Innehållsförteckning för January 2013 från The Writer

Begin again. Start over. Revise, revise, revise. Writers know these actions well. Indeed, second only to filling the blank white page is reworking the content on that page. Write it. Revise it. Revise some more. The beginning of a new year is the perfect time to reflect on visions and revisions. What will you write in 2013? How will you become a better writer? What can you do to fulfill your potential? Where will you look for inspiration? If you’re holding this issue of The Writer magazine in your hands or reading it digitally, you have taken – we believe – a reliable step toward answering those questions. Since the founding of this magazine in 1887, the mission has been to support writers, to provide the instruction, information and connection…

IN WRITING ANY STORY, you have to start somewhere and fill in the background details as you go. You can’t cram everything into the first lines. Consider how to entice the reader into the story and, at the same time, convey the important information. Robert Olen Butler introduces the unique circumstances of one of his short stories in its title: Jealous Husband Returns in the Form of Parrot. The first lines confirm what readers suspect: “I never can quite say as much as I know. I look at the other parrots and I wonder if it’s the same for them, if somebody is trapped in each of them, paying some kind of price for living their life in a certain way.” E. L. Doctorow begins his novel Ragtime this way:…

Joe Posnanski @JPosnanski October 28, 2012 “The storm boasted 75 mph winds …” Is “boasted” really the right verb there? If so, that’s one arrogant storm. Funny Tweets @ComedyTruth October 30, 2012 #1 rule during arguments: if you’re losing, start correcting their grammar. Open Letter Books @open_letter October 30, 2012 Win a free book, “Morons,” and more in our newsletter (but, be honest, you clicked through at “free books,” huh?) – eepurl.com/raSEv Mark O’Connell @mrkocnnll November 1, 2012 Reading DFW’s Both Flesh and No. As great as his essays are, they always bring out some inner editor type instinct in me. Nickhoward (@nickhoward) November 1, 2012 One of these years I’m going to write a bad novel to go with my bad November beard. #nanowrimo #noshavenovember Adam @Adam_McKinney7 November 5,…

Introduction I used to daydream about making it as a writer. I thought my fiction would bring me lavish book parties, resounding critical acclaim and adoring fans. In all my fantasies, I never saw myself writing and publishing deeply personal non-fiction and using that to create more publishing opportunities. But that’s exactly what has happened in the last year. Breakthrough My publishing breakthrough came on the heels of an unexpected diagnosis. On my 32nd birthday, my husband and I learned our 3-year-old son is severely autistic. Through my grief, worry, sobs and shock on that awful birthday, I knew I must write about this. So I did. I channeled my emotions into a raw, honest letter to my family, friends and – on a whim – to the online literary…

Constance Hale stood at the front of a long narrow hotel meeting room, holding an audience in her sway as she preached the gospel of subjects and predicates. A small, energetic woman with an expressive face framed by dark curls, she was at the San Francisco Writers Conference to help writers of all levels add panache to their prose with descriptive nouns and dynamic verbs. Sitting in her workshop, I was struck by how easily she engaged attendees in a lively discussion about grammar. No schoolmarmish tsk, tsker waiting to scold us for our mistakes, she turned what could have been a dry lecture into a playful word game. Since she burst onto the grammar stage in 1997 with Wired Style: Principles of English Usage in the Digital Age, Hale…

Almost all writers use techniques that don’t work. I call these flaws “little dinosaurs”: habits you learned in the past that damage your speed, accuracy and confidence. But you don’t know that. For example, a common problem has to do with first sentences. Student writers, especially journalists, are often taught that they must have a perfect first sentence (“lead”) or readers won’t read them. A star investigative writer I once coached produced one story every six months. She’d spent a month trying to achieve a perfect first sentence. She’d type it, pronounce it imperfect, cry for a while and erase it. Then she’d repeat the whole process, hour after hour, day after day, for a whole month of weeping until she had a perfect beginning and could then write the…

Many authors are eager to upload their books for sale, or as a free download, on Apple’s iBookstore (within iTunes) if for no other reason than to expand readership among the millions who use iOS devices. Some authors are surprised to discover the submission process is both time and data intensive. “I thought I could use the same file formats I used to upload to other e-bookstores,” says Shaila Abdullah, award-winning author of Saffron Dreams. “Apple doesn’t do things like everyone else. You have to prepare for the process.” Apple does provide systematic instructions for book-content providers. Still, it’s easy for the uninitiated to miss crucial steps. Being prepared helps you avert frustration and puts you on the path to earning additional income from books and growing audiences. First, get…

The publishing world is undergoing radical change. The growing popularity of print on demand – POD – publishers and the explosive growth of e-books mean that authors have more options than ever to get their books into print – or into pixels. As bestselling author Barry Eisler indicated in 2011, when he turned down a $500,000 advance from a publisher so he could self-publish his newest novels, writers no longer have to choose a traditional publisher – or work with a literary agent. That’s one reason many agents are changing how they do business. They are no longer only in the business of selling books to publishers. Now they’re providing consulting services to wouldbe authors, including editing, contract and negotiation advice, as well as guidance on developing a bigger platform…

Delta Sky “We are looking for expertly executed stories about travel, lifestyle and business.” Query via e-mail or mail with clips. Contact: Sarah Elbert, Editor-in-Chief, edit@deltaskymag.com, 220 S. 6th St. Suite 500, Minneapolis, MN 55402. deltaskymag.delta.com enRoute “enRoute commissions travel stories that focus on everything from food and drink, wellness, design and architecture to style, arts and culture, technology, social trends and sports.” Query via e-mail with clips. Contact: Ilana Weitzman, Editor-in-Chief, pitch@enroutemag.net. enroute.aircanada.com Go “We are looking for writers who can knowledgeably write about local sights, scenes and activities, as well as business (as it relates to travel).” Query via e-mail with clips. Contact: Orion Ray-Jones, Editor-in-Chief, Orion. Ray-Jones@ink-global.com. airtranmagazine.com Hemispheres “We want ‘insider’ articles by residents or writers with expert credentials and a global perspective.” Query via e-mail…

In Kevin Wilson’s The Family Fang, a best-selling novel that topped multiple best-of-the-year lists, performance artists Caleb and Camille create mischief, according to their children, who are compelled to take part in the work. Wilson’s own art showcases playfulness, humor and seeming ease even as he masterfully explores the boundaries of art and how deeply (and darkly) a parent’s influence can reach. A father himself, Wilson still savors childlike pleasures: If he hasn’t seen his wife, poet Leigh Anne Couch, all day, he prefers to “watch TV and eat candy with her” rather than write. A teacher at Tennessee’s Sewanee: The University of the South, he is also the author of an award-winning story collection Tunneling to the Center of the Earth, and his work has appeared in numerous literary…

If you keep a private journal for your thoughts and dreams and dalliances, you know the delights and dangers that lie within its pages. Of course, for some, a journal is merely a record of events. End of story. But not really. Whether pouring out your soul or simply keeping track, a journal is among the most important writing tools and historical documents we create. First, history. Journals of any form tell a story – even ones that merely list events or activities. Language is always located in a unique era – with popular phrases and linguistic constructions. Say you’re a writer whose novel is set in colonial America. If you study the language of journals from that period – in the late 1700s, the midwife Martha Ballard started a…

If great writers of the past lived in our world of digital distractions, how would they cope? Imagine it: Jane Austen’s Pinterest boards, Mark Twain’s Facebook rants, Ernest Hemingway’s Tweets. Would these authors have written such groundbreaking work or indulged in Web procrastination? Writers in the age of technology face a constant barrage of Internet distractions. The average American spends 32 hours a month on the Web, a horrifying statistic for time-pressed writers. But rather than waste creative energy fighting these e-demons, you can transform online procrastination into idea generation. Here is how to make digital vices work for you. 1. Find new friends Nearly 25 percent of online time is dedicated to social media, so get inspiration from Internet breaks by following people who motivate you. Many authors have…

Get the best of both worlds: a pen that is also a digital recorder. The Echo Smartpen records everything you hear. Then notes and audio can be transferred by USB cord to your computer and can be sent out as PDFs or audio files. The pen is ergonomically designed, which is great because the 2 GB model holds 200 hours of audio. That’s a lot of pen holding. $169.95. livescribe.com Writers achieve coolness in many ways. Chief among them is the baggage they carry. Literally. And by literally we mean messenger bags designed by an actual messenger. (A messenger should not to be confused with your muse – although they both are in the delivery business). Design your own custom bag from a variety of styles and fabrics. Take comfort…

I’ve taken at least a dozen writing workshops over the last four years. I’ve sat through hundreds of hours of workshops in various genres including playwriting, fiction and poetry, and I’m sorry to say they haven’t done much for me. I’m sorry to say it’s taken me this long to consider seriously constructive criticism of peers and professors. I have wasted a lot of time, and a lot of time and effort has been wasted on me. I hate to admit this, but here goes: For a long time, I thought I was kind of a genius. As kind of a genius, I didn’t think I needed help. I made a lot of excuses as to why suggestions were invalid or wrong. “Of course he doesn’t like my work,” I…

Passive Restraint: Understanding the voice of verbs No to this nonstarter: “Avoid passive constructions” A host of writing experts rail against what they fuzzily call “passive constructions.” Sometimes they mean we should avoid static verbs. Sometimes they mean we should banish the passive voice. And sometimes they don’t even know what they mean. I once visited a journalism class in which the instructor advised students to steer clear of is going, was going, and had been going as a way of cutting static verbs out of sentences. That’s a valuable tense he’s throwing out. We need progressive forms! Why not tell students to throw out every neon highlighter and stick only to a black ballpoint? What do you think Gabriel García Márquez would have said to an editor who told…

The following simple writing process is designed to help you get started. You can try it for a while and then modify it to make it your own. IDEA Focus ideas by asking: • What is the piece probably about? • Who would read it? • What does the reader already know? • What are the major concerns? Gather some information before you pitch the idea to an editor. Don’t end your conversation with your editor until you know what to do. GATHER List topics you have to research and then develop resources. Pursue the easiest first. Halfway through gathering, inventory what you’ve got and what you still need. Answer this question in one draft paragraph: “What’s this about?” Stop gathering when you have the information you need. ORGANIZE Ask…

iBooks Author: Free app from Mac App Store; creates Multi-Touch books read with iBooks on iPad. FairPlay DRM: Apple’s proprietary digital rights management system; prevents unauthorized duplication of your book. iTunes Connect: Apple website that provides resources needed for content (music, apps, book) creation, management and delivery to Apple online stores. Manage your contracts, tax and banking information; obtain sales and finance reports, request promotional codes. iTunes Producer: Apple software included with iTunes Connect account; creates the digital package that contains finished e-book, including data Apple requires to submit it to iBookstore. Paid Books Account: Allows you to sell books and offer free books in iBookstore. You can specify whether books are offered with or without Apple’s FairPlay DRM protection. Free Books Account: This iTunes Connect account allows you to…

How did Left Coast Crime get started? The first Left Coast Crime conference was held in San Francisco in 1991, started by, among others, LCC 2013 Fan Guests of Honor Tom and Enid Schantz. At that time, there were a few large mystery and science-fiction conventions, mostly on the eastern side of the Mississippi. Left Coast Crime, as its name implies, has been one of the few to host a conference in the western part of the U.S. It’s also traditionally held in a place where spring comes early, but there have been exceptions, such as Colorado and, a few years ago, Alaska. How many attendees do you expect? From where do you draw your attendees? Attendance ranges from 350 to 500 people. Typically, a significant number of the attendees…

Margarita Donnelly heard the news about a woman winning the 1996 Nobel Prize in literature on NPR, but in her car, she didn’t catch the poet’s name. It turned out the Nobel Laureate, Polish poet Wislawa Szymborska, had published the first English translations of her work in Donnelly’s Oregon-based literary journal 16 years before. A group of four women, Donnelly among them, founded CALYX in 1976. “When we started publishing, it was about providing an avenue for women’s voices that weren’t getting public recognition at a great rate.” She and other editors published Barbara Kingsolver’s early work. “CALYX holds a very special place in my heart,” Kingsolver notes on the journal’s website. “Some of my very first published words – two poems – were published in CALYX years ago.” Editors…

I THINK THE AUTHOR needs to have a good time. I could get really pedantic and give you a more scholarly answer, in terms of plotting and things like that. But I think that a much more intrinsic answer would be that the storyteller needs to enjoy the telling of the story. Whether you’re writing fiction or nonfiction, you have to find that story compelling to yourself or your reader will not. When I’m writing a book, if I’m getting a little bit sleepy and a little bit bored, then it’s a sure thing that my reader’s going to, too. So I use that as the signal to bump up the pace, to throw in another hazard for my characters, make the dialogue snappier, make the action verbs more active…

We asked our Facebook followers to identify the moment when they knew they were a writer. When do you become a writer, we wondered? At what point does it morph from merely a feeling into a fact? We received a litany of responses, but most people said it was confirmed early in life, often by a parent or attentive teacher. “When I came out of the womb with a pen in my hand?” one reader quipped. Some said the realization came much later in life, and still others said the knowledge has simply always been there, like it was never a question in the first place. • My best friend, who died of breast cancer in 2007, told me that I was a writer before she died, and she made…

Ever tried looking for an academic journal article from five years ago or an obscure fact from two centuries ago? Whether you write magazine articles or historical fiction, at some point, you’ll need to dig deeper than a standard web search. The “Deep Web” or “Invisible Web” is online information that isn’t discoverable with search engines. An entire world of information exists that won’t come up when you type a search into your browser search bar, no matter which search engine you prefer. There are two main sources of hidden information that make up the Deep Web, according to the University of California Berkeley tutorial Finding Information on the Internet. First are databases that require a login to access. These are usually paid subscription databases. Some examples are the LexisNexis…

For those who love books about writing, the equation is both simple and problematic: Too many writing books are published each year (several thousands, actually), and there’s too little time to read them all. The New Year brings another treasure trove of writing books. The following 13 titles will be published in the first three months of the year (subject, of course, to change by the publishers). There’s something here for everyone: nonfiction writers producing essays and memoirs, as well as fiction writers crafting short stories and novels. There are books of fascinating interviews filled with writerly wisdom from best-selling authors about why and how they do what they do. Lovers of grammar and style will find book recommendations, too, as will those seeking to learn the nuts-and-bolts of the…

Writers may want to tackle Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch in chunks, tapping into those parts that answer questions about verbs. Others might want to read it straight through. Either way, Hale hopes readers will latch on to four key elements of good writing. Understand subjects and predicates. “We need a subject (person, place, thing or idea we want to express something about) and a predicate (expressing the action, condition or effect of the subject),” she writes. It’s amazing how often experienced writers forget this simple principle and end up with something silly like this headline: McDonald’s Fries the Holy Grail for Potato Farmers. Be precise. Ask yourself, “Have I chosen the very best verb?” “Knowing the difference between a paltry verb and a potent one, a static sentence and a…

After a decade as a freelance writer and journalist, editor, instructor and now a blogger, I’ve heard writers ask one question more than any other: How can I get work quickly? The answer I give is simple: Spend an entire week, anywhere from 50 to 90 hours, doing nothing but marketing. You will get work. And you will get it quickly. Consider this: Last March, I returned from maternity leave after having my first child and despite having a 2-month old demanding my constant attention, I was able to drum up enough work to keep me busy for a month. Some of it paid quickly, which meant I started getting money right away. The year before, I took a month off to begin a novel and, when I returned, editors,…

When one of the most respected, intellectual, general interest magazines in the English language sought a new top-of-the-masthead editor seven years ago, the name James Bennet quite likely did not immediately come to mind. That is no knock on Bennet, at the time a talented New York Times reporter. But his magazine experience was limited, even as his continued rise at the newspaper was obvious. Today, David Bradley, publisher of The Atlantic, seems like a visionary for reaching out to Bennet, whose shaping of indepth reporting and compelling narrative – first person and third person – give the magazine gravitas. Subject matter is vital, of course, and the story mix since Bennet became editor is impressive. “I learned a long time ago that a subject is not necessarily a story,”…

Several years ago, travel writer and award-winning blogger Bret Love found himself on the verge of declaring bankruptcy. After a divorce and an accident in which an uninsured driver wrecked his car, he reached out to everyone he knew for help. “My best friend introduced me to his editor at Air Tran’s Go,” Love recounts of his first foray into the world of in-flight magazines. “They were looking for someone to do celebrity profiles, which are what I’d written. The first piece I did for them was a cover story on Eva Longoria. It really launched my career.” Since then, Love has also written for American Airlines’ American Way, American Eagle’s Latitudes, United Airlines’ Hemispheres, Cayman Airways’ Skies, Thai Airways’ Vision and Volaris Airlines Magazine. “There’s a lot of hustle…

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 WriterMag.com Subscribers to The Writer have online access to information on 3,000+ publishers, publications, conferences, contests and agents. Go to WriterMag.com and click on Market Directory. AGENTS F N C THE AARON M. PRIEST LITERARY AGENCY Seeks mainstream and literary fiction (adult and YA), thrillers and narrative nonfiction. Submit by email only. Contact: The Aaron M. Priest Literary Agency, 708 3rd Ave., Fl. 23, New York, NY 10017. 212-818-0344. See website for specific agent email addresses. www.aaronpriest.com. F N ANNE EDELSTEIN LITERARY AGENCY Specializes in narrative nonfiction (including memoir,…