What Does it Mean to Be “Present” on the Page?

Ask Lilly: a new writing advice column

Hello and welcome to the first installment of my new writing advice column, Ask Lilly! Thank you everyone who submitted questions (and if you want to submit for the next installment—and support other Word Cave features like What is a Novel? and Museum Pages—upgrade to a paid subscription!).

Feedback for my memoir was that people want to see more of me on the page, that I should slow down. What have you found to be some of the best ways to do this?

This question is close to my heart, because I got these two notes constantly when I was working on Negative Space. The first one, that I needed to put more of myself on the page, especially confounded me for years. People kept saying it and I kept nodding like yeah sure of course, more of me on the page, and then I’d get back to my desk and think “What the hell are you talking about, I’m spilling my guts all over these pages! What more could you possibly want??”

So I’ll address that part of the question first and then circle back to the idea of slowing down.

This took me a long time to figure out, but when people say they want more of the writer on the page in memoir and personal essay, what they usually mean is that they’re being asked to do too much of the interpreting and reflecting work—that they’re being left to guess and assume what the writer/narrator is feeling in pivotal moments, rather than being let into their interiority.

I think a lot of us have a tendency to leave this work to the reader because we’ve too thoroughly internalized the old “show don’t tell” rule. I have enough to say about the problems with that rule, or at least the ways it’s been universalized, to fill a whole newsletter, but for now I’ll just say that it has especially hampered writers of memoir and personal essay, where the point is very rarely what happened—the point in personal narrative is what the writer has made of their experience. What you think and feel, how you’ve made meaning out of what happened. And in order to convey all of that, you need to do some telling.

When I was feeling frustrated after getting the “more of you” note for the 500^th time on Negative Space, I remember thinking “I’ve described the scene, it’s obviously a sad moment, do I really need to spell out that I felt sad??” The answer, it turned out, was yes.

My natural tendency while drafting is still to omit a lot of the vulnerable ~feelings~ and focus instead on describing what happened. I still want to believe that if I describe an experience well enough, I’ll never have to say how I feel about it. This is still not true.

So I have a practical answer to this question of how to actually go about putting more of yourself on the page, because this something I have to do during revision for everything I write about my life:

Once you’ve written the story and you have your structure down and you’ve made your scenes tangible and all of that good stuff, go through the draft and highlight every moment that’s supposed to have emotional weight, and/or where your perspective shifts. Every moment that you, as the character living the story and/or the narrator telling the story feel something and/or realize something. (Hint: there should probably be a highlight somewhere in every scene. If you don’t feel or realize something in a scene, what’s it doing in the story? But find the specific spot within each scene where you want the feeling or realization to really land, and highlight that line or paragraph.)

Once you’ve identified each of these spots where you’ve maybe ended a scene abruptly without enough reflection/interiority, or maybe (another of my own tendencies) intellectualized your reflection so much that it’s all intangible and still not really grounded in you or your emotions, this is where the second part of the question comes in: Slow down. Linger in the moment where the feeling or realization lands, dilate time and let us sit in it with you. And whenever possible, ground it in the body.

By ground it in the body, I mean locate the emotion or realization of the scene in your actual physical self, and describe what it feels like there. Do you feel the emotion or realization as a tightness in your ribs? A sharp feeling in your temples? Sweaty palms, dry mouth, restless feet? Bringing the moment into the body is one of the best ways (maybe the best way) to quite literally put yourself on the page, locating the emotion in your own physicality—and it’s a great way to translate emotion for the reader in a way that allows them to feel it with you. Saying you feel sad doesn’t really mean much. Intellectualizing the concept of sadness with an extended metaphor doesn’t really address the problem of you feeling absent from the page. But bringing your physical experience of an emotion or realization onto the page—and lingering there—will address both of these notes!

The hardest part, for me at least, is pushing yourself to stay in the moment (to slow down). The reason I kept getting the same notes to put more of myself on the page and slow down over and over again was because I kept addressing them as briefly as possible. I’d add one sentence and think “There! I’ve done it! Vulnerability and presence on the page.” But in most spots, I ended up needing much more than that. It took several passes to get myself to stay in these moments of reflection, realization, and interiority for long enough—extending each important scene to include not just what happened, but where the feeling of what happened landed in my body.

Ok phew that answer got long! I’ll try to keep these next two brief…

I’ve been querying agents for five months, and I’ve gotten 18 full requests. Of those 18, ten have passed, saying glowing things about my memoir and that they’re not sure how to sell it in the “currently very challenging memoir market.” Sigh. How do I know when to pivot and start submitting to small presses?

Ok this one is going to be difficult to keep brief, but I will try. To that end, I’ll skip my usual spiel about the fact that some books are meant to be small press books, and the right small press is the most ideal home for such a book, not just a back-up plan. (Ok I’ll mostly skip the spiel…)

Agent rejections can give us a lot of good information, even when they’re super brief form rejections that don’t say much. A few examples:

If you’re getting mostly rejections based just on the query, without requests for the full manuscript, that indicates that your query letter needs work—it’s not doing its job of making agents want to read the manuscript. But that’s not the problem in this case—18 full requests is great (even without knowing how many queries you’ve sent out total), so clearly you have a strong query letter.

If the majority of agents who pass after requesting the full give the same feedback—that the pacing is too slow or the scope too wide or they can’t connect to the voice or whatever—then it’s worth going back into the manuscript to see if you can address whatever issue is being repeatedly raised. But that’s also not the issue here!

If you get a relatively even split of competing feedback in rejections (some think the pacing is too slow, others think it’s too fast. Or one person doesn’t like the voice, another the structure, another the scope. Or as is often the case with hybrid projects, some wish it was just straight personal narrative and others wish the research/criticism element was more prominent), OR you get no critical feedback/only positive comments and the passes all invoke the age-old “I’m not sure how to sell this” line (as in this case), that’s a good indication that the manuscript is strong, and it’s just a matter of getting it in front of the right agent.

Here's the thing about “the market:” it’s always tough. People have been saying that the market is especially tough for memoir “right now” consistently since at least 2010 (when I first started hearing that… probably much longer). And I guess it’s been true this whole time! It’s always hard to sell a book. And yet. New memoirs have been bought and sold consistently these last 15 years. A bunch have even been best-sellers. More are being acquired today, right now, even as the same “the sky is falling” message about the market continues to proliferate.

Agents have to be very tactful, sometimes to the point of vagueness, when sending rejections, because there are a lot of thin-skinned jerks out there who get very hostile in response to anything that looks like criticism (what those jerks are doing trying to get into this industry, I have no idea. If they ever get published, Goodreads will make their heads explode). Pointing to an external force like “the market” is a gentle way for agents to pass without saying anything critical about the project that might be taken personally (and without having to take the time to articulate exactly why they didn’t personally connect with a project… an endeavor that takes time and consideration they simply can’t give to every submission if they’re ever going to get through their inboxes).

So while I can’t say whether this specific project would be better off at a small press (which it might! Even if there is an agent out there who would take it on and submit it to the Big Five!) I can say that if your vision for it is to sign with an agent and submit to the big publishers… five months is not that long to be querying, and the agent responses so far have been about as promising as a slew of rejections can be. The market is always tough, but the right agent for you will be able to sell your book anyway.

(lol at “keeping it brief.” Ok I’m gonna try even harder with this last one.)

Do you have books you’ve written that you still want to finish? Why is finishing so hard? Is it just finding the right form?

I don’t personally have any “drawer” books, or book projects I’ve started and then set aside. But I know lots of writers who do! So far at least, by the time I’m far enough into something that I’ve started to think of it as a book, I’ve already stress tested it and restarted it a few times and am too far down the rabbit hole to stop until it’s done. But I often set essays aside, sometimes for several years. Sometimes I come back to them, and sometimes I don’t.

I wrote a short essay about planting flowers at my friend Heather’s grave in 2015, and then set it aside because I knew it was missing something but I didn’t know what. That essay sat in a folder until 2023, when I split it in half and turned it into the opening and closing scenes of a much longer essay about Heather for First Love.

And as I wrote here recently, I wrote an essay about ballet and chronic pain and then set it aside for two years before returning to it and expanding it into a book (Ballet Will Heal Me, forthcoming from Autofocus!!).

In both of these cases, the things that were missing from those essays were experiences I hadn’t lived through yet—so of course I couldn’t finish writing! I didn’t know that when I set the pieces aside, I just knew that they felt incomplete but I wasn’t sure how to finish them, that I’d reached the end of what I had to say at the moment but it didn’t feel like enough. So I filed them away and worked on other things instead. I have several essay drafts cooling on the back burner right now, as well. Who knows when or if I’ll return to them. But no, they don’t nag me in the meantime, because I’m always busy working on something new! I actually find it comforting to know that I always have a backlog of partially-written material to return to if I ever run out of new ideas.

So if you’ve hit a wall with a project and want to set it aside, maybe a future version of you will have a clearer vision for how to complete it. You can think of it as taking a break, if that feels less momentous and guilt-inducing than telling yourself you’re done with it—because who knows!

You can also take a less open-ended break if there’s a chance you might just be burnt out and tired. To the second part of your question, why is finishing so hard: Because writing a book is a huge undertaking! It takes a long time, and a lot of endurance and sustained engagement and self-motivation. It’s totally normal and fine and sometimes necessary to take a break and let your mental battery recharge. To spend time in the world with friends, or to focus on creative input (reading, going to a museum, seeing a show) before expecting more output from yourself.

Thanks for reading! That was really fun. Upgrade to a paid subscription to submit your questions next time!

PS the absolutely amazing low-residency MFA program I teach for, at Randolph College, is accepting applications for the coming semester until September 1. Randolph is one of the most special things I’ve ever been a part of—professionally, creatively, and personally—and I can’t recommend it strongly enough without sounding like a zealot. If you’re considering an MFA, I truly don’t know of a better place. And if you’re on the fence, I’m happy to answer any questions about the low-residency model in general, and/or Randolph in particular!

(And if we know each other/have worked together, I’m happy to be one of the two recommenders the application asks for. I know asking for recs stops a lot of people from applying for things… don’t let that be a barrier here!)

Check out this list of faculty mentors you could work with, and apply today.