Express Yourself
Good Writing Is Asking Good Questions
Investigate your life, and the people within it, until you reach the truth
Welcome to The Draft, an advice column about writing and life from Eileen Pollack, former director of the University of Michigan MFA Program. We’re here to answer your questions about storycraft, writing, and telling the truth.
Have a question? Share it with us.
Dear Draft,
How do you find the right way to frame a creative nonfiction piece? I have some stories I want to tell from my life, but I am struggling to figure out how to frame them under a larger idea so they have more literary resonance than a simple anecdote. Do you have any tips? Any examples from your own work?
Signed,
Searching for a Frame
Dear Framed,
You might be struggling, but you’re asking all the right questions, which, in creative nonfiction, means you’re doing exactly what you’re supposed to do.
As you so wisely suspect, whenever you begin to grapple with your material, you want to find the best structure or form to help you organize your memories, your thoughts, your research. And that usually involves drawing a frame around all the messy stuff you…
