#amwriting With Jess & Kj

The hardest part about writing a book is … all of it. Or, arguably, whichever part you’re doing. For our guest on this episode, listener Emily Henderson, it’s something like “I know what I want to write about, but I don’t know how. Structuring memoir or non-fiction (or, for that matter, fiction) is hard, y’all. And I think it gets talked about less in many ways that other elements of craft. We have this illusion that you come up with an idea and then you write it and it’s the writing that’s hard. But taking that idea and even getting it into a writeable shape is also hard. Are you writing a how-to book? A chronological story? A series of essays? An exploration of a big idea through a smaller lens? You may not know until you try. We talk about exploring all the iterations and then—ironically, since what Emily hopes to do is explore her “Covid project” of running every street in Santa Barbara—we helped Emily build a NaNoWriMo-style “project” around finding her book’s structure and getting some words on th