The Writer February 2015

* Union organizer and political activist Tillie Olsen drew attention in the 1930s for addressing the fact that women were less likely to be published and receive less attention than male authors. “So many [short stories] to name here, but I vividly remember reading John Berger’s ‘Boris is Buying Horses’ for the first time about 13 years ago. It taught me that the short form can contain an entire life (and lives), that stories can be expansive and vast, and yet intimate and precise. it was the first story I read where I truly felt the world.” —Paul Yoon, Snow Hunters “‘Woman Hollering Creek’ by Sandra Cisneros. Unbelievable as it sounds, Sandra’s work was the first collection that I encountered that featured Latino characters and strong women who resembled the…

What I’ve learned about writing I’ve learned by trial and error, which is how most writers have learned. I had to overcome my academic training, which taught me to write in a way that was useless to me. Part of the struggle in learning to write is learning to ignore what isn’t useful to you and pay attention to what is. Everything you notice is important. Let me say that a different way: If you notice something, it’s because it’s important. Writing isn’t a conveyor belt bearing the reader to “the point” at the end of the piece, where the meaning will be revealed. Good writing is significant everywhere. The ability to suggest more than the words seem to allow is one of writer’s most important tools. The ability to…

For Several Short Sentences about Writing, Klinkenborg adopts a format that resembles poetry. For example: Examine the distance between sentences. Some lie close together, making small steps forward. Others seem to stand well apart from each other, Advancing the piece discontinuously. At first, it’s a little jarring. Klinkenborg doesn’t explain his technique until page 55: Make your prose look less familiar. Turn every sentence into its own paragraph. *** What happens? A sudden, graphic display of the length of your sentences. And, better yet, their relative length – how it varies, or doesn’t vary, from one to the next. Variation is the life of prose, in length and in structure. “I’ve been teaching writing for a long time, and I’ve looked through a lot of writing books,” Klinkenborg said. “They…

When browsing the collection of novels about sports, it quickly becomes clear that one sport is a favorite of writers and readers alike: baseball. The Atlantic’s Wiedeman, who claims that most good sports novels are about baseball, says, “[Baseball] is a team game, affording authors the ability to explore relationships between teammates, coaches and opponents. But it’s also a game with extreme moments of aloneness: Individual triumph and individual failure are what we remember.” Nick Taylor, author of The Setup Man, highlighted another advantage of writing about America’s Pastime: “[Baseball has] been played professionally for so long it’s got a weight of tradition behind it, and there’s a weight of tradition in baseball writing that you can tap into.” The American public generally understands baseball, so you also avoid the…

Though it may seem benign compared to some of the more nefarious forms of identity theft, website and social media hacking is particularly problematic for freelancers. Los Angeles-based writer Lauren Tharp’s website was “pharma hacked” in 2012, resulting in a loss of 87 percent of her traffic. “My website was out of commission for about a week and, in that time, was blacklisted by Google,” says Tharp. “It took quite a while to regain my audience’s trust.” Tharp said the worst part of the experience was the helplessness. “One minute you’re humming along in complete control of your writing career,” she says, “and then the next minute all of that control is taken away from you.” Robert Downs, a freelance writer in Chicago, has experienced a variety of privacy intrusions,…

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