Eleven Urgent and Truly Helpful Bits of Advice for Nonfiction Writers

As I re-enter revision, this article resonates with me. I hope it helps you.

The Brevity Blog

Jeannine Ouellette, author of the memoir The Part That Burns, offers a generous abundance of clear advice in her recent Substack essay “11 Urgent & Possibly Helpful Things I Have Learned From Reading Thousands of Manuscripts.”

Her advice comes from “more than twenty years of editorial experience, including a decade of magazine editing, developmental editing, and book coaching” she explains, before distilling that experience quite brilliantly.

For instance, on attention to language in our nonfiction, Ouellette writes:

We must love the words for their own sake—for their shapes and sounds, their strangeness and quirks. And we must test those same words over and over again to see if they are the absolute best fit for the job. We must reject overly easy, overly familiar images and phrases and push ourselves instead for the slight adjustment that can make a world of difference. Take Larry Levis’s poem, Winter Stars…

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