The Writer Oct-12

How much goes into a memoir? Knowing how many of your life events to include in a memoir is pretty tricky. You want to make sure the important events are included, but you don’t want to bore your reader. Learn more about how to sort out what should go into your memoir from our Ask The Writer columnist, Brandi Reissenweber, at bit.ly/QgwFOn. Freelance advice from The Writer staff: Do you know what a “nut graph” is? What about the No. 1 turnoff for an editor reading your query? Where might you look for an expert to interview? You’ll learn the answers to these questions and 47 more in “50 freelance tips from The Writer” at writermag.com/50freelancetips. Get more from WriterMag.com: If you haven’t registered on our website, do it now!…

This month in Conference Insider, editorial associate Martha Lundin chats with Susan Page of the San Miguel Writers’ Conference. I’ve met Susan, and can’t praise her event or the city of San Miguel de Allende highly enough. San Miguel was a wealthy commercial town in colonial Mexico that lay dormant for years after the decline of the nearby silver mines. In the 1930s and 1940s, the city began to attract writers and artists from Mexico City, the U.S. and Canada. Today, with its beautifully restored colonial buildings; a large international community; and a wealth of fine hotels, restaurants, galleries and arts events, San Miguel—a UNESCO World Heritage Site—is definitely worth a visit. What better place to work on that novel? The conference is an outgrowth of a local literary reading…

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After 1,300 miles, Maya Stein’s journey is just beginning. “I’m still very much in this middle space between where I came from and answering the question, “How am I going to translate this?’ ” says Stein, who in June concluded a 40-day bicycling trip she called “Type Rider: Cycling the Great American Poem.” Launched on Stein’s 40th birthday, Type Rider originated from a childhood memory of a typewriter Stein’s father placed in the hallway that linked the family’s bedrooms. Each day, he would type a line of a short story to be continued by the other family members. With her teal typewriter in tow, Stein created a communal “hallway” from her home in Amherst, Mass., to Milwaukee, birthplace of the typewriter. Along the way, she set up impromptu typing stations…

Does a story need an antagonist? AN ANTAGONIST stands in opposition to the protagonist, or main character. Not all works of fiction include an antagonist, but many do. An antagonist may be an individual character or a group of characters. In Ken Kesey’s One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest, the main character, a patient named Randle McMurphy, butts heads with the antagonist, Nurse Ratched, who maintains an authoritative power over the ward. An antagonist need not be human. In Stephen King’s Cujo, a rabid St. Bernard traps a woman and her son in their car. In Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, a novel that follows a young boy and his father in a postapocalyptic world, the bleak setting may be seen as the antagonist. While your fiction doesn’t have to include…

What is the single most useful thing you’ve learned about writing, and how has it helped you as a writer? “ONE LEARNS SO many lessons along the way, and so many of them are important. Certainly, the value of patience and perseverance is one of the central lessons; talent is worthless without those things. But I think the most vital lesson I’ve learned is really to trust myself above all others. The input of editors and agents and valued readers is always worth listening to, but at the end of the day, only I know what book it is I’m trying to write, and what I hope to achieve. “Does this knowledge help with my writing? Sometimes, arguably, not. It would be great to feel that I had only to…