Finding the Hook Writing Workshop: Writing a Memoir That Sells with Laura Carney

Begins Tuesday, September 15, 2026

Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Tuesdays, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM ET

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Instructor Bio

Instructor Laura Carney is a writer and copy editor in New York. Her work as a copy editor has primarily been in magazines for 20 years, including Good Housekeeping, People, Guideposts, Vanity Fair, and GQ. Her best-selling book, My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free, was published by Post Hill Press in June 2023.

Laura has appeared on CBS News Sunday Morning, NPR, the BBC, Tamron Hall, the Drew Barrymore Show, and NBC Nightly News with Lester Holt, among other TV programs. She has been covered by the Washington Post, Reader's Digest, AARP, Maria Shriver's Sunday Paper, Woman's Day, and Shondaland, among other publications. My Father's List was one of the Best Books of 2023 in Real Simple magazine and given the 2025 One City, One Book Award in Greensboro, NC. My Father's List has been optioned for TV and was chosen by Melissa Gilbert for Modern Prairie's Book Club, where Laura teaches annual bucket list challenges. Laura also teaches memoir at Cape Cod Writers Center and SouthWest Writers.

Who is this class for?

This introductory online writing class is for first-time memoir writers who have some training and experience but struggle to turn a life into a story. If you're wrestling with what to leave in and what to leave out, and how to build a coherent outline that matches the shape of your tale, this workshop is for you. All you need is a story you're ready to tell and the willingness to find its hook.

What to expect:

In a world that seems to have its fill of memoirs, a strong hook and a distinctive voice are what set a book apart. Today's readers want stories that feel like a game — propulsive, surprising, alive on the page. In this creative writing workshop, you'll learn how to find both the angle that draws readers in and the voice that makes them stay.

Laura Carney built her best-selling memoir, My Father's List, around a singular question: how do you bring an absent person — in her case, her late father — vividly back to life on the page? That challenge shaped not only how she wrote the book but how she learned to structure, pace, and color a true story so it reads like the best fiction. Over ten weeks, she'll share the eleven techniques she used to tell the most important story she'd ever told, drawing on examples from classic literature and contemporary memoir alike.

Each session is an interactive discussion of the craft concept at hand, with lively feedback and writing prompts woven throughout and regular opportunities to share your work. You'll explore structure, detail, audience, flashback, humor, voice, and even the role of weather — and leave with fresh inspiration, a working outline, and prompts that move you closer to your true voice. Because fun is why a reader picks up a book, and it's why they keep reading.

What are the writing goals?

In this course, students will develop a working structure for their memoir and a more sellable, distinctive memoir voice. Through a series of in-session writing prompts — including a culminating three-part scene exercise — you'll generate new material, test different approaches to the same memory, and identify your "so-what": the personal mission statement that defines why your story matters. Feedback is verbal and interactive, delivered through live discussion in each session, with opportunities for volunteers to share and respond.

Readings

Readings may include excerpts from:

• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
• Running Home: A Memoir by Katie Arnold
• Blind Man's Bluff by James Tate Hill
• Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma by Melanie Brooks
• My Father's List: How Living My Dad's Dreams Set Me Free by Laura Carney

COURSE OUTLINE

Week 1: Outline — The hardest part of writing memoir can be outlining its structure, yet a unique structure is one of the surest ways to make a memoir sellable. The best part of an outline is that no one else ever sees it — it's yours alone, the skeleton of your book. We'll walk through various ways to build one, including colors, chakras, hidden lessons, and modes of transportation.

Week 2: Details — A life is complex: what do you leave in, and what do you leave out? Hook the reader right away. Storytelling should revolve around characterization, not exposition, and read like a movie. Details should work like a painter's palette, blending to form a scene's mood, and whatever describes the world outside should hint at what's happening inside your characters. Reading: a single passage from The Picture of Dorian Gray and a passage from My Father's List.

Week 3: Audience — Write to an audience of one: someone smart, playful, fond of you and your writing. The reader should feel you're speaking with them, like a friend. We'll look at books that do this well, including The Alchemist and The Perks of Being a Wallflower, and explore how to think about who is receiving your story.

Week 4: Flashbacks — Many great memoirs use flashbacks to show how the protagonist has changed or grown, but inserting them gracefully is an art. We'll discuss how, with examples from My Father's List and Running Home.

Week 5: Present or Past — An important decision: is your memoir mostly set in the present or the past? We'll look at examples of both, including Dave Eggers's A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius.

Week 6: Humor — Humor balances a memoir's more heartfelt moments and gives them even more impact. Humor is, at heart, describing the unexpected — as Kurt Vonnegut said, it "helps the medicine go down." We'll discuss James Tate Hill's Blind Man's Bluff.

Week 7: People — How to write about the people in our lives: what's okay to include and what isn't. Reference: Writing Hard Stories: Celebrated Memoirists Who Shaped Art From Trauma by Melanie Brooks.

Week 8: The Hero's Journey — A memoir should feel like a novel. We'll discuss the structure put forth by Joseph Campbell and why it helps a memoir feel more true.

Week 9: Voice — What should the story's voice sound like? Drawing on F. Scott Fitzgerald's idea that what you have to say and the way you say it should blend as one, we'll examine books where voice and style match the subject matter, including Wild, Slaughterhouse-Five, High Fidelity, Between the World and Me, The Joy Luck Club, and Frankenstein.

Week 10: Weather and Your So-What — Does it matter if the sun is shining? As Hemingway put it, "weather is very important." We'll look at how weather can portend and mirror the emotions of a scene, with a passage from My Father's List. Then we'll define your "so-what" — your mission statement for why this memoir matters — and close with a culminating writing prompt: describe a memory when someone made you smile; rewrite it focusing on sensory details; then rewrite it again in second person. Volunteers share their work.

COURSE TAKEAWAYS:

• A working structural outline for your memoir
• A clearer, more sellable, and more distinctive memoir voice
• Concrete techniques for handling detail, flashback, humor, and pacing
• A defined "so-what" — your personal reason your story matters
• New pages generated through in-session writing prompts
• A toolkit of craft strategies drawn from classic and contemporary memoir

PAYMENT OPTIONS:

Tuition is $695 USD. You can pay for the course in full or use Shop Pay or Affirm to pay over time with equal Monthly Payments. Both options are available at checkout.

ONLINE COURSE STRUCTURE:

• Instructor: Laura Carney
• Begins Tuesday, September 15, 2026
• Class will meet weekly via Zoom on Tuesdays, 7:00 PM – 9:00 PM ET
• Tuition is $695 USD.