Innehållsförteckning för October 2016 från The Writer

We went to press on this issue at the end of July, seemingly one of the most violent months in recent memory. We woke each morning to a new tragedy. Some of us turned toward each other, some turned against, and still others turned away from everything, bunkering down, riding out the turmoil as the world smoldered. It was in these humid, breathless days of July that I turned up, bedraggled and weary, at ThrillerFest 2016 (profiled in our pages on page 38), a conference for thriller writers and not, I am always quick to clarify, a convention for Michael Jackson enthusiasts. There I met debut authors, struggling authors, successful authors, and best-selling mega-authors. I listened to each one talk about the industry, the struggle to get published, the brave…

The top 10 do’s and don’ts of submitting to literary agents DONTsubmit until your book is the best it can be. DOresearchtheagentthoroughly. Read their publisher’s marketplace or agency website bio. Know what they rep, what they’re looking for, and their specific submission guidelines. DOwriteaprofessionaland clear blurb of no more than one to two paragraphs maximum that sticks to the main character and main conflict. Don’t get bogged down in secondary characters, backstory, setting, or theme, and don’t give away the ending (that’s for the synopsis). DOwriteaclearand concise query letter with not a comma out of place. Address the letter to the agent and tell them why you are submitting to him or her specifically. State the title, word count, and genre of your work. DOexudeconfidencebut don’t overdo it. DONTtell the…

As a young aspiring writer, I was fortunate enough to go to college in New York, the heart of American publishing. I hoped learning how the publishing industry worked would give me an edge, some kind of insider’s insight into a world I knew nothing about. With this in mind, I began an internship at a small boutique literary agency in the city. Over the course of eight months, I read hundreds of submissions and dozens of manuscripts. I learned about agents, editors, and the journey a book must take to get out of the slush pile and onto a bookshelf. Agencies often use interns to screen the unsolicited submissions. For a manuscript to make it to the agents, it first has to grab the attention of an intern. I…

On her last day in New Caledonia, Jennifer Ackerman drove to the top of Mount Koghi in search of the elusive New Caledonian crow. At the top of the mountain, met by a brilliantly green rainforest and the towering Koghi Kauri trees, she plunged into the forest in search of the birds, only to encounter failing light and massive spider webs. She never found the crows but heard their raspy calls in the darkness. Yet Ackerman, author of The Genius of Birds, isn’t an ornithologist; rather, she’s a science writer driven by a passion to learn. Everyone knows that scientists have to be curious. It’s often innate in the scientist. But it’s also instinctive in the science writer. Science writers feel a need to learn about the world and what…

If you’ve ever banged face-first into a serious bout of writer’s block, you’re not alone! Every writer from Aristotle to Shakespeare to Mark Twain has encountered the terror of the blank page from time to time. A few – like Twain – have offered some advice. “The secret of getting ahead is getting started. The secret of getting started is breaking your complex overwhelming tasks into small manageable tasks, and then starting on the first one.”— Mark Twain Today’s top writers, too, know the agony of a blank screen, but like Twain and others, they’ve developed strategies to keep the words coming. Here are some of their best tips on getting over being stuck. BRAD MELTZER No. 1 best-sellingauthorof10thrillers, as well as nonfiction, advice, and children’s books Eisner award-winning author…

Published in June of this year, A House for Happy Mothers is Amulya Malladi’s sixth novel. Born and raised in India, this international writer currently lives in Copenhagen, where she balances family, writing, and her work as a marketing director for a medical device company. According to Malladi, “ A House for Happy Mothers is about paid surrogacy and the story of two women, the biological mother Priya, a well-off woman from Silicon Valley, and the surrogate, Asha, who is from a poor background.” As with all of her novels, the narrative comes to life with a relationship- and character-driven story in which culture(s) plays a prominent and important role. Writing in Copenhagen I feel isolated from a literary perspective in Copenhagen as I don’t know many other English writers…

We writers are clever. We take the 26 letters of the alphabet and spin them into fascinating tales that run the gamut from science fiction to romance and everything in between. If we do it well, we grab readers with such force they go without sleep, are late to work, and miss subway stops to keep turning those pages. When placing history into your fiction, that cleverness is taken to another level because you want to do it seamlessly. Research can send me down the rabbit hole, and, like Alice, I might not come up for air for hours as I wander and ponder and fill my basket with the historical jewels I want to use. However, too much bling can blind a reader or make their eyes glaze over.…

Writers always gun for the hows and whys behind the latest bestselling smashes. We can’t help it. We ask: How did you do it? What are you doing that I’m not? How did you get to be so talented? And: What makes you so special? The harsh reality is that the vast majority of us will not pen the next Eat, Pray, Love or Gone Girl. Frankly, if we all knew exactly what it takes to go viral or pen a smash bestseller, we’d all have done so by now. So how refreshing it was to call up Caroline Leavitt on a sunny morning in June and hear her talk candidly about all the moments in her career, not just the best-selling ones. Granted, Leavitt is no stranger to success;…

“I am not afraid to ask a dumb question. If I don’t know something or they are talking about something over my head, I am not afraid to say, ‘Wait a second! What are you talking about? How does it work?’” —DAN FERBER “I try not to overdo it [when using analogies]. I’m selective about it and very strategic about where visual cues might help to explain a difficult concept.” —MELISSA PANDIKA “When I interview a scientist, I tend to over-prepare. I bone up. I read their papers. Then I go to the interview and, a lot of times, I realize the story that they have to tell is not the story that I was prepared to tell. So be open to whatever new information comes your way and follow…

Tweaking pitches to editors grows exhausting, so someone offering work feels like a gift. That is the appeal of online ads calling for writers. So is their availability: A freelancer can fill an entire day’s work just applying for gigs on sites of varying reputes. Think of online ads as walking through a city at 2 a.m. Some neighborhoods radiate youthful fun; others have a winding-down, sip a scotchand- soda at the bar vibe. Too many teem with sketchy characters that have you patting your pockets for your phone and wallet. Consider this column a guide for navigating this sprawling pseudo metropolis. My qualifications? For nearly 10 years, I have consulted online ads. I’ve landed fun, financially rewarding jobs – and one that concluded with me going David Mamet on…

Frustrated by genre boundaries, writers Mel Anastasiou, Jennifer Landels and Susan Pieters were drinking Innis & Gunn on a sundeck near Vancouver, B.C., when they decided to launch Pulp Literature. The three-year old quarterly magazine features science fiction, mystery, fantasy, history, suspense, and thriller defined by powerful themes and complex character development. “We realized we knew a lot of writers who had pieces sitting in shoeboxes under their bed that didn’t fit what they’d already published. We also knew new writers looking to break out,” Landels says. “We put together a magazine that introduces new writers to the world and lets established writers break out of their boxes.” Tone, editorial content Editors explain on the magazine’s website that some writers assume they’re looking only for stories informed by guns and…

You can't find this in print. EXCERPT: A HOUSE FOR HAPPY MOTHERS BY AMULYA MALLADI Chapter One Rock-a-bye baby in the tree top, when the wind blows, the cradle will rock . . . The nursery rhyme played itself in her head over and over again as she tried to fall asleep. When the bough breaks, the cradle will fall. And down will come baby, cradle and all. This one chance, she thought desperately. God, give me this one last chance. “Please, please, please,” she whispered under her breath. And even though she was lying down in bed, she knew she was really on her knees. By two in the morning, Priya finally gave up trying to sleep. She looked in disbelief at her husband next to her. How could…

Great sentences come in many forms: short and long, feather-light or weighty, encrusted with punctuation or flowing without friction from capital letter to full stop. I am on the lookout for great sentences, and I need your help finding them. If you send them to me via The Writer magazine, I promise I will read them – and more. Writers don’t just read great sentences, we X-ray read them. We not only read for meaning, but we look beneath the surface of a text to discover how the meaning is made. In an act of reverse-engineering, we figure out which of the writer’s moves made something clear, suspenseful, poignant, or ironic. This is the stuff of my latest book, The Art of X-ray Reading: How the Secrets of 25 Great…

STEP 1: THE MORAL QUESTION Leavitt starts each book with a probing moral question. “It’s good to know the question that the book is asking so I know how the book is going to be answering it,” she says. “In Is This Tomorrow, it was ‘How do you find community when you’re an outsider?’” The question in Leavitt’s latest novel, Cruel Beautiful World, was “What do you do when there’s something you want to fix, and you can’t?” “Those are the kind of moral questions I think give the book an extra layer. They make the book more meaningful,” Leavitt says. STEP 2: MAPPING OUT CHARACTERS Before Leavitt starts any novel, she asks herself the following questions about each of her characters. What does she want at the beginning of…

Along with memoirists like Frank McCourt ( Angela’s Ashes) and Ishmael Beah ( A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier), author Elena Gorokhova recounts the immigrant experience — in her case, leaving the Soviet Union in 1980. In her 2010 book, A Mountain of Crumbs, Gorokhova tells of coming to the U.S. at age 24 with only one suitcase. Reviewers have noted that her memoir not only portrays life under communism during the Cold War but is also a coming of age story and an exploration of a difficult mother-daughter relationship. After reading her debut book, which chronicled her childhood and early 20s in Soviet Russia, a number of readers asked to know more, and Gorokhova obliged with a second memoir, Russian Tattoo, a continuation of her life…

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 Writing Resources. Information in this section is provided to The Writer by the individual markets and events; for more information, contact those entities directly. ANIMALS/PETS ANIMAL WELLNESS Natural pet magazine aimed at helping pet owners make wise healthcare choices for animal companions. Accepting articles of 500-1,500 words. Particularly interested in submissions for Animal Passages, Warm & Fuzzy and Tail End columns. Submit via email or mail a disc with the file. Contact: Animal Wellness, 160 Charlotte St., Unit 202, Peterborough, ON, Canada K9J 2T8. 705-741-0817. ann@redstonemediagroup.com animalwellnessmagazine.com THE BARK Publication for dog lovers covering canine nutrition, culture, obedience and gear. Accepts unsolicited submissions and previously published…