Welcome to I’m a Writer But, where writers discuss their work, their lives, their other work, the stuff that takes up any free time they have, all the stuff they’re not able to get to, and the ways in which any of us get anything done. Plus: book recommendations, bad jokes, okay jokes, despair, joy, and anything else going on that week. Hosted by Lindsay Hunter.    

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John Cotter (Losing Music) discusses writing a memoir by accreting details, revision, being a gusher or not, reinventing the wheel with every project, considering the reader, how his memoir is actually a mystery, the inhumanity of the medical industry, and more!

From the episode:

John Cotter: I take a long time to write. My prose kind of accretes. Some people will just let it all gush out on the page–they’re gushers. They just let it rip. And then they go back and clean it up afterward. I’m just not that kind of writer. Some people approach a memoir and they think, okay, there’s this giant mountain that is my life and I have to carve things out of it until I have this shape, this shape that is the memoir. My approach was more like, okay, there’s a blank canvas, and I’m going to start by putting a little blue. And then I would just sort of accrete color bit by bit.

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John Cotter is the author of the novel Under the Small Lights, and the memoir Losing Music, which Oprah Daily calls, “as much a love letter to sound itself as it is a chronicle of loss; your world will sound different after reading it.” The Millions calls Losing Music, “a powerful addition to the memoir canon–hard-hitting, beautiful, profound.” And The Wall Street Journal says, “Evidence that Mr. Cotter’s ear is still keen for the melodies of language sings from every page.”