Creative Nonfiction Consultations with Louella Bryant

“Great writing is meant to crush us, entertain and move us,  return us to ourselves with some greater understanding of the world and  its workings,” says editor Betsy Lerner in her book The Forest for the Trees. Certainly that is the response all writers want from our readers.  But how do you accomplish it? First, you need commitment and  perseverance, even on beautiful summer days, to sit and write and read  and write more. It also helps to have a mentor, someone who sees promise  in your writing and nurtures that promise. That’s where I come in.

A mentor should help a writer find the heart of a story or essay.  That is, instead of criticizing and tearing down your work, I’ll help  you find precisely what you’re trying to say and how to coax that heart  to the forefront of the piece, and I’ll do that by showing you how to  listen to your own writing and trust what it’s trying to tell you.

Once you discover what enlightenment you’re trying to offer your  readers, I’ll help you find your own voice to make your  stories/essays/manuscript uniquely yours. Having said that, we don’t  write in a vacuum. Even though it seems like a contradiction, I’ll point  you toward writers who will serve as successful examples for what you  are trying to achieve in your own writing. The best writers are also  readers.

You’ll get some technical tools and advice, suggestions about broad  qualities such as structure and flow, and direction on more specific  elements such as sentence variety and word choice. And I’ll press you to  write your best.

With your submission, I’d like an informal cover letter that will  tell me something about you so that I can understand where your writing  is coming from. I’m eager to dig into your work, so let’s get to it!