As part of their series on the craft of non-fiction and the personal essay, Michael Steinberg discusses the struggles and surprises of writing his memoir in the Tri-Quarterly Review.
As I kept going, there were times when it felt like I was taking dictation from my mind. And yet, I still wasn’t sure where all this was taking me. But then there were moments, when I’d be out jogging or taking a shower, or even on the verge of sleep—moments when I wasn’t even thinking about the memoir—when a sudden, unforeseen image and/or idea would come to me. To my surprise, many of those unexpected arrivals seemed to fit the developing narrative. To a large extent, then, my paying attention to those revelations is what guided me the rest of the way.
