Writing the Hard Stuff: Turning Difficult Subjects Into Meaningful Prose

A reflective and practical guide for writers wanting to dig into difficult or personal subjects, this book offers a road map to the special craft techniques that will allow authors to navigate trauma and tough topics to create compelling and accessible prose. With consideration of traumatic experiences such as domestic violence and sexual abuse, but also thinking about how best to tackle political, scientific, cultural, environmental, and other thorny, emotional, or potentially objectionable subject matter, Nicole Walker demonstrates the craft techniques that can provide distance, context, and multiple entry points for writers to shape difficult content. Drawing on her own backstory and experience teaching students from many backgrounds who often have painful stories to tell, Walker offers in this book ways both she and her students discovered how to write the hard stuff effectively.

With each chapter providing a strategy to attain a form of distance, including rest, metaphor, object writing, detachment, detour, distraction, point-of-view shift and ducking into different content through braided essay, this book enables writers to tell their story whilst connecting to the larger issues attendant to their theme and experience. Utilizing writing prompts and examples from a wide range of texts, Writing the Hard Stuff promises to broaden the reach of writers’ difficult and hard-hitting prose by connecting the interiority of the personal story with the exterior world.

Nicole Walker is the author of Processed Meats: Essays on Food, Flesh and Navigating Disaster (2021) Sustainability: A Love Story (2018)and the collaborative collection The After-Normal: Brief, Alphabetical Essays on a Changing Planet. (2019). She has previously published the nonfiction collections Where the Tiny Things Are (2017), Egg (2017), Micrograms (2016), Quench Your Thirst with Salt (2013), and a book of poems, This Noisy Egg (2010). She edited for Bloomsbury the essay collections Science of Story (2019) with Sean Prentissand Bending Genre: Essays on Creative Nonfiction (2013)with Margot Singer. She is the co-president of NonfictioNOW and is the recipient of a National Endowment for the Arts award and a noted author in Best American Essays. Her work has been most recently published in the New York Times, Longreads, and Ploughshares, among other places.She teaches at Northern Arizona University in Flagstaff, AZ and serves as the Crux Series Editor for University of Georgia Press.