Steven Church shares his remarks from the recent NonfictioNow Conference panel “Hydra-Headed Memoirs and Well-Connected Essays: Negotiating Your Book-Length Nonfiction Thing,” wherein he pondered aloud about hearing that his own “book-length nonfiction thing,” was too fragmented and associative and didn’t have unifying narrative line; and, second, about the challenges of an MFA program, where we focus on teaching student how to write really great essays and then, in their last year, expect them to submit an entire unified “book-length nonfiction thing.”

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By Steven Church

Step 1: Learn to bake, from scratch, a couple of really good cupcakes—perfect little cakes that share the same basic form and thematic structure of a larger cake, the complete idea for which hasn’t actually formed completely in your head yet, but which exists just beneath the surface of your waking thoughts. Start small. If necessary, pay a lot of money to take some classes…