by Writing Workshops Staff
53 minutes ago
Laura Carney wrote her memoir, she says, because the story was too long to be an essay. It is a journalist's answer, and it points to what she has spent twenty years learning: every true story has a shape, and the work is finding it.
Her father wrote a 54-item bucket list in 1978, the year she was born. Item three was "write and have a few novels published."
She finished the list for him, and the book that came out of it, My Father's List, became a best seller, a Real Simple Best Book of 2023, and a television option.
In Finding the Hook: Writing a Memoir That Sells, Carney teaches the eleven techniques she used to build that book. You will leave with a working structural outline, a defined "so-what" that names why your story matters, and concrete moves for handling flashback, humor, detail, and even weather. You will also learn the practice she credits most: writing to an audience of one, a single reader who is smart, playful, and fond of you. It is the difference, she argues, between a memoir and a press release.
Here is our Meet the Teaching Artist Interview with Laura:
Writing Workshops: Hi, Laura. Please introduce yourself to our audience.
Laura Carney: Hi! I'm a magazine journalist turned memoirist who wrote a book because it was too long to be an essay. In all seriousness, though (but who wants that?), I uncovered and completed my late father's bucket list—which he wrote in 1978, the year I was born, before there were bucket lists—and item 3 on the 54-item list was "write and have a few novels published." Hence, my foray into memoir (and maybe why my memoir reads like a novel...). I was blessed to turn a tragedy into a healthily optimistic guide to life, but writing my story about my bond with my father wasn't all sunshine and rainbows (though it mostly was). I'm a big fan of the uplifting memoir and personal essays that inspire. I'm always on some kind of quest to learn more about life and I'm a Joseph Campbell acolyte. This means that when I'm not copyediting magazines and books for a living, I'm often physically training for or researching my next hero's adventure, which is probably part of some longer adventure I'm writing a book about. I'm extremely close with my family of origin and feel fortunate that they let me write about them.
I live with my husband of 10 years (sweetheart of 23) in Montclair, NJ, but we like to pretend we are still New Yorkers. He works as a book designer at Macmillan and podcasts about movies and designs film posters on the side. We are both vegan, and we will talk about it. I'm also a visual artist and sometimes publish illustrations.
Writing Workshops: What's the thing you wish someone had taught you earlier in your writing life, and how does this class address that?
Laura Carney: That if you want to find your own voice, you need to read a variety of authors...and then lean into reading everything your favorites ever wrote. And everything they ever read.
Good writing has more to do with what we absorb than in how often we do it. I am not a morning pages girl. I write if I have something worth talking about. Perhaps the journalist in me.
"Good writing has more to do with what we absorb than in how often we do it. I am not a morning pages girl. I write if I have something worth talking about."
Writing Workshops: If a student walks away from this class with one skill or shift in their writing they didn't have before, what is it?
Laura Carney: They will be more confident in who they are as people, not just as writers. They will value what they have to say.
Writing Workshops: What's the last sentence you read that made you stop and reread it? Type it out for us.
Laura Carney: "If a man has faith he will cooperate with equal faith every where; if he has not faith, he will continue to live like the rest of the world, whatever company he is joined to." —Henry David Thoreau
Writing Workshops: Describe a moment in a workshop, one you were teaching or one you took as a student, where something clicked for someone. What happened?
Laura Carney: When I taught my writing class at Cape Cod, a thrill for this Vonnegut enthusiast, I shared my tip about writing for an audience of one. We had a full room, and a dignified-looking white haired man in the back said this was an aha moment for him. "I've worked in TV broadcasting for many years," he said (he was a local news anchor). "I've often heard that I should speak to the camera as though I am addressing one viewer at home. This helps you connect better. But I've never considered writing that way."
I explained that reading is an individual experience—an intimate one between the reader and the author. They should feel like the story you wrote was THEIR story, written just for them. When you write in hopes of pleasing everyone, you are a political speechwriter, not a memoirist.
Writing Workshops: What's a craft move you're slightly obsessed with right now? Not a big concept, but a small, specific technique.
Laura Carney: If I am writing about a writer, I like braiding in their prose in some way. I write profiles mostly as a journalist, and I'm usually hard-pressed to find a better way to define a writer than by incorporating their own words.
Ten weeks of craft moves this specific, drawn from the best-selling memoir Laura built out of her father's bucket list.
Enroll in Finding the Hook →Writing Workshops: What's a book you press into people's hands that has nothing to do with writing craft?
Laura Carney: A Grief Observed by CS Lewis
Writing Workshops: What's the worst writing advice that sounds smart?
Laura Carney: "Make yourself write every day." As though repetition is all you need to improve your work. I find it's better to be sure you have at least an hour of solitude every day, and even better if this hour includes exercise or takes place in a sanctuary only you know about. Writers do their best work in the subconscious, so we often require situations that give us freedom to live there for a little while. Without the ability to block out the noise of life, it can become challenging to tap into that voice inside that needs to write. So don't worry if you don't produce many pages...the real goods exist in you and need you to take the time to hear them.
"Writers do their best work in the subconscious, so we often require situations that give us freedom to live there for a little while."
Writing Workshops: Finish this sentence: "Most writing classes won't tell you this, but..."
Laura Carney: Writing is an art form we are both cursed and lucky to pursue, and if you are doing it for any reason other than because you must, you're doing it for the wrong reasons. Also, it's supposed to be fun! The reader knows what the writer's intentions were—they always come through. So get clear on why you are doing this.
Writing Workshops: Who was your first literary crush?
Laura Carney: Tie between Winnie-the-Pooh, Laura Ingalls Wilder, Judy Blume and Time Cat
Writing Workshops: What's your teaching vibe, in one sentence, not a paragraph?
Laura Carney: Fun and inclusive
Writing Workshops: What would your students be surprised to learn about you?
Laura Carney: I'm double-jointed and actually love doing nothing... I'm adjusting poorly to being expected to always be doing something as a successful author.
Over ten weeks, Laura will help you find the hook that pulls a reader in and the voice that keeps them there, and you will leave with an outline, new pages, and a clear answer to the question every memoir has to survive: so what? Bring a story you are ready to tell. Laura will help you find its shape.
Class begins Tuesday, September 15, 2026, and meets weekly on Zoom. Come find your hook, your structure, and your so-what.
Save Your Seat in Finding the Hook →WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
