Tell Your True Tale is a writing workshop devised by journalist Sam Quinones and based on the acclaimed True Tales stories he’s been writing for much of his 35-year journalism career. He offers these workshops in person and online.
The goal of TYTT is to demystify writing, while helping new writers cultivate their storytelling voices.
Among the biggest challenges new writers face is figuring out what to write and how to start. Tell Your True Tale workshops get them to think of their own experiences, and the experiences of those around them, as raw material for avoiding writer’s block.
Often, this approach works best when new writers are from communities or families that have never told their stories.
Then, by insisting on telling stories in limited space, the True Tales approach forces writers to hone their pieces and their imaginations by eliminating unnecessary words, finding reader-grabbing leads and endings, and making the hard choices that are essential to strong writing, no matter the genre.
As you’ll see from the stories on this site, the goal is short nonfiction that reads like fiction.
All were written by people who had published very little, or nothing at all, before this.
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Sam Quinones, editor of Tell Your True Tale, has been a journalist for 35 years.
He worked for ten years at the Los Angeles Times. Before that, he spent a decade (1994-2004) working as a freelance writer in Mexico. From those years, he published two books of narrative nonfiction.
True Tales from Another Mexico: The Lynch Mob, the Popsicle Kings, Chalino and the Bronx was published in 2001.
In 2007, he published Antonio’s Gun and Delfino’s Dream: True Tales of Mexican Migration. His books were reviewed in major publications (The Economist, L.A. Times, The Nation) and highly acclaimed. Hundreds of university classes have used them. The San Francisco Chronicle Book Review called him “the most original American writer on Mexico and the border out there.”
In April, 2015, he published his third book of narrative nonfiction – Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemicthrough Bloomsbury Press.
Dreamland was selected one of the Best Books of the Year by Amazon.com, Slate.com, Wall Street Journal, Seattle Times, Buzzfeed, Entertainment Weekly, the Daily Beast, Boston Globe, Bloomberg Business, and others.
Most recently, he published his fourth book of narrative nonfiction — The Least of Us: True Tales of America and Hope in the Time of Fentanyl and Meth.
He also writes a blog – True Tales: A Reporter’s Blog. For more information on contracting Sam for a storytelling workshop, or hire him to speak publicly, visit his website: www.samquinones.com.