Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience—every reader is a different person.

To write a good memoir you must become the editor of your own life, imposing on an untidy sprawl of half-remembered events a narrative shape and an organizing idea. Memoir is the art of inventing the truth.

One of underestimated tasks in nonfiction writing is to impose narrative shape on an unwieldy mass of material.

I have no interest in teaching writers how to sell. I want to teach them how to write. If the process is sound, the product will take care of itself, and sales are likely to follow.

Rewriting is the essence of writing well: it's where the game is won or lost. The idea is hard to accept. We all have emotional equity in our first draft; we can't believe that it wasn't born perfect. But the odds are close to 100 percent that it wasn't.

Keep your paragraphs short. Writing is visual - it catches the eye before it has a chance to catch the brain.

To defend what you've written is a sign that you are alive.