We’re throwing a(nother) party!

If you know Charlotte Lit at all, you probably know we like to throw a party.

Every year at this time, we do something interesting, party-wise. Four years ago we made our debut with a 100-person event at The Light Factory featuring poet Linda Pastan. A year later, in February 2017, we celebrated our first birthday and the 100th of Carson McCullers in the very house where she lived while writing The Heart is a Lonely Hunter. (It’s now Copper Restaurant.) Last year, we went to play in the garden—Wing Haven Gardens, that is—where we paid tribute to trees (and gave all participants a seedling to plant), and were entertained by Bryn Chancellor, author of Sycamore, and Martin Settle, reading from his collection Maple Samaras.

This year on March 3, Charlotte Lit celebrates its third birthday at Mint Museum Randolph, with special guest Judy Goldman. Tickets are $50 and include hors d’oeuvres from La-Tea-Dah’s, dessert from Sunflour Baking Company, wine and beer and other beverages, and a signed hardcover copy of Judy’s new memoir, Together: A Memoir of a Marriage and a Medical Mishap. (Charlotte Lit Supporting Members receive one free ticket, and McCullers Society Members receive two). Register here!

Staying in the Flow: Advice for Memoir Writers and Others

Gilda Morina Syverson will lead a workshop on memoir, “Traveling Home, Again:  Memoir’s Enlightening Path” at Charlotte Lit on Thursday, February 21st, from 6 to 9 p.m. Register


Only two years. That’s what I told myself when I first began to teach memoir writing at Queens University. I would do it for two years. My plan was to spend more time on my writing. But something happened. I not only fell in love with the process of writing my stories, but I fell in love with everyone else’s stories, too.

That was over 19 years ago. I am still in awe of what people discover when writing about themselves, their families, relatives, in some cases distant ancestors. We can write compelling stories by capturing flashes of memories, obsessions, dreams—night or day, an inspiring line from a poem or article and more. Then we take the thought or line, let it lead us as we write and write and write.

What I’ve told my students over the years is to capture the memory that comes to mind after giving them a prompt or reading them a poem. Do not think about editing, grammar, punctuation marks, and so on. Just write what flows! We’ll deal with crafting later.

I learned this process over thirty years ago when Natalie Goldberg wrote in her books about keeping that hand moving. NO THINKING ALLOWED. Not out loud! Although there is something valuable to learn about “Why not out loud?”

When a person says to me that he or she wants to write and starts telling me their story, I carefully, sometimes not so carefully, stop him or her and say, “Don’t tell me. Write it down.”

I’ve seen frustration on faces. Yes, they have a story to tell. But my intention is to get these people to their office, bedroom, back porch, or wherever they feel comfortable and put down that tale in written words. I imagine them saying to themselves, “I’ll show her. I’m telling that story anyway,” and then pen it in a journal, on a piece of paper, or type it into a Word document.

Ah-ha! A start! It’s where all writers—beginner or advanced—return to again and again.

Even though memoir (and poetry) are my loves, keeping that hand moving is a starter for all genres. When I sit down to write something new, brand new, I let it spill out—a morning dream, a cousin who has revealed a family secret, relatives from Italy who appeared on my grandmother’s doorstep. I let the story lead me where it wants to go. While writing, if Uncle Joe or Aunt Jane appear on your shoulder (metaphorically, of course) and have something to say, do not swat those voices away.

When it is time for crafting, editing is a creative process all its own. Since I am drawn to the editing process as much as the initial discovery, when I go back into the story, that’s when I play with the language, add specific and descriptive details, dialogue if need be, cut, paste, develop scenes.

The structure and spine of the story will slowly evolve. I let it lead me remembering what Anne Lamott said years ago when visiting Charlotte, that she edits each chapter seven, eight, nine times. It is in this process, where I get honest with myself or bring my writing to one of my critique groups; I can count on them to be open with me.

After all these years, I am still in awe of the stories that have grown out of people’s lives, their families, the places they have come from. I hope to hear a bit of your story one day—written down, of course!


Gilda Morina Syverson is an award-winning author for the memoir, My Father’s Daughter: From Rome to Sicily, and two poetry collections, Facing the Dragon and In This Dream Everything Remains Inside. She is at work on her second memoir. Gilda has been teaching and coaching memoir writing for over 19 years and is also on the faculty for Charlotte Lit’s Authors Lab. She has recently been featured on Charlotte Readers Podcast.

Research First, Then Write?

Editor’s note: We occasionally take a look at the standard bits of advice given to writers. This week, guest blogger Andy Thomason takes on the notion of research first, then write.


When I told one of the editors at my office that I was writing a book, he offered what I thought was a strange piece of advice to give right off the bat: Mix up the reporting and writing. Don’t try to cordon off each task by, for instance, spending the first six months reporting and latter six months writing.

This goes a little against my experience. When I edit long stories, the reporter has usually done the vast majority of the reporting before they sit and write. The processes are somewhat distinct. It’s only when they’re armed with pages of notes and transcripts that the reporter enters Writing Quarantine (only to come out days later with a draft, shell-shocked, regretting they ever entered this line of work).

I didn’t ask my editor to elaborate on his advice, but I didn’t need to. After a few months of reporting, the paralysis I felt made his point for him. I had contacted a wide swath of people for interviews, talked to the fraction who were willing, followed some of their leads, and dutifully pestered the people who still weren’t answering my calls or emails.

As I’ve detailed previously in my real-time newsletter in the course of writing this book, my reporting yielded promising material. But the more information I had, the more directions this book could go. It could be about the process of admitting athletes into colleges like UNC. It could be about academic support offices. It could be about the NCAA. It could be about the athletes themselves. Each focus would require a different structure, different reporting, a different process. The number of potential paths I could carve up the mountain seemed exponential.

It was around this time that I remembered another piece of advice that some of the editors in my office often dispense. When writing an article (or anything, I guess, including a book), ask yourself, what is this about? Not what happens, or who’s in it, but what’s the concept at the heart of it? Doing this exercise well can often get you down to one word. Power. Corruption. Money.

This exercise has a focusing power. For instance, if you were writing a book about college sports that you decided was mostly about money, then you would naturally want to dig into conferences’ revenue sharing agreements and media deals. But if you were writing another book about that same topic, but this time decided it was about exploitation, you might want to focus more on the stories of the athletes themselves.

Answering this question can help you set your sights on what you really need. There are no longer a thousand routes up the mountain, but just a few.

So one day between Christmas and New Year’s I took my laptop to the Caledonia conference room and opened a blank Google doc, with the goal of free writing my way to the heart of the book. One word seemed ambitious, so I decided to aim for one page, double-spaced. And if it was good, a version of what I came up with here would likely appear in the book itself, probably in the introduction.

Real book writing. This was going to be a big step forward.

I wrote a bad sentence.

I wrote another bad sentence.

Enough with sentences. Let’s try a scene. I wrote a bad scene.

Back to sentences. Here was an OK sentence, but not really on topic.

I wrote a paragraph. It was a fine paragraph, but it didn’t answer the question.

This was not going well. I got in the elevator and headed to the sandwich place around the corner. On the way I took more stabs at the question, chattering topic sentences entering the Untitled Document of my brain. Bad. Bad. Maybe. Meh. Somewhere between the CVS and the Zapp’s chips I began to make inroads on an answer. I walked quickly back to the office, storing sentences in my head as I went. I sat down at my computer, gobbled up my sandwich, and started typing. Forty-five minutes later, I had a page-long answer. This was not great writing. But the argument made sense, and that’s what mattered.

This was the mini book, and I could use it as a roadmap for the big one. I went sentence by sentence and asked a question of each of them: What information would I need to prove each claim? Who would I need to talk to? What would I need to ask them about? I made a bulleted list, and deposited the results into the “tasks” pop-out in my Gmail.

Only by writing could I figure out what I needed to do next. My editor was right.

Rather than hail this as a breakthrough, I kicked myself instead. This is the kind of thing I should’ve been doing with one year left, not nine months. What was I even doing for those three months? As the days until my October 1 deadline tick away I’ve become more anxious about time I spend not writing and not on the phone. I’ve even started to lose a little sleep out of fear that I’m too far behind. And with no book writing experience, my only logical response is low-grade anxiety and fear.

When I mentioned this to a friend this weekend he said, “Well that’s the point of the first book, isn’t it?” I’m learning a lot. Hopefully I’ll come away with a book, too.


Andy Thomason is a Charlotte native and senior editor at “The Chronicle of Higher Education.” He’s a graduate of UNC Chapel Hill, where he was editor-in-chief of The Daily Tar Heel. Andy is writing a book about the relationship between colleges and the big-time sports programs they house, using the recent UNC academic-fraud scandal as a narrative lens. This is his first book, and he’s chronicling his reporting and writing process in a real-time newsletter. You can sign up here: tinyletter.com/arthomason 

The Power of an Author’s Note

I have a confession to make: If a novel contains an author’s note, I read it before I launch into the first chapter—even if it falls at the end of the book.

I’ve been doing this for as long as I can remember—both before I ever tried to write a book, and now that I have a bunch of published novels under my belt. It’s the perpetual writing student in me who is always looking for a glimpse into the writer’s mind and process. Sometimes, I’ve found, the author’s note can be as fascinating as the book.

Second confession: I’ve been known to recommend an author’s note to other writers and to students, the way someone else (someone less nerdy, maybe) might endorse the novel itself.

Now, because you seem to still be reading this, I’m going to offer an author’s note suggestion to you. This one relates to a class I’m offering at Charlotte Lit on Feb. 5: “Beyond Stereotypes: Writing Diverse Characters with Dimensions.” The note is in Jodi Picoult’s Small, Great Things, a novel well worth your reading time. But even if you aren’t a Picoult fan, it would be a shame if you missed her author’s note, which is highly instructive.

Small Great Things is told in shifting third limited POV, with a protagonist who is an African-American nurse accused of jeopardizing a white baby’s life. The other POVs belong to a white supremacist and the nurse’s white lawyer.

Let’s skip to the author’s note. What we learn there is that Picoult, a white woman, tried early in her career to write a novel “about racism,” as she puts it. She failed miserably.

“I started the novel, foundered, and quit,” she writes. “I couldn’t do justice to the topic. I didn’t know what it was like to grow up Black in this country, and I was having trouble creating a fictional character that rang true” (p. 459).

She then discusses moving on to write all those successful novels with characters unlike her—men, suicidal people, teenagers, rape survivors. Why couldn’t she create a person of color facing racism? Because racism is hard to discuss, she says, so white authors often don’t.

What changed that made Picoult feel like she could tackle the topic of Small, Great Things? Obviously, it wasn’t that racism suddenly got easier to write about. When she set out to write the novel, based loosely on an incident she’d read about, it was Picoult’s intention that changed.

“I wasn’t writing to tell people of color what their own lives were like,” she notes. “I was writing to…white people—who can very easily point to a neo-Nazi skinhead and say he’s a racist…but can’t recognize racism in themselves” (p. 460).

Powerful stuff. You’ll have to read the author’s note for details on how she actually went about crafting her protagonist (and a skinhead we actually feel something for)—and for more about this topic, you can take my Charlotte Lit class.

I’m going to leave you with this thought: The uncomfortable things we think we can’t possibly write about just might make powerful fiction.

And here’s one last confession, too: I read the acknowledgments right after the author’s note.


Paula Martinac is the author of four novels, including most recently, The Ada Decades. She teaches creative writing at UNC Charlotte and is a writing coach in Charlotte Lit’s Authors Lab program.


Join Paula for “Beyond Stereotypes: How to Create Diverse Characters with Dimension” on Tuesday, February 5, 6-9 pm. Members $55, non-members $65. Register here.