Author Elizabeth Silver Teaches Non-Fiction

At the Literary Festival on Feb. 21, author Elizabeth Silver presented non-fiction storytelling. 

In her time at Highland Park High School, Silver was part of the school newspaper, the literary journal and took all the English classes she could. She knew she wanted to pursue a career in writing but wasn’t sure what that was. 

After majoring in creative writing at the University of Pennsylvania, she traveled to Costa Rica where she taught English and wrote for the local English newspaper. Then she moved to New York to work in publishing. 

“From that experience, I decided I wanted to write fiction,” Silver said. “I wanted to write novels. I wanted to write short stories.”

Silver then decided she wanted to get her master’s in fine arts, so she moved to England to study at the University of East Anglia. 

“It was there that I really honed in on the ‘craft’ of writing,” Silver said. “You spend all this time reading and working on your piece, but you are getting to know other writers. You’re getting to know yourself as a writer and figure out what you want to say and then learn how to do that over time.”

Following her time in England, she went back to Philadelphia and taught college English. When she got nervous that her writing career wouldn’t work out, she applied to law school and studied law for three years. 

From there she got a job on the Supreme Court in Austin, Texas. She worked on death penalty cases and visited to death row. 

“That was the turning point,” Silver said. “It was the moment when I realized it was the non-writing job that gave me a story. It gave me a really interesting story to tell.”

From her experience in the Supreme Court, she wrote and got her first book published, “The Execution of Noa P. Singleton.” 

“That was a start,” Silver said. “That book was published in 7 languages, optioned for film, and I wrote the screenplay for it and started the career that I had dreamed of.”

Since then, she has written a second book that is a memoir. She now lives in Los Angeles, California with her family. 

At the Literary Festival, Silver’s workshop presentation, “Truth and Storytelling: Bringing Your Life to the Page,” covered the basics of writing personal narratives.  

Once Silver shared her background, she then explored the difference between fiction and non-fiction. She asked the class what they thought the difference was and freshman Margaret Henderspon answered. 

“Fiction is something that is not real or made up while non-fiction is about a specific thing with real facts,” Henderson said.

Silver then followed up by explaining that fiction is usually based on true emotions and experience and the author is just making up facts and a story that goes around it. 

For students who didn’t know what a memoir meant, Silver described that it is a non-fiction piece, but it isn’t necessarily about a person’s whole life. It is only a particular topic or moment in the author’s life that they choose to analyze. 

After Silver finished clarifying her base information, she gave the students a writing prompt. The topic was: “When I think about my mother, I feel ____”.

She then had the students call out adjectives that they would use to describe their mother, and she wrote them on the board. These included words such as safe, happy, worried, protected and encouraged. 

Next, Silver instructed the students to complete a six minute free write in which they were to follow the same prompt about writing about what their mom or dad means to them. She reminded them to not worry about grammar, spelling, or censorship and to just get words on the page. 

When the six minutes were finished, she asked the group what they thought about it. Most people said the time felt too short and they didn’t have enough time to get what they wanted to say on the page. For those who thought it felt long, they believed it was difficult to come up with enough things to say to fill the time. 

The students were told to share their writing with a partner. 

When everyone was done sharing, Silver concluded her presentation by commenting on a writer’s journey and the final point of their writing. 

“The minute you figure everything out and finish writing out your own story, it’s your story, no one else’s,” Silver said. “There’s a lot of power in that. Nobody can steal your voice and nobody can steal your story.”