an inciting incident, is difficult to pin down, in these cases because the outcome of the story is known at the beginning—there’s not possibility of a surprise climax as there would be in fiction.  

The first of these is Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition by Laura Pratt (Random House Canada, 2023). This is a deeply touching memoir of a passionate six-year love affair that ends abruptly one Tuesday afternoon outside Toronto’s Union Station as the author’s lover says, without warning, “It’s over” and boards a train to his home in Montreal for the last time.

Here, Pratt launches directly into the inciting incident—her lover’s sudden end to their relationship, which she describes in the prologue, the rest of which is exposition. This is exposition and inciting incident of what I call the battlefield variety. When a story opens on a battlefield, we may think the battle is the inciting incident. But often it’s the exposition, the backdrop against which a single moment in the battle is the real inciting incident, which triggers all the action to follow. In Pratt’s story, the moment of her lover’s sudden departure is in the incident, the entirety of their six-year affair is exposition, and the real story—rising action, climax, and resolution—focus on her attempts to recover from this sudden loss afterward.

Another book with a unique take on inciting incident is One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable—A Mother’s Memoir (Pottersfield Press, 2018) by S. Lesley Buxton. The story of a mother shepherding her only child through a rare neurological illness to an untimely death at 16, One Strong Girl posed a dilemma for the author: anyone who read it would already know that the daughter dies. How do you find an inciting incident or a climax when the crucial end point of the story is already known? 

Instead of following a purely chronological arc, which would have started the story where the daughter began having unexplained symptoms, Buxton opened the book as she and her husband are boarding a flight to Japan. It’s not that they have any particular interest in Japan, but that it was a source of fascination for their daughter, so here they are, visiting all the places she would have liked to have seen. 

But what really drives this part of the story is that they’ve taken specks of dust from the daughter’s cremated remains and had them baked into small, colourful glass beads. The inciting incident happens when they discreetly leave a glass bead in the first place they feel should would have loved, a practice they continue throughout the trip. It’s their way of giving her in death an adventure that life did not allow her the time to have. 

It’s only after this incident that Buxton shifts to her other timeline—the moment on a sadly memorable day when their apparently healthy 11-year-old daughter inexplicably fell down. Buxton works forward from there following two timelines—their daughter’s excruciatingly slow demise to her death—the climax—and their own process of coming to peace with the fact that she’s gone.

It’s a truly creative way of handling a difficult situation in telling a difficult story. But creativity is exactly what creative nonfiction is all about. 

Finding Your Narrative Arc: What Is Rising Action in a CNF Story, Part 1

Once the inciting incident happens, the story needs to start building tension. The challenge in creative nonfiction is to find the points in the story that cause a spike in tension, and then plot them along the narrative arc. 

In a CNF story almost countless pieces of information are available; the secret to building tension is to choose the events that propel the intended story forward—and the author must be very clear about what that story is. Remember, in a real life, countless stories may be unfolding for that person at the same time. This means the author must choose information that moves that story forward, and exclude any information that doesn’t move the story forward.

That can be very difficult. There might have been significant events happening parallel to the intended story, and your instinct may be to include them because of their significance to your life overall. But if they don’t serve any purpose in moving that particular part of your life story forward, you might have to set them aside and tell yourself you’ll include them in another book.  

A few years ago, I coached a first-time author as he drafted a manuscript about the increase in anti-Chinese racism when COVID-19 broke out. He opened his book by talking about his first experiences of racism as a youth. Needless to say, he’d felt his share of prejudice throughout his life. But including every incident would have slowed the story down rather than propelling it forward. 

As well, he stressed to me, he tended not to notice microaggressions. People close to him would point out something someone had said that he wouldn’t have noticed. This actually proved advantageous when it came to building tension throughout the rising action. Racism exists every day in subtle forms, but as the pandemic spread throughout the world and led to accumulating deaths and a global lockdown, the incidences of racism he experienced personally or heard about on the news were increasingly overt, so they built the tension in his story quite naturally.

Unless you’re writing an action book, you probably want to pace the action—to allow your readers a small break between tension-building events. This is useful for allowing readers to catch their breath and let the relevance of the last tense moment sink in. That is, instead of positioning all the relevant background information at the beginning of the story, you incorporate bits of additional exposition throughout the manuscript as and when it’s needed to understand the events at that point in the story. 

Finding Your Narrative Arc: What Is Rising Action in a CNF Story, Part 2

A common mistake new writers make is thinking they have to provide all the exposition (background information) up front, to set the scene for people to understand the story. This is called information dumping, which we’ll talk about more later. For now, I’ll just say that, rather than setting readers up to grasp the story better, information dumping tends to bog them down in information that’s not meaningful enough to remember at that point.

There is a better way of doing this and that is to incorporate bits of exposition at appropriate moments in the rising action. Think of it this way: just as the narrative arc illustrates a process of rising tension and falling action, the rising action itself is like a series of mini rises and falls. So you build tension with each mini rise, and then use the slight dip or slowing of action that follows each small rise to insert enough exposition either to clarify the significant of the mini rise that just happened or to set the reader up to understand the next mini rise.

You can use these mini bits of exposition in numerous ways. They can contribute to scene setting or character building. They can be toughs that you fill with historical or scientific information. They can be stretches of dialogue that accomplish scene setting, character building, and information sharing all at once in a more interesting way than straight narrative.

For example, in our story about racism, the author didn’t remember experiencing an overtly racist act until he was in his mid-teens. An early peak in the action describes that incident. The pause following that peak provides readers with time to let the impact of that incident sink in, while at the same time allowing space for the author to provide some background about himself. He realizes on reflection that it’s unlikely he never experienced racism before that incident, but that, for whatever reason, he tended not to acknowledge it. That’s a signficant point in building his character.

So, we have crucial moments of action/tension (also referred to as plot points) to carry the story forward, woven together with bits of exposition pertinent to the current plot point. As the action rises and falls and rises and falls again and again, each mini peak in the action builds the tension a bit higher, and each supporting bit of exposition delves deeper into the backstory. This continues until the tension builds to the climax, which we’ll look at next. 

Finding Your Narrative Arc: The Climax in a CNF Story, Part 1

In a novel or a movie, the climax is the point that the author builds the story toward:

• After a thrilling high-speed chase, the cop gets the crook.
• After months of off-and-on courtship, the couple declare their love for each other.
• After a series of coming-of-age challenges, the kid figures something out and takes a huge leap forward in maturity.
• After a road trip full of unexpected twists and turns, the hero adds a piece to his understanding of the meaning of life. 

The climax in a creative nonfiction story is not always easily identifiable or dramatic. In some of the books I’ve talked about it’s fairly evident: in One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable – a Mother’s Memoir by S. Lesley Buxton (Pottersfield Press, 2018) and Still, I Cannot Save You: A Memoir of Sisterhood, Love, and Letting Go by Kelly S. Thompson (McLelland and Stewart, 2023), the climax is where the protagonist dies. 

The climax might also be evident in a road trip story, like Louisburg or Bust: A Surfer’s Wild Ride Down Nova Scotia’s Drowned Coast by RC Shaw (Pottersfield Press, 2018), when our hero finishes his journey by rising to the challenge he set himself. In the true crime book (a genre of historical CNF), Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary by Catherine Fogarty (Biblioasis, 2021), the climax comes when the violence reaches a peak such that even the prisoners realize it can’t go on. 

In other stories, though, the climax can be harder to find. One example is Overrun: Dispatches from the Asian Carp Crisis by Andrew Reeves ((ECW Press, 2019), which I mentioned in “What Is Exposition in a CNF Story, Part 2.” Reeves’s climax seems to have emerged naturally through the way he built his story around a kind of protracted road trip: The Asian carp’s unintended invasion began close to the mouth of the Mississippi River and steadily expanded north to where it’s now not far from the Great Lakes. Reeves retraced the passage of the fish from its southern starting point and followed its “footsteps” (if fish had feet—sorry, I couldn’t resist) throughout the Mississippi basin waterways in the same order. 

Next, we’ll look at some other not-so-obvious climaxes.

Finding Your Narrative Arc: The Climax in a CNF Story, Part 2

Last week, we saw how the climax can be relatively easy to find in some types of CNF. In a memoir about a loved one dying, their death is often the climax, even though the narrative arc might follow its path along a less chronological route. In a memoir about a road trip, the climax could revolve around the author’s achievement of the goal of this trip, although it could also be a point when an author experiences a revelation. In an account of an historical event, the climax might come when the action in the story reaches a peak, forcing a significant change; for example, the climax of a book about World War II might have been Hitler’s suicide.

Another not-so-obvious climax point is in The Fruitful City: Building Communities Around Nature’s Bounty by Helena Moncrieff (ECW Press, 2018). In this book, Moncrieff writes about urban orchards—the bounty of fruit available in cities where most of it simply falls to the ground and rots—and the potential for using that bounty not only to feed those who need food, but to build community around doing so. 

Moncrieff’s table of contents charts her narrative arc: from “Putting Down Roots” and “Planting Seeds,” she begins her climb up the arc with “Up a Tree” (picking the fruit) and “The Fruits of our Labour” (sharing it). This is where she builds tension and incorporates exposition: In cities across the country, people have tackled this idea, run into problems, tackled it again, run into different problems, but stuck with it, inching forward, building a movement. 

From there she moves to the penultimate moment: “Withering on the Vine: The Slide to Food Illiteracy,” exploring how we become so far removed from understanding where food comes from. It’s a perfect setup for the climax: “Wassail: Celebrating Under the Trees.” A party. A moment of joy. A celebration of nature’s bounty. (And then into falling action and resolution in her final chapter, “Conclusion: Waiting for Spring”; we’ll talk more about that later.) 

Finding Your Narrative Arc: The Climax in a CNF Story, Part 3

Another book where the climax might not have been obvious to the author is No Place to Go: How Public Toilets Fail Our Private Needs by Lezlie Lowe (Coach House Books, 2018). I loved this book and not just because of all the witty bathroom puns (like “single-user bathrooms may level the peeing field,” “public bathrooms are far from money down the drain,” and “how culturally constipated we are” about bathrooms). 

Lowe writes her exposition (in a chapter cleverly named “Game of Thrones”) about what sparked her interest in public bathrooms: being out and about with young children and unable to find a place to change a diaper or let a toilet-training toddler pee somewhere other than their pants. 

Here’s what I consider the inciting incident:

“Here’s a truth bomb … 2.3 billion people live without basic sanitation … open defecation is a daily reality for 892 million people …” This spreads disease that, when paired with inadequate water and hygiene causes 842,000 deaths worldwide each year. “Almost half are children under five.” 

From there, Lowe builds the tension by tackling:

• “Potty parity” (the lack of sufficient toilets to account for gender-related biological differences)
• The history of flush toilets and closed sewers
• Cultural issues surrounding where people urinate and defecate
• Lack of information letting users know where publicly accessible toilets are located
• Gay and transgender issues regarding use of public toilets
• Lack of facilities for people who are unhoused
• Lack of facilities for people who have a health issue that may cause incontinence
• Some of the solutions creative people have come up with to deal with this issue

The tension builds naturally as the reader realizes how many people are affected by a global lack of response to a basic human need and how easy and inexpensive some of the proposed fixes would be. The climax comes when Lowe shares the story of an older man with Parkinson’s who, for lack of bathroom access, wet his pants on a public street—and then went public, making headlines all over the UK. 

This opened a chapter about exactly whose responsibility public toilets should be. Lowe’s conclusion and the climax—this is a problem for governments at all levels to address. It’s not a problem that should fall to private businesses like retail stores and restaurants, and it’s certainly not up to individuals—we’ve been using that approach for generations and it’s clearly not working. It’s a problem that’s already led to some very creative solutions and could easily lead to more, with adequate awareness, funding, and demand. But governments must lead the way. 

In some CNF stories, the climax is obvious. In others, it takes skill to find it. But if you do your job as a CNF writer correctly by hooking readers’ attention and sustaining it through a mix of tension and exposition, the climax should reveal itself. 

Finding Your Narrative Arc: The Resolution in a CNF Story, Part 1

The root of “resolution” is “resolve,” and that’s an apt description of what happens in the resolution of any book, fiction or nonfiction. When I studied English literature in high school, it was called the “denouement,” a French term that literally translates to “outcome.” The resolution sometimes incorporates “falling action,” while other books have so many loose ends to be tied up—resolved—that the falling action has its own place on the narrative arc after the climax and before the resolution, where it serves as a counterbalance to the exposition, inciting incident, and rising action that build to the climax.

No matter what it’s called, the point of this final part of the story is to bring readers a feeling of closure, to ensure they can close the cover of the book without wondering, “But what happened to …?” or “Why did it work out THAT way instead of …?” or maybe “Why do I still feel all keyed up instead of ready to put the book down?”

(If a story is meant to leave a reader feeling unsettled, perhaps because it’s written around a serious issue that should concern all of us yet has had no resolution in real life, an experienced author might want to leave a lot of loose ends where they lay. I don’t know if I’d recommend that to first-time authors; I haven’t tackled it, but I imagine it would take a great deal of skill to pull it off in a way that feels intentional and right.)

In a book with a resolution that incorporates falling action, three main things happen: 

• The pace of the action slows down after the climax. 
• Problems or issues get resolved during this slow-down period.
• Loose ends get tied up, questions answered.

When I think of the pace slowing down, I liken it to doing something that physically gets your heart pumping. Adrenaline is what speeds up your heart rate and breathing, and when the race or the crisis is over, it takes a bit of time for your body to eliminate it. 

Chasing Smoke: A Wildfire Memoir by Aaron Williams (Harbour Publishing, 2017) focuses on one summer in the author’s life as a forest firefighter. It’s an adrenaline-fuelled story and it takes some time at the end of the book for the firefighter, and his readers, to wind down. 

Problems or issues that get resolved might include things like:

• Two people in conflict finally reaching agreement; for example, at the end of The View From Coffin Ridge: A Childhood Exhumed by Gwen Lamont (Ginger Press, 2024), the author finds a way to achieve detente with her mother.
• An individual making peace with their situation; for example, at the end of One Strong Girl: Surviving the Unimaginable – a Mother’s Memoir by S. Lesley Buxton (Pottersfield Press, 2018), the author and her husband are working toward acceptance of their daughter’s death.
• A person achieving a long worked-for goal and moving forward to whatever comes next; for example, in A Cure for Heartache: Life’s Simple Pleasures, One Moment at a Time by Mary Jane Grant (Coronet, 2019), an author who felt “untethered” and like she didn’t “fit” after her husband left her returns to a feeling of being at home with herself.

Finding Your Narrative Arc: The Resolution in a CNF Story, Part 2

In any story, there are events or people that may or may not be pivotal to the outcome but are important to include, nonetheless. Separating falling action from resolution gives the author a chance to give readers a more comprehensive sense of closure. Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (Penguin Random House, 2019) is an excellent example of this.

As the subtitle suggests, this is a story of ongoing racism, rape, violence, and murder faced by countless Indigenous women as they travelled along a stretch of highway in northern BC. It is a complex, multilayered story in which hundreds of people have played a role, either in actively trying to ignore the problem or in sincerely trying to address it. By the second-last chapter, fittingly called “Winding Down,” many storylines converge and must be resolved. This is a great example of falling action, which then leads into a chapter of resolution, called “The Last Walk.”

In my own book, No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery (Iguana Books, 2026), I’ve layered my memoir of injury and recovery with research on:

• How concussion works
• How it’s related to whiplash
• How it can lead to chronic pain
• How chronic pain can trigger depression
• How the medical-legal-insurance system impedes an individual’s ability to get fair compensation for a fully preventable injury
• How all of it can combine to leave long-term impacts on a person’s physical and mental health, their career, and their relationships with family and friend

There are a lot of points to tie up, which I do in my penultimate chapter, called “Life Goes On,” before a text break that leads to resolution. So, whether you decide to wrap your falling action and resolution into one or divide them into two really, in my opinion, depends on how much falling action there is.

The tricky part about finding resolution in a nonfiction story is that life doesn’t start and stop where the story starts and stops. There was life before the story and there will be life after it. But the resolution allows the author to tie up the particular chunk of life that we’ve been sharing with our readers so we can all feel a sense of satisfaction and completion, and move on. 

Terms to Remember in Writing Creative Nonfiction: Target Audience

I said earlier that finding a narrative arc is one of the first things I tackle with writers I’m coaching. That’s true, but there are things I tackle even before that, like audience—Who should read your book? Who will be interested? Who will get the most out of it?

As a writing coach and editor, I can’t count the number of times an author has said “everyone.” It would be nice to think I could write a book that would appeal to everyone, but it doesn’t work that way. And that’s good, because it helps when we’re writing to imagine specific details about the person/people we’re writing to.

Many years ago, I edited a memoir of incest. I recently read a different memoir of incest. You might think they’d have the same target audience, but they don’t.

The memoir I edited years ago, Little Girl Mended: A Memoir by Nikki Krauss (Vox Dei, 2015), was written by a woman who, while dealing with her experience of incest, had found Christianity. She’d written her book from a Christian perspective for a Christian audience because she believes that, as painful as this experience was, it was her god’s way of inviting her into his heart. She was targeting a largely female audience of readers who were practising Christians or those considering Christianity.

The memoir I read recently, The Unravelling: Incest and the Destruction of a Family by Donna Besel (University of Regina Press, 2021) was written by a woman who discovered, as an adult, that she was not the only one molested by her father: he had molested all her sisters, too. But she was the only one who moved forward with a legal case, which tore her family apart. She targeted readers who’d had a similar experience when breaking an unwritten family code of silence.

Same topic, different audiences.

In “Finding the Narrative Arc in Creative Nonfiction, Part 2: What’s It For?” I talk about using narrative arc to choose which of the almost infinite pieces of information to include in and exclude from your story. Too much information—especially information that isn’t directly pertinent to the story you’re telling—bogs the reader down in unnecessary detail.

Knowing your target audience is another way to help you decide what to include and exclude.

Consider this: there’s considerable overlap in the type of information Krauss and Besel included in their books. But Krauss chose information that supported her belief that the incest was part of god’s plan because it helped her find faith. Besel chose information that supported her experience that family secrets—keeping them or sharing them—can tear a family apart.

Here’s another example: When researching No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery (Iguana Books, 2026), I read many other books about concussion. But each one had a slightly different target audience:

• No Such Thing is a memoir of injury and lawsuit that reaches out to an audience of people who’ve experienced concussion, and their families, employers, neighbours, and friends, to validate the gaslighting they’ve experienced and support the truth in their experiences with scientific evidence.
• The Concussion Crisis: Anatomy of a Silent Epidemic by Linda Carroll and David Rosner (Simon and Schuster, 2011) speaks to parents of teenage athletes about the very real dangers of ignoring concussions, again supported by scientific evidence.
• Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, ED Morin and Jane Cawthorne, eds. (University of Alberta Press, 2021) is directed specifically toward women, who suffer concussion more often, have more symptoms, and take longer to recover then men, and even more specifically toward women writers, whose careers can be dramatically affected by concussion.
• Sex With a Brain Injury: On Concussion and Recovery by Annie Liontas (Scribner, 2024)

It’s all guided by knowing your target audience. It can also be guided by knowing how booksellers will categorize your book in their stores. We’ll talk about that next time.

Terms to Remember in Writing CNF: BISAC, Part 1

Another important aspect of writing a CNF book is thinking about how booksellers will shelve it. 

To do this, go to bisg.org, the website of the Book Industry Study Group and check the current list of subject headings, called the BISAC list (Book Industry Standards and Communications).

The BISAC includes 54 major headings, such as Antiques & Collectibles, Computers, and Family & Relationships. Under each heading, there could be dozens of coded subheadings, such as:

ANT000000   ANTIQUES & COLLECTIBLES / General

ANT056000   ANTIQUES & COLLECTIBLES / Advertising

ANT002000   ANTIQUES & COLLECTIBLES / Art

ANT003000   ANTIQUES & COLLECTIBLES / Autographs

BISG recommends choosing no more than three possible headings.

If you don’t care about publication, this won’t matter to you. But if you hope to be published, or to self-publish, this is another way of helping you stay on track when writing your book.

For example, Run, Hide, Repeat: A Memoir of a Fugitive Childhood by Pauline Dakin (Viking, 2017) tells of the author’s childhood, during which her mother was persuaded by her stepfather—who Dakin later realized was mentally ill—that they must constantly be on the run from people who were pursuing him. It could be listed under:

BIO026000    BIOGRAPHY & AUTOBIOGRAPHY / Memoirs

HEA055000   HEALTH & FITNESS / Mental Health

FAM052000   FAMILY & RELATIONSHIPS / Dysfunctional Families

Here’s another example: Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary by Catherine Fogarty (Biblioasis, 2021). This book is about exactly what the descriptive title and subtitle say it’s about. Possible applicable categories are a bit more complicated:

HIS006070    HISTORY / Canada / Provincial, Territorial & Local / Ontario (ON)

HIS037070    HISTORY / Modern / 20th Century / General

POL035010   POLITICAL SCIENCE / Human Rights

POL014000   POLITICAL SCIENCE / Law Enforcement

SOC004000   SOCIAL SCIENCE / Criminology

SOC051000   SOCIAL SCIENCE / Violence in Society

In this case, the author focused more on twentieth-century history than regional history, presumably because it was a federal penitentiary, not regional, and it was a time when prison unrest in many places was leading to questions about prison reform.

The prisoners themselves identified their issues as having less to do with claiming they hadn’t earned their punishment than insisting they still deserved basic human rights. I’m not sure what categories the author was considering, but I’d lean more toward criminology than a broader term like “violence in society.”

Terms to Remember in Writing CNF: BISAC, Part 2

Aside from narrowing down your writing angle, what purpose does categorization serve? It helps writers understand which categories are currently selling the best.

If you’re only writing for self-expression, maybe this doesn’t matter to you. But it might matter to writers who hope to get something back from their investment of blood, sweat, and tears.

To illustrate, let’s look at a book that’s harder to categorize: Ring of Fire: High-Stakes Mining in a Lowlands Wilderness by Virginia Heffernan (ECW Press, 2023).

Ring of Fire is a detailed discussion of a region of Northern Ontario, Canada, that is extremely rich in a range of critical minerals. The author tells her story from several perspectives:

• The geological history that created such rich deposits
• The history of corporate attempts to raise capital and negotiate with governments to extract the resources
• The range of environmental issues this could both raise and address
• Approaches to mining that would best serve the First Nations in this remote and inaccessible area

This book could be catalogued under any three of the following categories, and likely several more:

BUS070150   BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Industries / Natural Resource Extraction

BUS014020   BUSINESS & ECONOMICS / Investments & Securities / Commodities / Metals

HIS028050    HISTORY / Indigenous / Colonial History & Interaction with Nations, Tribes, Bands & Communities

POL045000   POLITICAL SCIENCE / Colonialism & Post-Colonialism

POL074020   POLITICAL SCIENCE / Indigenous / Reconciliation

POL074030   POLITICAL SCIENCE / Indigenous / Treaties & Agreements

SCI026000    SCIENCE / Environmental Science

SCI092000    SCIENCE / Global Warming & Climate Change

In a book that touches on so many areas, which three should the author focus on most closely? One way to decide is to determine which categories are currently selling the best. This is not so much about the story the writer wants to tell as the business of publishing.

Why is this important? Aren’t we all artists who don’t want to dirty our hands with such filthy business? The truth is, if we think that way, we’re being a bit precious about the work we do and why we do it.

Book publishing is expensive. Other than the “big five” publishers (Penguin Random House, HarperCollins, Hachette Book Group, Macmillan, and Simon & Schuster) that dominate the market, most publishers need government grants to survive. An author who can position their book to help its publisher recover costs is more likely to be published than one who can’t.

If, as an author, you have a story to share with the world, part of your job is to figure out how best to do that. Some of that comes down to having a good story. Some of it is about your skill as a writer.

But, like it or not, some of it is about recognizing that, if you can’t position your book so a publisher can at least break even on it, your message is not going to reach any audience. So, if getting your message out is a primary motivator for you, adding BISAC categories to your writers’ toolbox just makes sense. 

Terms to Remember in Writing CNF: Universal Message

What is a universal message? It’s a concept, feeling, or idea that all people can relate to, regardless of their language, culture, faith, gender, or other background. It often conveys basic human emotions or experiences such as love, loss, hope, or fear.

All art forms convey a universal message. Knowing what your universal message is can help to keep you on track in your writing.

When I’m free writing, my brain goes off in myriad directions, sometimes leading me down various rabbit holes and extensive thought networks in the underground of my subconscious. Knowing what my universal message is helps to pull me back to the central message of my story.

In Impact: Women Writing After Concussion, Jane Cawthorne and ED Morin, eds (University of Alberta Press, 2021), I’d say the universal message is that women experience things—injury, pain, illness—differently than men.

In The Fruitful City: The Enduring Power of the Urban Food Forest by Helena Moncrieff (ECW Press, 2018), the universal message is that there is bounty all around us and it helps feed our need for community as well as our nutritional needs.

In Murder on the Inside: The True Story of the Deadly Riot at Kingston Penitentiary by Catherine Fogarty (Biblioasis, 2021), the universal message is that even people in prisons for terrible crimes are humans; as such, they have rights which we ignore at our own peril.

Often, the book’s subtitle hints at the universal message. For example, Cheryl Strayed’s memoir Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail (Vintage Books, 2013) suggests that sometimes when we feel lost in life we must go somewhere unfamiliar, try on a different persona, to find ourselves again.

Sometimes the universal message is called the universal theme. Themes can include broad, general ideas such as power and corruption or love and loss. I prefer to distinguish universal message from themes which I’ll deal with later. 

When I’m coaching, and in my own writing, I try to keep the universal message broad enough to apply to the whole book (or essay) but narrow enough that I can sum it up in a sentence. That way, if I start to go down one of those rabbit holes, I can use my universal message to help me get back on track. 

Using Themes in Creative Nonfiction Writing, Part 1

When I was writing about finding the universal message in your work, I found “message” used interchangeably with “theme.” More experienced writers may disagree, but I don’t think of themes and universal message as the same thing. 

To me, a writer should be able to sum up their universal message in a sentence. For example, “Women experience pain, injury, and illness differently than men.” 

I think of a theme as identifiable in a word or three: “power and corruption,” “love and loss,” “joy in tragedy.” Or simply “lies,” “faith,” “human rights.”

Any work of creative nonfiction, or fiction for that matter, should have only one universal message, and it should serve as a touchstone that the writer can come back to repeatedly as a reminder to keep the story on track. But there can be several themes in a book. They’re not present in every chapter but are typically woven in and out of the story. 

One of the mentors in my MFA program gave me a way to track themes visually, as a way to ensure I’m distributing them throughout the story in a balanced way. 

Draw a table (or use Excel) with as many columns as you have themes, and as many rows as you have chapters. In my book about concussion, I have five themes—pain and suffering, truth and lies, justice, money, and family—spread across 14 chapters. So, I would draw a table with five columns and 14 rows. I’d label the columns with each of my themes, and the rows with each of my chapters. 

You can go at this one of two ways: you can look at your themes one at a time and figure out which chapters have this theme in them, or you can look at your chapters one at a time and figure out which of your themes are represented in that chapter. Either way, fill out the chart so the rows and columns show you the distribution of your themes. 

Looking at this chart, how are your themes are distributed? Is there a balance across chapters? It’s not that every chapter needs to touch on every theme, but that you want to avoid clumping, such as when several consecutive chapters have the same theme or themes.

Let’s use my book, No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery (Iguana Books, 2026) as an example. If readers picked it up to understand how concussion can affect a person’s family life, but all they read about for five chapters is how my concussion affected me financially, they might give up.

So, I ask myself, is all that money information necessary? Am I repeating some things? Could I leave some things out? Could some information fit equally well in another chapter? Is some of it really about how money issues affected my family? Can I shift the angle in those chapters to focus more sharply on the family theme?

Or should I go back to my universal message and ask if all the themes fit with my universal message? If one of them takes readers’ focus away from it, I might want to play down that theme by removing information that doesn’t quite fit the story I’m trying to tell. 

I might find that a theme that’s very important to me and to my universal message isn’t present as often in the book as I’d like. How can I introduce that theme more often? I might realize that theme isn’t as central to the story as I thought. So, does my universal message need tweaking? If so, I’ll have to pay attention to that in my next full draft. 

Writing a book is a journey. In the early stages of my writing, a lot of my chapters accordioned in and out as I wrote 20,000 words down a rabbit hole only to realize I only needed 5,000 words on that subject. Through each of eight drafts (I didn’t count the number of revisions within each draft), I fine-tuned my content, added and sometimes took away new or outdated research, and focused more or less on personal anecdotes.

At each stage, three things kept me on track: understanding where I was in the narrative arc I created, having a universal message and tweaking it if needed, and being clear about my themes and their balanced distribution throughout the narrative. 

If you thought writing a creative nonfiction book was just about writing a draft and sending it off to a publisher, think again: creative nonfiction is a craft with its own tools. Using those tools to painstakingly shape each draft will make you happier with the finished product.  

CNF Writing: What Is Information Dumping?

One of the things I see most often when working with new writers is a tendency to think they need to lay down all the background information to their story before they start telling their story. This is understandable: how will people understand all the terminology and the events unfolding if they don’t clearly explain them in advance? It’s a logical question but it leads to a common mistake called information dumping.

Information dumping is when you do exactly what I’ve just described: you try to put all the background in place before getting on with the story so that, once you get to the story, your readers will understand the how and why of what’s happening. The problem is that this typically gives your reader pages of information they have to wade through before they get to the part that’s interesting and engaging. Are they likely to stick with you as they plough through background information that, at that point, has no context or meaning for them? 

In a word, no.

Readers are impatient; they want to know right away why they should read your story. They want to be engaged immediately. They want to feel compelled to keep turning page after page, to stay engaged throughout your story. To keep readers turning pages, you need to have strong forward momentum in your story. You need to make sure every paragraph, every sentence, even every word is in some way moving your story forward. 

If you stop your story to fill in too much background information at once—or if you don’t start your story right away because you’re trying to fill in all the background information before the story begins—you’re going to lose readers before they’ve even figured out what your story is about.

What do you do?

Going back to narrative arc, remember that your story begins with just enough exposition so that your inciting incident—the moment that the tension in your story begins to build—makes sense. Then you begin building tension by creating little peaks in the action, followed by dips. The dips are where all that background information goes, but only as much as needed to explain the last peak in action or make the next peak in action make sense. 

Not only does this avoid information dumping; it also helps to build tension. As each bit of action occurs, not having all the information in advance keeps the reader asking, “but why?” This contributes to building tension toward the climax, and answers each “but why?” question as it arises. 

So, not only do you avoid information dumping; you also keep the story moving forward.

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Maintain Forward Momentum with Active Voice

One of the key problems with information dumping is that it slows a story’s forward momentum. Keeping a story moving forward is key to keeping readers reading, and it’s not only accomplished by what you don’t do, but also by what you DO do. 

One way to keep forward momentum is by using active voice. I’ve always heard passive voice defined as any use of the verb “to be” (am, are, is, was, or were) when an active verb would work better. For example, “This little piggy was going to the market” is less active than “This little piggy went to market.” 

But as much as searching out variants of “to be” works as a guideline to finding and fixing passive constructions, it’s not definitive. Sometimes, compound verbs formed with “to be” are the only thing that works. Consider “I go to the market” vs “I am going to the market.” While there’s nothing grammatically wrong with the first sentence, it sounds stilted. There are also times when the verb “to be” on its own is essential, as in Shakespeare’s famous line, “To be or not to be, that is the question.” 

I’ve recently learned of a different way to hunt out passive voice: look for a sentence without a subject, or to put it another way, a sentence where the object of the verb is serving as the subject. “The thief stole her wallet” is an active construction: subject (thief), verb (stole), object (wallet).

The passive version would be “Her wallet was stolen.” This not only slows the forward momentum down, it also provides less information (Who stole the wallet?). More to the point, there is no subject—or rather, the object (wallet) becomes the subject. But a wallet doesn’t make for a very interesting subject because it’s inanimate. It can’t do anything; it can only be done to. 

So, the sentence, “Her wallet was stolen,” just sits there, feeling clunky. “The thief stole her wallet,” on the other hand, gives us an image—a subject is performing an action. As we read, that image helps to move the story forward. (Note, too, that searching for variants of “to be” would have led us to the passive version of this sentence.)

That’s not to say there are no uses for passive voice. Academic articles and books are often written in passive voice because it removes the subject from the action. In academia, objectivity reigns supreme, so writers often prefer that lack of a subject.

(Not that it belongs here, but the plain language community would argue that excluding a subject doesn’t make academic work more objective; it only makes it less readable. When was the last time you felt compelled to keep turning the pages of an academic article?) 

Check out this page for more deliberate uses of passive voice. For example, you may want to leave a question mark about who stole the wallet; that might be an important part of your story and a way to build tension. Or you may want the reader’s attention to fall more on the object than the subject: “In a rash of recent thefts, wallets were the item most often targeted.” Or you may prefer to be vague to avoid taking responsibility: “Things were said, things were done, wallets were stolen.”

In most cases, however, you can use active voice to keep your story moving forward, ensuring your readers keep turning the pages toward the conclusion you want to leave them with.

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Vary Paragraph and Section Length 

Much of what we do in creative nonfiction is aimed at keeping the story moving forward. A strong narrative arc, a universal message, and active voice all help with this. Varying paragraph length is another way to keep the story moving forward.

For most of us, reading text is not just a visual activity but an aural/oral one. I don’t know about you, but when I read, I hear the words in my head. It’s not universal, but it’s common; about 80% of us read that way. This means that when we read, we hear things like volume, inflection, and accent. We also hear rhythm.

Our brains respond to rhythm. Our hearts beat in rhythm; we live our days by circadian rhythm. Rhythm in music can make our toes tap; rhythm in rhyme can us help us memorize words; rhythm in children’s stories or lullabies can calm them—and us.

Creative nonfiction has rhythms too. Narrative arc is a type of rhythm. We can use it at both the book and chapter levels; we can even use it in sidebars. When chapter titles follow a pattern, they add rhythm. Even chapter epigraphs provide a type of rhythm.

As CNF writers, we consciously choose rhythms for the effect they’ll have on our readers. We also incorporate variety. This balance between sameness and variety in rhythm holds readers’ interest without lulling them to sleep. By moving back and forth between rhythm and variety, it alternates between almost casting a spell on the reader and jolting readers. This back-and-forth rhythm keeps readers turning pages.

In effect, lull/jolt + lull/jolt + lull/jolt = forward momentum. 

There’s also a visual element to varying paragraph length. 

Look at the paragraphs in a CNF book you’ve recently read and you might see something like this: Long paragraphs take an in-depth look at something the author might have preferred not to split up into shorter paragraphs. A string of paragraphs of roughly equal length take an idea apart and relate it in stepwise fashion, building an idea one chunk at a time.

Short paragraphs—maybe a sentence or two, or even only a word or two—serve almost as macro-scale punctuation, stressing points that require emphasis almost as if they’re verbal exclamation points. They add variety for the brain. They contribute to white space that gives the eyes a rest. They sharpen the readers’ awareness of what they’ve just read and prepare them for what they’ll read next.

A final note: line breaks, which work at a multi-paragraph level, provide a variation on the lull/jolt rhythm. Whether you mark them with a blank line or a fitting symbol, they trigger thoughts like: “Look at the time! I’ll keep reading to the next line break and then get on with my day/go to sleep/refill my coffee.” It’s another simple but effective way of keeping the reader engaged, which is the most important aspect of moving the story forward.

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Vary Sentence and Word Length

During my master’s program, one of the mentors said we need to ensure that every paragraph, every sentence, and even every word should move the story forward. If a sentence is not moving the story forward, we may need to recast it or eliminate it; if a word is slowing a story down, we should find a better word or simply delete it.

First, let’s look at sentence length. But let’s look at it by looking at word length. Here’s what I mean: 

“Even varying word length is important. Many new writers use big words. But too many big words can be tedious. Tedium doesn’t move a story forward.”

The above paragraph is four sentences long. Each sentence is six to eight words. It’s a boring paragraph. Now, let’s rewrite it:

“Even varying word length is important. Many new writers want to use impressive vocabulary, so they use lots of big words. An occasional bon mot that encapsulates a big idea in a single word—”he lived abstemiously for his entire life”—can add interest to a sentence and a paragraph.

“If the sentence gets too long, break it up with punctuation. Use em dashes to insert a related idea or example into a sentence. The em dashes will keep the ideas clear, the long sentence will add variety to the paragraph, and the big word (abstemious) will add interest. But don’t use too many fifty-cent words; words that repeatedly send the reader to the dictionary can be tedious.

“Tension moves a story forward. Tedium stops a story in its tracks.”

True, we added information. But fundamentally, we said the same thing. “Vary word length. Use some big words but not too many. Avoid tedium.”

We also touched on sentence length by showing how to break up a long sentence with punctuation. This way, neither the long sentence nor the big word compromise comprehension. Readers can glean the word’s meaning from the context; they don’t need to use a dictionary. This paragraph, too, serves as an example of how varying sentence and word length can keep a story moving forward.

Don’t be afraid to use short words either. George Orwell famously encouraged writers to look for shorter words whenever possible to make their writing more readable. We’ve also talked about using short paragraphs as a sort of macro-punctuation that can add emphasis to what we’re saying. Short words and sentences can serve the same purpose. 

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Replace Vague Adjectives and Adverbs; Use Strong Nouns and Verbs

A few years ago, I was doing a blue pencil café with a writer who described a woman in his story as “beautiful.” I asked what made her beautiful. He looked bewildered and said, “She was beautiful.” I asked what made her beautiful. “She was just beautiful.” What colour was her hair? “I don’t remember.” What about her eyes? “I don’t remember.” What do you remember? “She was beautiful.”  

The problem is that each person’s idea of beauty is different, so saying “she was beautiful” doesn’t provide a picture that the reader can visualize—and part of making a story engaging is using the words on the page to create a picture in the reader’s brain. 

How do you help readers visualize? Going back to the original example, you use specific details. For example, “Her hair was long and straight, a deep auburn framing a face with high cheekbones, fine lips, and deep green eyes.” 

Note that you don’t have to describe every detail. If you focus on the most noticeable features, the reader will fill in the rest. I often compare what I mean to John Lennon’s drawings. If you Google “John Lennon’s drawings,” you’ll see a lot of line drawings with few details. Sometimes, there are gaps in the lines. But he provides just enough with those lines that the viewer can fill in the rest. 

The same applies to verbal description. You may have heard the writers’ saying, “Less is more.” That can mean different things in different situations, but one thing it means is that you don’t have to describe absolutely everything you want the reader to see when you describe a person or a setting. 

In fact, when you don’t try to describe something in too much detail—when you allow for the fact that everyone sees things differently, and no one sees things exactly the way you do when you’re writing—you’re encouraging readers to engage with what they’re reading in ways they can’t do if you describe too much. 

Think in terms of strong nouns and verbs. Instead of saying, “He’s a strong, husky guy,” try “He has the build of a professional wrestler.” Instead of saying, “She walked quickly down the street,” try “She hurried down the street” or “She bustled down the street” or “She dashed down the street.” 

Not only are they all more effective than “walked quickly,” but they all convey a slightly different nuance—and that too is more engaging for the reader. 

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Using Motifs

The Canadian Oxford Dictionary defines “motif” as “A distinctive feature or dominant idea in artistic or literary composition.” Some definitions use the word “theme” to define it, but that’s not quite right. Other definitions use the word “message,” as in “universal message,” but that’s not quite right, either. 

To me, a writer should be able to sum up their universal message in a sentence. One example I gave in part 2 of the section on universal message was “Women experience pain, injury, and illness differently than men.” A theme is more likely to be identified in a word or three: “power and corruption,” “love and loss,” “joy in tragedy.” Or simply “lies,” “faith,” “human rights.”

A motif may be connected to one or more themes in a book, and through the themes it’s also connected to the universal message, but it’s not a theme in itself. Rather, it’s a repeated element that may remind the reader of a theme. 

In my book, No Such Thing: A True Story of “Mild” Traumatic Brain Injury and My Twenty-Year (so far) Recovery (Iguana Books, 2026), the universal message is that “Not everyone recovers from a ‘mild’ brain trauma quickly, or at all, and we need to believe them when they say they haven’t recovered.” A theme derived from that, which recurs throughout the book, is “pain”—emotional as well as physical. 

A motif I use early in the book to refer to pain is feeling like a brick is lodged in the back of my head. I refer to that brick repeatedly, but only in the early chapters. As the days wear on after my injury, and throughout the rest of the book, I describe my pain as feeling like my head is stuck in a vise. So, that vise—that application of pressure—is a motif I use to describe my pain throughout my story. 

In Dying for Attention: A Graphic Memoir of Nursing Home Care by Susan MacLeod (Conundrum Press, 2021), the universal message appears to be that we must provide better care for senior citizens approaching the end of the lives. A notable theme could be that of inhumanity, which MacLoud repeatedly sums up with the repeated phrase, “Systems That Make Humans Inhumane.” A connected motif that appears regularly is a banner over some of the graphic tiles, some reading “Susan Seeks an Expert” and others “Solution Susan Strikes” as the author tries to deal with those systems. 

In Highway of Tears: A True Story of Racism, Indifference and the Pursuit of Justice for Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls by Jessica McDiarmid (Penguin Random House, 2019), I would say the universal message is that we must stop ignoring this ongoing tragedy among Indigenous and one of themes is racism. The titular “highway of tears” is a motif that refers not only to loved one’s grief over their lost mothers, daughters, and sisters, but to the long road the survivors must travel to get to justice. 

In Heartbroken: Field Notes on a Constant Condition by Laura Pratt (Random House Canada, 2023), music is a recurring motif. The author’s lost love is a musician. She met him while music was playing and they danced. Everywhere they travelled, they attended musical performances. If the universal message is that maybe not all things pass but you learn to live with your grief, and one of the connected themes is loss, music is a motif that evokes the passion of the love affair, now ended, and the grief it left behind. 

In How to Clean a Fish and Other Adventures in Portugal by Esmeralda Cabral (University of Alberta Press, 2023), I would identify the joy of exploring other cultures (or your own) as the universal message and one of the themes as exploring a culture through food. A motif might be the fish in the title, which is such a large part of Portuguese cuisine. 

What I’ve described above might not be what the authors had in mind. But the point for me is less that I’ve captured exactly what they had in mind while they were writing but that I can look at what I’ve read and see a common thread leading from a universal message, to themes, to motifs. Next time, we’ll look at something one of my mentors referred to as the “rolling now.” 

Writing Creative Nonfiction: The Rolling Now

The “rolling now” is a term invented by Ken McGoogan, one of my mentors in the MFA in Creative Nonfiction Writing program at University of King’s College. It refers to writing in a way that goes back and forth between the present and the past. The two streams are braided together so that interludes from the past explain what’s happening in the present. This allows the author to incorporate exposition seamlessly as it’s needed.

I started this series on writing creative nonfiction (CNF) in April 2025. For the first several months I focused on narrative arc, and the different parts it comprises. The first part is exposition, which I describe in two parts. It is the background information that sets the stage for the inciting incident, from which the “rising action” flows inexorably forward to the climax.

As I note in “What is Rising Action in a CNF story? Part 2,” one of the most common mistakes new writers make is thinking they must provide all the exposition up front, before the move into action. The thinking, of course, is how will the action make sense if readers don’t have the background information, and it’s a good question.

But if we provide all the background in an information dump up front, it will take far too long to get to the action in the story. Yet I’ve worked with more than one author who did not even begin to approach the point of their story until they were halfway through the first draft of their manuscript.

What’s the solution? The writer only provides enough exposition at the beginning of the book to make the inciting incident make sense. This will leave questions in the reader’s mind, and that’s a good thing because if the writer has hooked them with the inciting incident, they’ll want to stick around and keep reading to learn the answers to their questions.

Then, during the rising action, the writer will build a peak into the action to increase tension and then will release the tension a bit to incorporate enough exposition to explain the previous peak or lay the background for the next one.

This is where the “rolling now” comes in, where the writer “rocks back and forth,” as Ken would say, between the present and the past in such a way that the reader feels like they are always in the present. When the rolling now is done well, the reader doesn’t notice the back and forth; they only notice that a present moment happens, is explained by a past moment, and then returns to the present.

To read more about the rolling now, check out this blog post by Sarah White, another MFA student who learned about it from Ken himself.

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Show, Don’t Tell

If you’ve been writing for more than five minutes, you’ve probably heard the phrase, “show, don’t tell.” But what does it mean?

In “Replace Vague Adjectives and Adverbs; Use Strong Nouns and Verbs,” I shared a story about trying to coach a gentleman to show, don’t tell. He described a woman in his story as “beautiful,” but when I asked him to share what made her beautiful, he just kept saying, “She was beautiful. What else do you want me to say?” I asked him several times in different ways to visualize the features that made her beautiful, and his response was, “How am I supposed to know?”

You can probably see where I’m going with this. The man was unable to visualize the woman he was writing about. Being able to visualize is the first and most important step in “show, don’t tell.” 

Say you want to describe a gorgeous sunset. What does that sunset look like? What colours do you see? Is the sun a fiery ball as it sets, or is it a sliver slipping behind the horizon? Is the sky perfectly clear and blue as the sun goes down, or are the colours filtered through wisps of clouds? Don’t tell your reader “It’s gorgeous”; tell them what makes it gorgeous.

Maybe you want to describe a little boy. What colour is his hair? Is it nondescript, or is it the colour of ripe wheat? How about his face? Is it thin and gaunt, or does he have plump, dimpled cheeks? How old does he look? A boy of two and a boy of seven and a boy of twelve are all little boys, but they’re very different in stature and build. Is he dressed in bright colours or wearing clothes with frayed edges and holes where the fabric has worn through? When you think of this little boy, observe every detail you can about him and, instead of telling readers that he’s cute, show them what makes him that way.

Here’s a bit of practice for you. Choose a room in your home. Sit down, look around, and observe every detail about it. Now start writing about this room in such a way that your readers can visualize it for themselves—are the walls painted or wallpapered? What colours or patterns? Is the floor hardwood, laminate, vinyl tile, ceramic tile, covered with an area rug, or fully carpeted? Colour? Texture? How would you describe the furniture? Is it a nondescript assortment of styles, or do the various pieces seem to fit together? 

The more detail you can visualize for yourself, the better you will be able to show your reader what you see. And this act of showing engages the reader’s imagination. It allows them to become an active participant in creating your story in their head. It doesn’t matter if what they visualize is the same as what you see. What matters is that they see whatever works for them, and that act keeps them engaged in your story and turning pages to find out what happen next.

Writing Creative Nonfiction: Less Is More

Going by my comments on “show, don’t tell,” you might think I’m advising you to include every detail you can think of in your descriptions. And I am offering that advice—in your first draft. But as you revise and fine tune your writing, consider how you might take a lighter hand to your descriptions. 

This is not a contradiction. This is why professional writers almost never consider anything complete on a first draft. That draft is where we write everything, accepting that when we come back to it, we’ll be able to determine how much is necessary to painting the picture we want our readers to see. 

Consider the sunset. It’s likely every reader has seen their share of sunsets, so they have plenty in their memory to draw on. This means that, of all the details you’ve recorded, you can likely cut back the number of details you’ve initially observed from a full-scale oil painting to a sketch with coloured chalk. “The sun slipped behind wisps of cloud against a sky of deepening blue.”

What about the little boy? “A boy of about seven peered up at me, his plump cheeks dimpled by his grin, his white-blonde hair begging to be tousled.”

And the room? “The living room was all white walls and hardwood, the sleek Scandinavian lines of the grey sofa and chair a study in contrast with the boldly patterned red, black, and grey area rug.” 

Why couldn’t you just do that in the first place? Maybe you could. Maybe you’re a good enough writer that you can see the scene in your mind and immediately know which details to include and exclude. In my experience, I have to be able to visualize everything—the tables, the chairs, the walls, the flooring, the curtains, the colours, everything—before I can decide which details will suffice to draw enough of a picture to engage the reader without boring them by leaving nothing to their imagination. 

I’ve been known to write a 20,000-word chapter on my first draft, only to shrink it back to 5,000 words on the second draft. I need to see everything on the page before I choose what will stay and what will go. And while I don’t think everyone goes to the extremes I do to include everything in the first draft, I think it’s generally good advice to remember that, as yet another writing saying goes, “writing is revising.” It takes maybe 25% of your time to capture the first draft, and at least 50% of your time to rework it. 

So, while it’s not this cut and dried, in general, I’d say your motto for the first draft: should always be “show, don’t tell,” while for the second draft it might need to be “less is more.”