[In this essay about writing and revising his memoir, author Bill Thorness generously shares his experience creating and publishing All Roads Lead to Rome: Searching for the End of My Father’s War –ED]

Inspired by a cache of letters from my father that my mother allowed us to read after her passing, I decided to write a book about my dad, specifically his Army service in a celebrated WWII commando unit. I envisioned the book as part history, part memoir and part a retelling of the war.

As I began research in 2008, I realized I was facing writing genres (primarily memoir and history) in which I had very little experience. The project was to become an exploration of craft as well as a journey of personal discovery.

For other writers who might be contemplating a similar foray into family and history, perhaps some of what I learned can be useful.

I am a writer and editor of journalism and creative nonfiction, both of which have some parallels with memoir. From time to time there’s also some retelling of history. Journalists often must dig deeply into a topic very quickly and then have the ability to succinctly distill what they’ve learned. Then, just as quickly, we forget it all as we move on to a new topic.

I worked for years in the business press, writing about insurance and health care. Then I moved into lifestyle areas of personal interest: bicycling and edible gardening. Authoring four books on those last two subjects, I gained experience with the depth of research and iterative editing passes that come with long-form writing projects.

A fifth book that was a profile of a business executive provided much practice in retelling history, as I interviewed subjects and dug into corporate records and media archives.

With all the book projects, obstacles to a completed project included finding useful source material, organizing everything logically, and keeping track of a lot of moving pieces.

But I’ve also always worked as an editor. I edited everything from news briefs and web marketing copy to magazine features, guidebooks, and histories. My editing work on books—collaborating with the writer and suggesting revisions—also had those things in common with my memoir project. Because editors are more removed from the work than the writer, I could identify gaps or missed storytelling opportunities. Always keeping the reader in mind, I could suggest ways to tighten the prose and keep up the story’s pace.

In all my long-form work, I realized that collaborating with someone led to a result that was greater than the sum of its parts. One writer and one editor, putting their minds together, can add up to three—the third element being a product that neither would have come up with on their own.

So I began my memoir project with a journalistic research approach.

The book began with that dramatic incident of cracking open the sheaf of letters from my father that my mother had saved. They contained bits of information about his military service, and they foreshadowed the marriage and family that were to come. I was entranced by hearing my father’s voice come to life in those letters. I had not heard his actual voice in decades, as he died when I was nine years old.

The Research Phase

My initial curiosity about his service took me to Italy, where I briefly visited his battlefields. When it came time to write his story, my memories and journal entries from standing on the ground in Italy would provide important details to bring those places to life. Smelling jasmine along the road as I set off into the battlefields, seeing the reaction of the military cemetery director when I mentioned my dad’s famous unit, and viewing the unrepaired craters where artillery had destroyed the stone homes of a mountain village, all stayed with me, in my mind and in my notes.

The first visit was short, so I planned a more extensive trip where I would put my boots on the same ground my father had trod from the Italian coast to Rome, its liberation the goal of his last campaign. During that trip, my digital recorder and my journal filled with notes, impressions, and questions. I wrote short location profiles as though writing travel articles. Every day, I would note details like wheat fields that reminded me of my farm upbringing or the dark exploration of caves under a villa that had been Allied headquarters during the war. I interviewed people, enlisting English-speaking hosts to interpret for me when I wanted to interview an older Italian person who had lived through that era seven decades prior.

I sought out military history at locations across the US, from a California university to a St. Louis military repository to the National Archives near Washington D.C. Learning to navigate vast databases and efficiently review and catalog records offered more learning opportunities.

I combed through microfilm of old newspapers, accessed at my local library through interlibrary loan. I sourced unpublished war accounts from oral histories and family records through genealogy resources.

Through my research, I found original accounts of many bits of history that had formed the stories in the World War II books I was reading. It was important to me to have those original records in hand rather than rely on (and risk repeating or co-opting) another writer’s research.

The Writing Phase

The process of amassing information had limits. Much could be gained from the initial material, but as I went deeper, new information and precious details surfaced more rarely.

I arrived at a point where I needed to shift from input to output.

A memoir that would span many decades seemed tailor-made for outlining. I began with a timeline, categorizing the story into my father’s immigrant parents’ path, his upbringing, his war years, and his post-war family years, including the time I knew him when I was a child. Then I realized the story needed to include a present-day element, showing why I was tackling all this history at this point in my life.

That phase would begin with my mother’s death and the unveiling of the letters, and proceed forward to my research efforts and, finally, include what I could learn from our family history. My father’s letters were mostly love letters, but they proved invaluable as inspiration.

With so many eras and so much information, I became mired in my structure.

I tried a straightforward chronological approach, but the story tension didn’t seem to build. I tried setting it in the present day with flashbacks, but with multiple earlier eras, I felt the reader would find it hard to keep anchored in the story. Early readers noted their confusion over the timeline and admitted they skimmed lengthy historical sections. In short, it was difficult to make the story flow and create an engaging narrative arc.

So I began to learn more about memoir styles, as that was not a genre within my skill set. I began to read memoirs, at the expense of my other reading interests, such as friends’ books and my favorite genre, mystery. There are so many memoirs out there, I began to be discouraged, thinking I would be adding to a very bloated field. But I also found gems and discerned stylistic patterns. An author’s physical travel to an ancestral home, for instance, anchored stories of that earlier family. Visiting a significant place also provided a logical setting for the author to dig deeper into memories and seek revelatory connections, providing a natural way to hide the exposition.

I bolstered my reading with workshops. I attended two evening workshops and an extended Saturday offering—and then a multi-week class held at Seattle’s Hugo House, which turned out to be pivotal. In all those classes, it was instructive not only to hear the instructors’ suggestions and incorporate their technique guidance, but to see other writers struggling to tell their stories. I recall one student focusing her story into an emotional moment where her frustrations came to the surface. She wowed us by extending her retelling of the scene to heighten the feelings.

My research work had proceeded over a few years, and now the study of craft was a process also extending beyond months to years. I was working on this project while keeping my writing and editing business going and completing other book contracts. It was more than a spare-time endeavor, but less than a full-time effort.

Still, the work was yielding successive drafts as I put into practice what I was learning: tighten the narrative, write to enter the hard places, focus on keeping the reader engaged.

And then the pandemic hit.

And I considered that the prime reason for doing this book was to put it out there for my family.

I had been interviewing my siblings and talking to them about the book for quite a while, and I looked forward to the day when I could send a published book to them as well as the next generation of family. But the uncertainty of the pandemic illness, for which there was no cure and only sketchy treatment, made me fear that I would lose some of my cherished family members before the book was done. So I resolved to finish a draft, self-publish it, and send it out to my siblings. At least they would get a chance to see what I’d found.

At the same time, I was nervous that they would object to the personal family history I was telling or judge me on my approach. But I realized it would be better to hear such objections when I could still consider changes before the book would be read by a wider audience.

This turned out to be a valuable step in the book’s evolution. Not only did it give me an urgent deadline so that I prioritized the work, but it also gave me a willing and informed set of “first readers.” In a way, my siblings became my writing group. As they read and responded to my self-published effort from afar, I gained valuable corrections and additions to our family stories. As an unexpected bonus, new memories and stories about my father came to light. Thankfully, no one had serious concerns about the amount of family exposure. Their valuable input fueled yet another draft.

The Revision Phase

But getting the self-published draft into print also gave me another insight: the structure still was not right. The story timeline was not evident; I was still jumping too quickly from era to era, and there was too much background bogging down the momentum.

I hired an editor.

I had heard from plenty of writer friends that publishing houses today do not offer the level of editing that used to be available. Today, to be considered for publication, a manuscript must land fully formed on the agent’s or publisher’s desk. If accepted, it would likely only receive copyediting.

I began to work with the editor who had taught the longer Hugo House workshop. Susan V. Meyers was not only a writing professor but also had written memoir and offered services as an editor and writing coach.

A structural editing pass with Susan revealed an organizational plan. But I also gained clarity on what themes or sections bogged down the story—there was too much pre-war history, too much North Dakota history, and too much family background. Condensing those sections and spreading them out to judiciously appear in the narrative would reduce long sections of exposition.

She also guided me toward character development that could make the story more than just about my father. Supporting characters would help readers relate better to my father and to me. Also, I needed to be a stronger character, and to accomplish that, I would need to delve further into the hard places of self-awareness, including my doubts, fears, shortcomings, and inadequacies.

As society emerged from Covid into careful small gatherings once again, I remained behind my desk, rewriting. In fact, I started over. The next draft began with an outline that used the organizational plan developed with my editor. It toggled between a mostly chronological telling of my dad’s upbringing and military service and a separate chronological account of my research into his life. Occasionally into those alternating chapters, I inserted flashback scenes for my significant memories.

This straightened a twisted timeline into a logical path. As I retold the stories from previous drafts, I added details to the characters involved, and at every stage, I considered how the history and that family knowledge was affecting me.

To gain a high-level overview of how the story was building, I mapped out the story arc. I charted a narrative arc for both main characters, me and my father. My story in present day and my father’s story, from youth to war to death. Where was the rising action, where did the climax occur, how long was the falling action before concluding the story? My goal was to bring each story to a climax independently, but also in concert with each other.

One more hurdle was to appear, however. Over the course of all that work, the freshness of my visit to his battlefields had gone cold, and the current draft also revealed holes in the storytelling. I began to plan for a third trip to Italy.

With the pandemic mostly behind us, my wife and I masked up and embarked upon yet more travel. I revisited our North Dakota farmland, then went back to the battlegrounds. (I know—tough duty, right? I got no sympathy from people when I told them that yes, I had to go back to Italy.) Being more familiar with the Italy locations allowed me to see them more deeply, and with that perspective, I felt that my knowledge was rounded out. I bolstered my memory with photographs, jotted fresh notes in my journal. When I returned, I was able to add more color and detail to my Italian scenes.

Finally, the Marketing Phase

With that revised draft in hand, I shared it with a few valuable early readers who helped me refine it into a submittable manuscript. I entered an excerpt into the PNWA Unpublished Works contest and was named a finalist—which figured prominently in my marketing cover letters that accompanied my book proposal and my draft. I submitted widely and made many pitches to agents and publishers.

And I used my network, letting other writers and editors know that I finally felt my manuscript was ready for publication and that I was pitching it. Getting the word out was crucial, as some contacts bore fruit, and I was getting people to read it.

In the end, I found my publisher through a personal contact who knew an editor who worked with someone who landed a new job at a press that might be a good fit. Interestingly, the previous editor of that press had turned down my earlier pitch, made long before the manuscript was in its current state.

The referral got me through that door again, and my manuscript got the green light for publication. I actually felt grateful for the long process of study, research, and revision that resulted in that pitch-worthy manuscript.

Looking back, I smile at what I thought was publishable before I had embarked on all those stages of development. The structural editing phase was crucial. Learning the particulars of the genre was very instructive. Gaining perspective from a distance helped me try new approaches. Repeatedly creating new drafts allowed me to eventually incorporate everything into a manuscript that would be attractive to a publisher.