Reading · The Bleeders · RSS Amplifier

Hey Bleeders!

Oh boy, do I have some updates for you in the coming weeks. I’m going to give you the full scoop on my book tour. I also have a standup show on Sunday at the Ice House in Pasadena—come through if you’re in LA!—and I want to share my prep process for that. On top of that, I just wrapped up my second-to-last residency in Antioch University’s MFA program, so I want to share a little bit about what I learned.

Because things have been especially hectic lately, I decided it wouldn’t be fair to my students to launch the yearlong Memoir Incubator in the midst of all this chaos, so we’ve pushed the start date to September 8th.

I’m incredibly excited to sherpa this fantastic group of writers over the mountain of writing their first books. There are still a few spots left, so if you’re interested in joining us, definitely get your application in soon. (Let me know if you have any technical issues.)

WritingWorkshops.com asked me to do a Q&A about this Incubator, and I took the assignment very seriously. The questions were excellent, and I think there are some useful nuggets in here for anyone dreaming about writing a memoir someday, so I wanted to share it with you today.

P.S. Last call for Start a Newsletter to Supercharge Your Platform, Network & Business this Sunday. If you want to launch your newsletter or uplevel your Substack game, this seminar is a great primer.

Courtney Kocak: I’m terrible at small talk, but I’m great at having super deep conversations with strangers, which makes me a terrific podcaster. I’m endlessly curious about people—why they do what they do, what they’re ashamed of, what they long for, what they care about most. I’m also a dog mom of two pit mixes—I love rescue dogs so much. And I’m addicted to long walks. Walking is a huge part of my creative process. That’s how I get the juices flowing between writing sprints.

Courtney Kocak: I knew that I wanted to write a memoir someday, but someday kept getting delayed further and further into the future because I had no idea how to get started. I think a lot of aspiring memoirists get stuck waiting for some magical knowledge they don’t yet have—assuming published authors just sit down and know the secrets of how to painlessly produce a book. But for me, the biggest breakthrough was realizing that writing a memoir is actually a zig-zagging process of accumulation, experimentation, and revision. It’s hard, but entirely possible.

Working on my debut memoir, Girl Gone Wild, taught me a ton of lessons—not just about writing and publishing, but about dedication, structure, tension, revision, emotional honesty, and what it takes to finish a big creative project. This class exists because I want to demystify that process for other writers. I want students to understand that you do not need to have everything figured out before you start. You just need tools, structure, accountability, feedback, and enough support to keep going when the going gets hard.

Courtney Kocak: I want students to walk away understanding how to start AND how to finish their memoir manuscript. Those are two completely different skills. Beginning is about generating new material and ignoring your inner critic; finishing is about learning how to elevate and shape that material into something cohesive, dynamic, and emotionally resonant.

We’ll work on moving past writer’s block and perfectionism in service of writing new pages. We’ll also spend a lot of time focused on scene craft, reflection, embodiment, structure, and themes. Revision is where a draft transforms from a series of events into something worth reading and remembering. My goal is for students to leave with a much stronger ability to fully express an experience on the page.

“Revision is where a draft transforms from a series of events into something worth reading and remembering.”

Courtney Kocak: David Grann opens The Wager with: "The only impartial witness was the sun." So good!

Courtney Kocak: A few weeks ago, I taught a memoir class over Zoom where I guided students through a series of writing prompts designed specifically to pull out sensory details and embodiment in their scenes. Instead of just saying “add more detail,” I broke the process down step-by-step: What did the room smell like? What was happening in the body? How was the dialogue physically delivered? What tiny gestures carried emotional meaning?

We did several writing sprints, and afterward students shared what they’d written. Where they landed was honestly kind of astonishing. Suddenly the scenes felt cinematic and textured. Several students were beaming after they read their work aloud because they could feel the shift themselves. That’s one of my favorite things about teaching—watching the real-time elevation of someone’s artistic skills is so thrilling and rewarding.

Courtney Kocak: I’m fully obsessed with embodiment right now. That was probably the biggest lesson I learned during the final revisions of Girl Gone Wild. The earlier drafts were focused on excavating the story itself: drawing out the plot and themes, figuring out the emotional arc, and understanding what the book was really about. But the later drafts became much more about how experience was physically expressed.

How was a line of dialogue actually delivered? What was happening in the narrator’s body? Once I started thinking this way, it completely transformed my writing. Embodiment adds an entirely new layer of meaning and emotional depth because readers don’t just understand the scene intellectually—they feel it. Now I spend a lot of time helping students learn how to access that same level of specificity and dimensionality in their own work.

Courtney Kocak: The last book that I gave multiple people as gifts was The Wager by David Grann. It’s so propulsive, immersive, and incredibly well-researched, but what really stuck with me is how distinct the authorial voice is. You can feel the intelligence and obsession behind every page. It’s one of those books that reminds you nonfiction can be incredibly rigorous while still feeling cinematic and compulsively readable.

Courtney Kocak: “Show, don’t tell” can absolutely be useful advice, but I think it can be taken too rigidly. Sometimes you just need to tell the reader what’s happening. There’s no prize for making your work unnecessarily oblique or burying what you’re trying to say in subtext. Good writing is about clarity and balance. Scene and summary serve different purposes, and learning when to use each is part of becoming a stronger writer.

“There’s no prize for making your work unnecessarily oblique or burying what you’re trying to say in subtext.”

Courtney Kocak: Most writing classes won’t tell you this, but writing a book takes a village. Mine was the only name on the cover of Girl Gone Wild, but the book wouldn’t exist without the teachers, classmates, workshop peers, editors, and friends who pushed the work further through feedback and encouragement. Writing is solitary, but finishing a book is more collaborative than most people realize.

Courtney Kocak: Cheryl Strayed was and still is my literary crush. I love her plainspoken prose. She’s so wise. Reading Tiny Beautiful Things and Wild were life-changing for me. Those books made me want to become a memoirist.

Courtney Kocak: I boil overwhelming creative problems down into clear, actionable steps so my students can create their best art.

Courtney Kocak: I’m a pretty open book, so I’m not sure there’s much that would surprise them, but I like to tell my students that I actually started out as an actress. I didn’t pivot to writing until I was 27, which I now think was a gift. Coming to writing later in life meant I had more experiences to draw from, more emotional maturity, and more perspective and wisdom. A lot of my students worry they’re starting too late, but lived experience is one of the greatest assets a memoirist can have.

If you’ve been telling yourself you are too late, or too unsure of the process, or simply waiting to feel ready, this is your sign to begin. Over twelve months, inside a small cohort and alongside a teacher who has finished the very same sort of book you are trying to write, you can turn a handful of loose essay drafts into a manuscript that knows exactly what it wants to be.

Apply for the Memoir in Essays Incubator →

XO,
Courtney

What's the best writing advice you've ever received—and the worst?

Writing a Book Takes a Village

Comments