Indholdsfortegnelse for March 2013 i The Writer

AS WE WERE PREPARING this issue of The Writer, our editorial team gathered stories about craft and markets and trends and publishing. All worthy topics. After all, these coordinates are at the heart of our mission to support writers in their profession and passion for the business and art of writing. So it’s all here for you: the editorial climate for short fiction, ideas for expanding characters through food references and tips for tweeting at conferences, protecting your computer files and developing your relationships with editors. And as always, our market guide. But I noticed a subtler theme emerging as I read the conversations between novelists Susanna Moore and Glen Duncan, and between nonfiction writer Tracy Kidder and his editor and collaborator Richard Todd, and also in my conversation with…

A work of “literary genius” from a young writer is a big deal. But older writers sometimes miss out on the attention mill. To address this youth-worship, the website Bloom (www.bloom-site.com) promotes literature from the other end of the spectrum, highlighting work by writers such as Harriet Doerr, Daniel Orozco and Bram Stoker who published their first major work around or after the age of 40. “By focusing too much on youth when bestowing awards and recognition, we miss out — we readers and we writers and we critics, that is,” says founding editor Sonya Chung. Kate Chopin, Toni Morrison and Isak Dinesen were late bloomers. Morrison was the youngest of the four to publish, finishing her first novel The Bluest Eye in 1970 at the age of 39. Whether…

OPEN DOOR POLICY Writer’s block isn’t the only obstacle on the road to literary success. We recently asked The Writer’s Facebook followers what other doors must open before their writing can move forward to success. Here is a selection of (edited) responses. •Danielle Ray: I have to open the door of courage. I have written so much but have not really sent out query letters. I think it is time. •Alexandra Costantini: I need to make room for the thing I love doing more than anything else. And then, I need to keep going and not let the daily doubts and frustrations get in the way. In other words, get out of my own way. Easier said than done. •Karen M. Rider: Sometimes there are doors that need to close…

Imagine watching your 1,000-page manuscript – that project you’ve poured blood, sweat and years into – swept out of your hands and scattered across the city. And that was your only copy. Most writing is done on computers, so papers fluttering across the sky may merely be the stuff of nightmares. But technology, as many of us know, does not guard against a virtual scattering that results in the same nightmare of loss. Still, every writer can take steps to achieve some level of security. The following are tips for avoiding a computer meltdown – and reducing the possibility of a writer’s nightmare becoming a reality. 1. Step away from the computer. Your file has vanished and your computer whirs like a 747. Before you panic, stop and breathe for…

One of the tech specialists on a weekly TV crime show, a self-proclaimed geek, experiences uncontrolled laughter each time he hears someone use the word “smelter.” His reaction both puzzles and bemuses his colleagues; he agrees it’s inexplicable, but also contends it’s inevitable. For writers, his response demonstrates another magical gift of language – sometimes the very sound of a word can make us smile and pique a curiosity that has nothing to do with meaning. Some words that generate a smile come quickly to mind. Who wouldn’t love an occasion to say “hoi polloi” or “hodgepodge” just for the fun of hearing their sounds? Perhaps the words evoke the nursery rhymes of childhood, when their repetition usually led to giggles. Alliteration contributes to the pleasures of the sounds, too…

SUSANNA MOORE belongs to a small class of writers whose work performs the paradoxical miracle of giving solace by offering none. For all their sensuous engagement with the Hawaiian landscape of her childhood (which led to the myopic critical judgment that there was something restrictively “lush” going on), her first three novels, My Old Sweetheart, The Whiteness of Bones and Sleeping Beauties, contain alarming – and unalarmed – confrontations with cruelty, desire, violence, betrayal and death. It took the controversial and nationally bestselling In the Cut to wake the dozing consensus to a writer whose imagination has always been informed by seared understanding and a shaming innocence, and to establish her reputation for not shirking the darkness. She cares about getting it right at the level of the sentence, delivering…

You come up with great ideas, send tailored pitches and snag some interesting assignments. Your freelance business is on solid ground, right? Maybe not. A successful writing career is about more than research-pitch-write-repeat. Keen negotiating skills and open communication with editors are essential. By using seven simple phrases, you could be earning bigger paychecks and snagging repeat assignments. 1 “Are you looking for pitches on any specific topic areas?” Pitching ideas to editors often feels like throwing darts while blindfolded. To increase her chances of scoring a bull’s eye, Kelly James-Enger, a freelance journalist in Downers Grove, Ill., asks editors about their needs. “It demonstrates that I’m interested in helping out instead of just saying, ‘I’d love to work with you again,’” she explains. After she learned that her editor…

•Todd was executive editor of The Atlantic Monthly and editor of the New England Monthly and Civilization. •In addition to working as a magazine and book editor for more than 30 years, he frequently writes on cultural topics. His work has appeared in The Atlantic Monthly, Harper’s, The New York Times, Columbia Journalism Review and Conde Nast Traveler. •He was an editor at Houghton Mifflin with his own imprint. Among others, he worked with Kidder, Ward Just and Ann Patchett. •Of Todd’s book The Thing Itself, Penelope Green wrote in The New York Times, “There is a sweet memoir embedded in this book of cultural criticism.” •He taught literature and writing at Amherst College, Smith College and the University of Massachusetts. •Todd lives with his wife in western Massachu setts.…

Last September, I completed 10 years of freelancing, and to celebrate my anniversary, I decided to give away a $50 Amazon.com gift card on my blog. Because I was trying to build my Facebook page following from scratch, I decided that to enter to win this gift card, readers needed to (a) like my page on Facebook, (b) follow me on Twitter or (c) tweet about the giveaway. The result? More than 1,000 entries, 190 tweets and 450 likes on Facebook in a month. Not a bad start. How did I do it? Here’s the lowdown on how to get “liked” fast. 1. Make it easy. The free widget called Rafflecopter is very popular in the giveaway community (indeed, there is such a thing) because this handy software automates the…

Nina Revoyr is the author of four books, most recently Wingshooters. The story takes place in Wisconsin where the main character is the child of a white father and Japanese mother. Revoyr was born in Japan, raised in Wisconsin and lives in Los Angeles. Her novel’s setting and theme seem autobiographical, but her goal was to push beyond her own story and into unknown territory. In 2011, the book was named one of the “Ten Titles to Pick Up Now” by O: The Oprah Magazine, and it has been compared to To Kill a Mockingbird. But Revoyr’s is a distinctive voice. “Writing for me is going to equal places of pain and places of joy,” she says. Wingshooters may be about the difficulty of the outsider experience, but it’s also…

In a courtyard, eight writers bend over their notebooks, pens flashing in the sudden sunlight breaking through the branches of stately Sitka spruce trees. Off in the forest, a Swainson’s thrush repeats a haunting melody. A breeze meanders through the courtyard, bringing with it the salt scent of the ocean below. This is what a writing class looks like at the Sitka Center for Art and Ecology in Otis, Ore. It’s an intoxicating blend of wise instruction and quiet creative practice in a coastal forest that many writers return to again and again. Jalene Case is executive director of Sitka; since 2008, she has worked in the weathered, many-windowed office that opens onto the courtyard and has witnessed dozens of writing workshops and courses on art, ecology and natural history.…

How do I write description so it seems as if it’s coming from the character? Isn’t description just a way to help the reader “see” something? IF YOU’RE WRITING FROM within a character’s perspective, then everything should be filtered through that character’s unique viewpoint. The human experience is complex, and as a result, a lot of factors influence any given moment. Let’s say your character is looking at a tree. No two characters are going to experience that tree in exactly the same way. Both characters may notice the prominent physical characteristics: the golden hue of the broad leaves, the jagged bark and the one low branch that is stripped bare. However, each character is also going to see the tree through a personal lens of emotion, experience and state…

Some of our favorite (unedited) comments from Twitter tweeps: Michele Filgate @readandbreathe I’m reading A SUPPOSEDLY FUN THING I’LL NEVER DO AGAIN by David Foster Wallace. This is the first DFW book I’ve read. (Shhh!) Spencer Pratt @spencerpratt Twitter break to recharge my crystals w my wife Heidi. She’s taking a break from reading V Woolf’s Waves. Luvs it more than Lighthouse! Laura Bradford @bradfordlit I was going to kick some major editing ass today but I am finding myself easily distracted. By other work, not like, cartoons & stuff. Rosanne Cash @rosannecash Dear @NewYorker. We’ve known each other a long time. We’ve exchanged emails. You even drew a pic of me. Could you spell my name correctly? Doris-Maria Heilmann @111publishing A barista spends 3min for a $7 cup of…

“Food is our common ground, a universal experience.” So said James Beard, the renowned chef, often called the father of American gastronomy. As a former food writer and cookbook author, I’ve always been impressed by how food imagery can make our senses come alive. When I started writing fiction, I discovered that this type of imagery can also help connect with a character, spicing up a passage or adding zest to a scene. Note that I am not referring solely to food-centric novels, such as Chocolat by Joanne Harris or The Various Flavours of Coffee by Anthony Capella. Nor am I suggesting that you incorporate recipes in the text, as Nora Ephron does in her novel Heartburn. Your novel might have nothing to do with food, but it can still…

Phillip Lopate basically wrote the book on the personal essay. As editor of the classic anthology The Art of the Personal Essay, the author of numerous critically acclaimed essay collections and director of Columbia University’s graduate nonfiction program, the Brooklyn-born Lopate has become a master practitioner of the genre as well as a legendary writing teacher. Despite his credentials, Lopate expressed reluctance to offer hard-and-fast rules for writing essays when we discussed his new book, To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. “My book isn’t a how-to book in the conventional sense,” he told me. “I think that almost any rule can be broken, if you can get away with it. What I’m instead trying to encourage is a mentality, an approach and a process, rather than…

WHEN I SPOKE TO THE METZENBURGS, I addressed them as Herr Felix and Frau Dorothea, but that summer they began to call me Maeve, rather than Miss Palmer. Felix preferred the company of as many people as possible, and I was occasionally asked to join them in the dining room. I wasn’t asked if guests were expected, but visitors had become rare at Löwendorf. The Metzenburgs’ isolation was difficult for Felix, accustomed as he was to brilliant conversation (or so I imagined), if not the distraction of sophisticated companions, but Dorothea did not seem to mind it at all. I seldom saw her. During the day, she drove to the village to visit the sick, taking them clothes and medicine, and to call on the old people who’d been left…

Forty years ago, Richard Todd, an editor at The Atlantic Monthly, worked with a 27-year-old writer, Tracy Kidder, on a piece about a mass murder in California. Kidder was green, and the article had to be rewritten again and again, yet neither writer nor editor gave up. Eventually the article was published. Although it didn’t live up to the grandness Kidder had hoped for, it showed potential. What Todd saw in Kidder through those many revisions was a talented writer with “dedication and perseverance,” someone willing to “keep experimenting.” Todd worked with Kidder on The Soul of a New Machine, which won the 1982 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction and National Book Award for nonfiction. That was the beginning of a long, fruitful writer-editor partnership that is rare in publishing.…

Lin-Manuel Miranda called from a hotel room in Philadelphia where he was shooting a new TV drama for NBC. He could just as easily been calling from a political office where he might be writing jingles for candidates, or from hanging out with Stephen Sondheim, with whom he re-wrote Spanish lyrics for the 2009 revival of West Side Story, or from the green room of a university where he might be delivering a presentation on hip-hop, or a stage where he might be freestyling. He wasn’t calling from the stage of the Tony Awards – but it’s worth mentioning that he could have been since In the Heights, for which he wrote the music and lyrics, was nominated for 13 Tonys and won four in 2008: Best Musical, Best Original…

Noah Milligan, editor of Arcadia, wants to see it all. “Novella, short story, poem, painting, photograph, stand-up comedy routine, album, short film, mockumentary, epic poem about the Dukes of Hazzard.” The submission guidelines on the magazine’s website exude exuberance: “We want to see it, read it, hear it and love it.” English students at the University of Central Oklahoma produce the 3-year old publication. However, don’t expect it to look like a traditional university literary journal. “We don’t say, ‘Here are three short stories and three poems’ over and over,” Milligan says. “We try to change up our aesthetics and come up with a new feature in each issue. The last one we introduced relates to essays on craft – we had wonderful surprises.” In 2012, editors launched the Epistolary…

“You ask of my companions. Hills, sir, and the sundown, and a dog as large as myself that my father bought me. They are better than human beings, because they know but do not tell,” wrote poet Emily Dickinson. The way people react to animals can be very revealing. Pets are often flawless reflections of their owners. Does your story include animals? If so, what do they reveal about your characters? What do they know but do not tell? Try assigning the pet a narrative or an action that illuminates your character. See more writing prompts at writermag.com.…

Caryl Phillips is a novelist, essayist, playwright and professor of English at Yale University. He is the author of 14 books of fiction and nonfiction, and his many honors include the James Tait Black Prize, the PEN Beyond Margins Award (now the PEN Open Book Award) and an honorary fellowship at Oxford University. Later this year, The New Press will publish Phillips’ latest book, Color Me English: Selected Essays. THE MOST IMPORTANT THING I learned about writing was not to read reviews or interviews. What others publicly think about your work (or perhaps even you) is out of your control. A good review will obviously create a buoyant feeling of happiness; a bad review can send you plummeting into a depression. Riding this roller coaster of emotions is not good…

Marianne Elliott served as a UN human rights monitor in Afghanistan and wrote the book Zen Under Fire about her experience. The native New Zealander also writes for the Huffington Post and teaches yoga. With these two sets of expertise, Elliott created the 30-day yoga practice Yoga for Writers. The downloadable program helps combat the stress that sitting for hours at a keyboard brings and facilitates the Zen state of mind that allows us to write truly inspired literature. Free for The Writer readers. marianne-elliott.com/free-yogafor-writers The younger sibling of silly putty, Brain Food is a great way to pull away from the computer every once in a while and engage your hands in something besides typing. Squish, stretch and mold as much as you want – just be careful not…

About 15 years ago, a group of women writers and I rented a house on Martha’s Vineyard for a weeklong writing retreat and the topic of favorite books came up. “The Scarlet Letter,” I offered vigorously. “Hester Prynne is my all-time favorite heroine!” (Pause). “But I always wondered whatever happened to Pearl.” My immediate reaction to that self-imposed query was “Damn!” I remembered Anne Tyler’s line to the effect that if she could only stop getting ideas, she wouldn’t have to be a writer. But the die was cast. Or to put it another way, the seed had been sown. I moped around out of sorts for days, fully aware that I could never write a historical novel about a 17th-scentury woman. Conquering that kind of Herculean task just wasn’t…

WHENEVER I SPEAK IN PUBLIC about autobiographical nonfiction, or simply give a reading of my own work, I am invariably asked in the Q & A session: How should one deal with writing about one’s family members or intimates? How does one balance the need to tell one’s story with the pain others might feel in being exposed this way? The assumption is that, since I have written candidly about family and friends in the past, I must know the answer to this difficult question. In fact I don’t have a one-size-fits-all answer, or a single set of rules. I continue to find the matter perplexing. I have to keep making up my mind on a case-by-case basis. And sometimes I get it wrong. Let’s first examine the common approaches…

Publishing industry pros suggest that the short story is not on its deathbed; it is flourishing against a backdrop of new opportunities for writers, editors, publishers and readers. Writers who pay attention to what’s happening to the art of the short story and who can appreciate the challenges faced by both scribes and editors will more easily navigate trends in the print and digital short fiction market. The art of the short story The length of short fiction may be trending toward flash-sized word counts, but the art of the short story is less about number of words and more about intense, deftly written prose, exploration of conflict and impact. “It’s certainly true that word limits have changed, but what made a story great a hundred years ago is what…

•Tracy Kidder was born in New York City. He attended Harvard University and received an M.F.A. from the University of Iowa. •Kidder wrote about his experiences serving in Vietnam in My Detachment. •His first book The Soul of a New Machine follows a team of researchers’ efforts to create a 32-bit superminicomputer. It won the Pulitzer Prize and National Book Award. •The New York Times bestseller, House, details the building of a house from three perspectives: the homeowners, the architect and the construction team. •In Among Schoolchildren, Kidder follows a fifth-grade schoolteacher in an impoverished inner-city elementary school for a full year. •Strength in What Remains chronicles the journey of a medical student who flees civil war and genocide in Burundi only to become homeless in New York City. With…

If you’re like most writers, you can’t afford the time or money to go to every writing conference and book festival on the calendar. But if you’re like me, you find out when the conferences take place and actively follow the far-flung events on Twitter. When you can’t afford to attend a conference or your schedule simply doesn’t allow travel at that time, the Twitter feed from onsite attendees becomes crucially valuable. It’s not a replacement for the real thing, but it does allow you to feel connected and share knowledge in real time. With this in mind, here are 10 tips for tweeting from live events. And keep an eye out for @TheWriterMag tweets – we’ll be at conferences throughout 2013. 1Make sure you include the event’s hashtag. This…

INFORMATION in this section is provided to The Writer by the individual markets and events; for more information, contact those entities directly. C = Children’s F = Fiction N = Nonfiction O = Other P = Poetry $ = Offers payment Agents C ADAMS LITERARY Exclusively represents children’s book authors and artists. Seeks picture books, middle grade and young adult fiction. Submit from website using submission form. Contact: info@adamsliterary.com. www.adamsliterary.com. F N THE AUGUST AGENCY Welcoming mainstream fiction, creative and narrative nonfiction, crime fiction and true crime, memoir, pop culture, media and current events, politics and social sciences, business, biography, history and academic works. Submit using online form. Contact: Cricket Pechstein: cricket@augustagency.com. www.augustagency.com. F N C CAROLYN SWAYZE LITERARY AGENCY Prefers literary fiction, juvenile and teen books, as well as…