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When William Dameron’s memoir, The Lie, was optioned for a feature film, he expected to step back. Then he and the producer started talking about what drove the people in his story. Those conversations turned into a writing partnership, and Bill found himself adapting his own memoir for the screen.
My good friend Bill returns to Freelance Writing Direct to talk about that collaboration and how he found his way into fiction. His novel The Way Life Should Be began as a memoir proposal. When his publisher passed on a pandemic memoir but liked the premise, Bill started imagining what the people he knew might do in situations they’d never faced.
In this episode, we cover:
- How Bill builds a character around what they want, what they need, and the flaw that gets in their way
- Why he outlines each chapter in two or three sentences and uses cause and effect to keep readers turning pages
- How a producer discovered The Lie after hearing Bill on Dani Shapiro’s Family Secrets
- What a viewer can see in a scene where a wife cuts her husband’s hair that neither spouse can see in the moment
- Why Bill is revising his historical novel from two points of view while his novel about family estrangement is on submission
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About Bill
William Dameron is the author of The Lie: A Memoir of Two Marriages, Catfishing & Coming Out, a New York Times Editors’ Choice, and the novel The Way Life Should Be, a Washington Post Notable Book. His essays and other writing have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, Salon, and Oprah Magazine.
Links
Listen to Bill’s episode of Family Secrets: The Last Haircut.
Get More From Estelle Erasmus
Latest Substack post: How to Write for Electric Literature, a recap of my NYU Editor-on-Call conversation with Denne Michele Norris.
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- Artists Against Antisemitism Mifgash, New York, NY: December 6, 2026. I’ll be on the panel “Beyond the Novel: Short Form Writing.” Find out more here.
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Named a Poets & Writers “Best Book for Writers” and a 2025 Reader Views Literary Awards Gold Winner in Writing & Publishing, Classics Division.
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About Estelle
Estelle Erasmus is an award-winning journalist, TEDx speaker, and author of Writing That Gets Noticed. She is the host, founder, and executive producer of Freelance Writing Direct, an adjunct professor at NYU, and the former editor-in-chief of five national magazines with a combined reach of 10 million readers.
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