Innehållsförteckning för May 2016 från The Writer

Several self-published books have been scooped up by traditional publishers and made famous. While it’s not a guaranteed step toward stardom, many literary agents and publishers keep an eye out for new talent this way. But not all self-published authors are created equal. We asked two literary agents to tell us what they look for and how they have seen the business change. “If I’m going to represent a self-published book to mainstream publishers I look for three things: current sales (a minimum of $5,000-10,000 in the first year), a great platform by the writer (I rep only nonfiction) and a dedicated ongoing marketing plan showing that the book hasn’t already peaked. It’s rare to find all three. I’ve found two books that were self-published in the past 15 years…

We may all write for ourselves, but it’s a bonus to get published. Right? Or is the point of writing to be published? Whatever their motivations, writers take to Twitter to discuss the process. Here are some MTs of their journey. Destiny R @Destinyvamp333 starts day 2 and chapter 3 #amwritng #selfpub Kate M. Colby @KateMColby Even when I don’t procrastinate, there aren’t enough hours in the day. #writerlife #indieauthor #selfpub Katie @TigersJungle Working on the formatting for the ebook version of my novel. A little trickier than I thought. #amwriting #selfpublishing f’reez @freezeegluu Choose font. Adjust spacing. Fully justify. Etc. Fooling myself that it’s ritual. More like procrastinating #amwriting #writersproblems TS Hottle @tshottle I love it when a story goes from space opera to James Bond and back. #mywana…

NAME Jenny Lawson The Bloggess YEARS BLOGGING 10 BOOKS Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, Furiously Happy WEBSITE thebloggess.com Voice is so important in writing. What are tips for developing voice? I’ve been writing ever since I was a kid. My anxiety disorder was so strong that it was the easiest way to communicate. Through blogging, I was able to find out what worked and what didn’t and I discovered that the things that I thought were the most irreverent and ridiculous were the ones that people loved. It encouraged me to be true to the crazy voice in my head that wanted to speak. You use lots of colorful language, which some may consider a turn off. What was it like to make the choice not to go the safe,…

EDITOR’S NOTE: When Harper Lee, author of To Kill a Mockingbird, died in February, we knew we wanted to honor her legacy in a powerful way in our magazine. In an exchange with Roy Peter Clark, vice president and senior scholar at the Poynter Institute in Florida, we found a gateway. Clark focuses a chapter in his newest book on Lee’s work. We print it here as our tribute to a writer whose impact on the craft and on the country is resonant and valuable. —Alicia Anstead On the evening of February 18, 2016, four writers from the Poynter Institute, a school for journalists, gathered around a table to read to each other excerpts of journalism, poetry, drama and fiction that had won a Pulitzer Prize. This year is the…

WORKSHOP: Literature and Cultural Identity through Creative Writing DATE: Tuesday, May 31 LOCATION: Leicester, England WEBSITE: www2.le.ac.uk/departments/english/creativewriting Leicester, England, has a complicated past, especially concerning immigration. The influx began with Polish servicemen banned from returning home after World War II and continued through the 1970s, when Indian immigrants and Asians from Kenya and Uganda made their way to the city in England’s East Midlands. The latter were not welcomed warmly. The city council placed ads in an attempt to discourage Ugandan refugees from relocating there, but thousands settled there anyway. The city and its outlying areas have a population of more than 300,000 made up largely of Eastern European, South Asian and Somali immigrants. In part to address that diversity, an upcoming writing event at the University of Leicester’s Centre…

Oregon naturalist Heather Durham wasn’t sure any editor would be interested in her literary nonfiction piece about bats. “It was kind of scienc-y, but also personal about the summer I spent trapping and banding bats and about my work as a park ranger,” she says. Then she read the contributors’ guidelines on the website for Tahoma Literary Review – specifically, nonfiction editor Yi Shun Lai’s suggestion that writers send “the stuff that you never thought would get published anywhere.” Durham’s piece appears in the two-year old journal run by three editors who read every submission. “The important aspect to keep in mind about magical realism,” he notes, “is that it portrays the ‘real’ world, not a fantasy or alternative world.” Tone, editorial content All three TLR editors graduated from the…

Wil Haygood has a voice you never forget. And yes, we could be talking about his deeply rich speaking voice. But as a journalist, he has a distinct voice as well. Clear. Smart. Probing. Unstoppable. When he started writing books – seven now – he bumped up the stakes narratively. His work now, he says, is done with his own “painterly brush..” His newest biography Showdown: Thurgood Marshall and the Supreme Court Nomination that Changed America was published last year. An earlier book The Butler: A Witness to History, about a longterm butler at the White House, was the inspiration for a 2013 film. Haygood has also crafted biographies of Adam Clayton Powell, Jr., Sammy Davis, Jr. and Sugar Ray Robinson. He has written for the Boston Globe and Washington…

Fiction writer Téa Obreht rose to prominence at the age of 24 – before she’d even published her first novel – when she was named one of The New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” best young writers. The following year, her debut novel The Tiger’s Wife was published to widespread critical acclaim, winning The Orange Prize (making Obreht this prize’s youngest-ever recipient) and being shortlisted for the National Book Award. It was also a New York Times best-seller. The novel is a family saga set in a fictional Baltic state that is recovering from a recent civil war. It weaves together realism and mythic stories in a prose style that is at once dreamy and precise. Obreht is working on her second novel, which is set in Wyoming in the 1880s.…

An editor at a conference suggested I learn about cumulative sentences. What are they? A cumulative sentence (also sometimes called a loose sentence) is an independent clause followed by one or more modifiers. Essentially, you use words, phrases and clauses to expand on or refine the main idea of the sentence. The effect can be natural as it parallels what often happens in speech. Here’s a cumulative sentence from “Georgia O’Keeffe,” an essay by Joan Didion: She is simply hard, a straight shooter, a woman clean of received wisdom and open to what she sees. The first part of the sentence is an independent clause. It can stand on its own: “She is simply hard.” The rest of the sentence modifies that independent clause, helping to more precisely define what…

If you’ve written a literary novel and have been unsuccessful in placing it with a commercial press, consider the path of independent literary publishing. Often when we think of literary fiction, we think of works heavy on theme and idea, multi-layered in meaning, with complex characters, innovative structure and unique style. In addition, some novels present elements of ambiguity, making readers struggle at interpretation, sometimes at the sentence level, sometimes with the work as a whole. Yet not everyone defines “literary” the same way, and certainly not every literary publisher looks for or emphasizes the same approach. Indeed, the editors of several independent literary presses had various ways of explaining what they look for in acquisitions. Their insights follow. What is a “literary” novel? Joey McGarvey, editor at Milkweed Editions,…

1 X-ray reading can detect and interpret texts that are embedded in other texts, such as the closing argument Atticus Finch made to the all-white, all-male southern jury. This is a rousing, if seemingly futile, speech about democracy and justice, delivered with its own set of rhetorical flourishes, from the power of parallelism to emphatic word order to the strategic use of the short sentence. All these tools are available to you as a writer and to the speakers who inhabit your work. 2 While there are no absolute requirements for telling good stories, time and again we see the benefits of certain strategies. One has been called a story engine – a question that only the story can answer. Some genres such as the whodunit come equipped with their…

Some rules are made to be broken, but in the world of writing contests, that’s not always the case. Here are common elements to double check before you submit work for the competition. Be thoughtful and careful. Don’t be disqualified for a clerical error. 1 Blind submissions are called such for a reason. If the contest you enter stiputlates this, make sure your name and other vital details don’t appear anywhere in the submission file. This includes: cover page, title line and header/footer. Online submission managers have their own ways of identifying you. Trust that. 2 Be sure your submission is within the specified word count. Judges may be willing to let 10 or 20 extra words slide, but more than that? Make the cuts. 3 Stick with the theme…