Innehållsförteckning för June 2018 från The Writer

We talk so much about butt-in-chair time as writers. “A writer is someone who writes,” we say, snidely. And that’s all very true, of course. Books don’t magically write themselves. That niggling story idea in the back of your brain will never come to fruition if you never pick up a pen. Yet so much of my own writing is done with nary a pen in sight. As a cook, I’m a religious believer in the equation of simple ingredients + time = magic. A chicken baptized with salt and time is a thousand times more flavorful than one pulled straight from its packaging. Cabbage and salt, when left alone to their own devices in the dark, become complex, tangy sauerkraut. Fruit macerates, cucumbers pickle, and a three-ingredient marinade turns…

OUT, DAMNED SPOT! Wash your hands clean of all those killed-off characters with Lady Macbeth’s hand soap. $3.95, theliterarygiftcompany.com A CREATIVITY-BOOSTING CUPPA The first step to overcoming writer’s block is caffeination. Or so we hear. $9.27, amazon.com THE END Not all bookshelves have happy endings. $18, genuinefred.com COOL STORY, POE I KANT EVEN believe you went so long without these punny literature bookmarks. $5, obviousstate.com LITERARY PAPER DOLLS Play with your favorite authors, not with your food. $11.64, amazon.com LIT LAUNDRY For the writer who puts the “shake” in Shakespeare. $23.99, lookhuman.com…

Irony is a key element of literature, yet defining it is certainly a challenge. Though it can take many forms in fiction, it always calls for thinking double, with a gap between expectation and result. There’s often an element of the bizarre or quirky about the ironic – with odd juxtapositions, disparities, disjunctions. We might not like some ironic reversals in real life, but fiction can certainly thrive on them. There are three basic kinds of irony: verbal, dramatic, and situational. In verbal, the gap is between what is stated and what is intended; in dramatic, between what a character believes to be true and what readers – and possibly other characters – know to be true; in situational, between what the character, or the reader, expects to happen and…

What are my own tactics for getting my creativity firing at Star Trek-style warp speed? Three things. 1 I play with my kids’ big box of Legos. Sometimes I build things related to what I’m supposed to be writing about. Sometimes I’m just having fun while some distant part of my brain troubleshoots my writing block. 2 I cartoon, sketch, or doodle – it all helps me organize my thoughts. It’s kind of my own primitive mind-mapping technique. 3 I ask myself “How would [insert name of prolific writer I admire] handle this?” And I channel them as best as I can right through my block and often a good bit further. “Becoming” Stephen King, Joyce Carol Oates, and/or Christopher Hitchens has helped me a ton.…

TWENTY YEARS AGO, FOUR WOMEN BURST onto screen in an HBO television comedy that unabashedly explored all things related to the “S” word. Today, four women (including one named Carrie) have burst onto the internet with a new comedy website about the other “S” word: satire. The Belladonna is a satirical women’s site founded and edited by writers Caitlin Kunkel, Brooke Preston, Fiona Taylor, and Carrie Wittmer. Throughout 2016, Wittmer had posted in a Facebook group about the need for a comedy and satirical site by women. After the election, her posts went from comments to calls for action: Who wanted to start a website? Kunkel and Taylor responded. “I think the election probably had a lot to do with it because we all wanted to write, like, fire satire…

WHEN NEW YORKER HUMOR EDITOR EMMA Allen was around 6 years old, her goldfish got the ich, or white spot disease. Allen recalls that her mother, then a corporate lawyer, left a multimillion dollar merger meeting to deal with a distraught little girl with a dead fish. At home, her mom placed the fish in a box and tried to explain death. “My immediate response was ‘Can we eat it?’” Allen says. Now, the only pet Allen has is CiCi, a horse she says has a “similarly rude personality” to her own and lives at her mom’s and stepdad’s Long Island home. Riding CiCi – but “not very well” – is one of the things you might find Allen doing when she’s not in her office sorting through potential humor…

“Think about whatever it is you’re trying to write and how you can find a different way into it by identifying heavy words with literal and metaphorical meaning and resonance. Do research into their etymology and see where the histories of these words will take you.” –STEVEN CHURCH “For a story to take a turn, you need a helper or an intruder. Write about two people in conflict, and how a third party – either a helper or an antagonist – arrives and changes everything.” –PRISCILLA LONG “Write a mock interview with a character. Ask them a ton of questions to gain a strong understanding of the character.” –RYAN ANDREW KINDER “Consider how all English sonnets are written to a fixed form: 14 lines, abab cdcd efef gg rhyme scheme,…

EXCERPT: GOODBYE, VITAMIN January 1 Sometimes I like a hangover because it’s something to do. This morning’s is a rodent: pesky by manageable. The allergy to Ibuprofen, I get from my mother. From her I’ve also inherited the tendency to headaches and fevers that do not respond to anything. First order of business, this morning, is two aspirins and a glass of water. In last night’s dream I got caught in the rain. Joel had been holding our umbrella, but he left me. He wandered off to follow a dog that was wearing pants. Fortunately, I was wearing a coat of salami. The rainwater beaded on it and glided off. I rifle through Bonnie’s paintings, propped up against her living-room wall. They’re collecting dust and cobwebs, which I brush off…

1_Sometimes novelists like to bypass introductions and drop us right in the middle of things. The first sentence of Virginia Woolf’s Mrs. Dalloway, for instance: “Mrs. Dalloway said she would buy the flowers herself.” I’m sorry, which flowers? Were we discussing flowers? 2_On one level, “the” doesn’t seem to signify much. 3_On a desert island, however, “I drank the water” means something very different from simply “I drank water.” 4_English distinguishes between the definite article “the,” the indefinite article “a,” and the demonstratives “this” and “that.” Some languages have no articles. Japanese is one such language. It has three demonstratives, however, corresponding to “this here,” “that over there near you,” “and that over there near neither of us.” 5_Pun: They paid me ten cents a word for the article; I…

Can you explain the difference between historical fiction and creative nonfiction? Are they interchangeable or are there definite differences between the two? It seems rather blurry to me. In a work of historical fiction, the story takes place in the past, but characters, actions, and other details are fictionalized. Creative nonfiction, on the other hand, is a broad term that encompasses many different types of writing (and, it seems worth noting, not all of it is historical). Creative nonfiction that covers the past uses the tools of dramatization but does not fictionalize. Andrea Barrett’s novella Ship Fever takes place in 1847 and tells the story of a Canadian doctor serving at Grosse Ile, a quarantine station for Irish immigrants who have fallen ill while fleeing the famine. The novella is…

IT’S probably not a surprise that comedy writer hopefuls follow humor editors on social media, hoping to glimpse what tickles their funny bones. Of course, the only evidence I have of this is my own cyberstalking. After trying to land a clip in McSweeney’s Internet Tendency for six years, I added a column in my Tweetdeck for the site’s editor, Christopher Monks. I learned that he liked baseball, lived in Massachusetts, and tweeted from waiting rooms a lot. Occasionally, he vented about asinine responses to his rejection letters. Most articles featuring humor gatekeepers like Monks and his peers focus on the do’s and don’ts of pitching and tips on how to get published, which still leaves an unanswered question: Who the hell are these people sending us all these damn…

BEFORE “FAKE NEWS” WAS A POPULAR phrase, Oregon native Brian Boone dabbled in fake facts – specifically by way of his work on Fake Facts: Really Unbelievable…Because They’re Not Real, a book in the Uncle John’s Bathroom Reader series. Boone began working at the Bathroom Readers’ Institute, the series’ publisher, in 2003, a year after graduating from the University of Oregon. He says BRI published one 500-to 600-page book a year on a variety of topics and shorter books on single subjects, like his Fake Facts trivia book. “That was a satisfying place to be [in] because I could still write with personality and humor,” Boone says. Boone had been developing his writing style since he was a kid in Portland. His dad, a sales manager for companies in the…

STEVE AND BRONSON. BRONSON AND STEVE. Two men. One Robot Butt. Born two months apart in 1988 in Painsville, Ohio, Steve DiMatteo and Bronson Arcuri wouldn’t meet until middle school, when they would begin a friendship that would take them from filming sketch comedy in the front yard to sparring with McDonald’s on Twitter decades later. Arcuri and DiMatteo grew up in blue-collar homes. DiMatteo’s dad worked his way up company ranks at a beer distributor, and Arcuri’s dad worked at a factory named Lincoln Electric. Both had stay-at-home moms. Around the eighth grade, Bronson and Arcuri formed No Dice Films with another friend. Both say their families were supportive of their creative endeavors. “As long as I was enjoying what I was doing, they were happy with it,” DiMatteo…

Let me set the stage for you: It is the early 2000s, a nice restaurant in New York City’s West Village. My date says, “No one gets my humor. It’s black humor.” We were breaking up, and I was actually kind of heartbroken (the guy was a dead ringer for Clark Kent, OK?), so I didn’t say anything. But in my head, I was like, “You don’t get to say that about yourself. That’s like saying, ‘Hey! This dress looks great on me.’ Other people say that about you. Oh, sure, you can say you think you’re a pretty funny guy, but even that has to come with a tiny bit of irony to it. Oh, you don’t know what irony is? This is so over, Clark.” Obviously I did…

Information in this section is provided to The Writer by the individual markets and events; for more information, contact those entities directly. Subscribers to The Writer have online access to information on publishers, publications, conferences, contests and agents. Go to writermag.com and click on Writing Resources. F = Fiction N = Nonfiction P = Poetry C = Children’s Y = Young adult O = Other $ = Offers payment F N P O ALASKA QUARTERLY REVIEW Publishes fiction, short plays, poetry, photo essays, and literary nonfiction in traditional and experimental styles. Submission by regular mail only with SASE. Unsolicited material read between Aug. 15 and May 15. Contact: [Genre Editor], Alaska Quarterly Review, University of Alaska Anchorage, 3211 Providence Dr. (ESH 208), Anchorage, AK 99508. uaa_aqr@uaa.alaska.edu aqreview.org F N P…

Name of publication: The Belladonna Editor(s): Caitlin Kunkel, Brooke Preston, Fiona Taylor, Carrie Wittmer Publishes: Original comedy, satire, and humor pieces Word count: 800 words or less Pay: Articles are currently unpaid, but all submitters receive constructive feedback as well as a monthly writer’s newsletter Response time: Three weeks for evergreen pieces, two days for topical pieces Acceptance rate: 15% Submission info: Please read full submission guidelines on thebelladonnacomedy.com, and all submissions should be sent to thebelladonnacomedy@gmail.com Name of publication: McSweeney’s Internet Tendency Editor(s): Chris Monks Publishes (type of content): Conceptual humor Word count: 1500 words or less Pay: None, but McSweeney’s hopes to change this in the future Response time: Usually 4-7 days, within 24 hours for timely submissions Acceptance rate: 5% Submission info: mcsweeneys.net/pages/guidelines-for-websubmissions Name of publication: Weekly…

Benjamin Kunkel is a New York-based writer, critic, and co-founder of the literary journal n+1. He is the author of the bestselling novel Indecision, the essay collection Utopia or Bust, and the play Buzz. Kunkel’s writing has also appeared in publications including the New York Times, the New York Review of Books, the London Review of Books, and The New Yorker. WHAT IS THE MOST IMPORTANT THING YOU’VE LEARNED ABOUT WRITING? AND HOW HAS THIS HELPED YOU AS A WRITER? Obviously everyone who writes wants to write well. But I’ve learned that it’s best to avoid evaluation of your own work until you’ve finished a draft. This is important for me because, like many writers, I’m liable to experiencing extremes of mood, which come from extremes of evaluation, as I…

Pinpointing the heart and soul of your story can take several steps. You might start off with an overall idea of how you want to structure the beginning, middle, and end of a chapter, an essay, or even an entire book, but when you put your pen to the paper, or your fingers to the keys, you might find that additional stories are popping up as you go along. You start reconsidering the path of your story. You may even notice that you’re suddenly incorporating several mini-stories into your overall plot. But are these new threads helping or hurting your book? How can a writer know if she should keep them, remove and turn them into a separate piece, or develop them into a bigger plotline that will run throughout…

WOW, WE WRITERS ARE A CREATIVE BUNCH, AREN’T WE? EXCEPT WHEN WE’RE NOT. Whether it’s writer’s block, existential burnout, deadline pressure, family stuff, Trumptastic distractions, or who knows what – sometimes the juice just isn’t in the orange, you know? SO WHAT THEN? WHAT’S A DEADLINE-FACING WRITER TO DO? Leave it to 10 WRITERS in a number of fields to offer time-tested tips on how you can kickstart the creative engine again and rev it into overdrive. JOSH RACHFORD, WRITER AT BOOM CHICAGO Make a big list. My close friend John McNamee, a television writer and cartoonist for The New Yorker, makes a long list of ideas when working. The key is to give yourself a number of ideas to hit, whether they’re good or bad, and then keep going…

MASSACHUSETTS, 1969: THE MONKS ADD A new member to a tribe of Irish-Catholics who seemed to have humor in their DNA. “They’re the funniest people I know,” says Monks, editor of McSweeney’s Internet Tendency. “I think I owe a lot of my sense of humor to them.” At dinners, family members often made puns that spawned five-minute riffs around the table. Other times, they played practical jokes on each other and friends. The Boston native recalls one stunt that his father pulled on a friend whom he picked up from the airport. “My uncle was stationed somewhere on the highway,” Monks says. “My dad picked him up, and my uncle just sort of took on this persona of [a] drifter.” Even when his past is painful, Monks can find the…

IT WAS A DAN QUAYLE JOKE THAT DID IT. Weekly Humorist Editor Marty Dundics recalls the editorial cartoon that he drew in fifth grade. In it, two men speculate the reason an angry mob has gathered. As a black limo drives by, one says, “Oh, Dan Quayle must be back in town.” “I was in fifth grade, and the teachers didn’t think political cartoons were appropriate for an elementary school newsletter,” says Dundics. Before our interview, he’d stumbled upon the drawing in his parents’ Maryland basement. “I’ve always been kind of a smart ass,” he says. “I would be a smart ass verbally, but I found being a smart ass in cartoons was fun. It was fun to be in print. I really got a thrill out of that.” After…

The image that heads Ravishly’s Facebook page shows a series of bare legs – light and dark, slim and plump, tattooed and prosthetic. The lavender letters below read “feelings. family. feminism.” The two-year-old San Francisco-based online magazine publishes nonfiction articles and essays on subjects ranging from friendships and parenting to mental health and body image to politics and sex. The pieces are by turns funny and heartbreaking, always with a feminist sensibility. The subhead for Ravishly reads “because life is easier when you’re not alone.” Readers come to the website for advice on parenting and relationships, for perspectives on current events and politics, and simply for camaraderie with writers who share a perspective that resonates. On the submissions guidelines page, editors write, “You’ll see us talking about gender equality, body…

First-time novelist Rachel Khong writes about family, love, and loss in her book Goodbye, Vitamin. Told using the form of diary/journal entries, Goodbye, Vitamin is the story of a young woman on the heels of a breakup, who returns home to help care for her father suffering from Alzheimer’s disease. Do not let the seriousness of the topic fool you: Khong’s writing finds humor in unexpected places and is often funny and tender at the same time. Recognized as a 2017 best book of the year by Esquire, Entertainment Weekly, NPR, and others, Goodbye, Vitamin is one of those instantly absorbing books you will probably finish in one sitting. Previously, Khong was executive editor at the acclaimed Lucky Peach magazine, and she has a strong background in nonfiction. This San…