Innehållsförteckning för October 2021 från The Writer

THERE’S AN UNDENIABLE ART TO WRITING PULPY HORROR. You, the author, create a terrifying monster, the monster terrorizes everyone, and maybe one person survives – maybe. But as the horror landscape changes and grows and reinvigorates, the tropes of the genre are finding root around new, potentially more sustainable qualities. Sure, there are new monsters to create, new motivation for vengeful ghosts, but much of modern horror has found new life in shaking off some traditional, B-movie horror tropes and moving toward multifaceted stories that stick in your craw and don’t let go, ones about friends, family, love. Oh, and there’s a monster, a demon, a ghost as well, of course. But the primary attraction, the name in lights, isn’t the terror; it’s the heart of the story that the…

Come for the North Carolina Writers’ Network Conference; stay for the independent bookstores. “There are at least half a dozen bookshops that I can think off the top of my head in Durham, Chapel Hill, Raleigh, Wake Forest,” says conference director Ed Southern. “You can easily blow off the conference and spend the weekend just visiting bookstores. We don’t encourage you to do that. But we wouldn’t blame you if you did.” The conference, held in Durham from Nov. 19 to the 21 this year, includes panels and readings, keynotes and workshops taught by professional authors, open-mic sessions, and manuscript critiques with agents and editors. It attracts hundreds of people from all over the country. Southern’s favorite part of the event is what he calls the in-between moments. “You know,…

Get ready for our next webinar: “Being Creative Every Day” Every day you can exercise your creativity. Sound pie-in-the-sky? It isn’t. On Sept. 21 at 2 p.m. ET, The Writer columnist Yi Shun Lai will share all her tried-and-true ways to make sure creativity enters your life – and how you can use creativity to better your productivity. This webinar is open to the public for a fee, but The Writer members get into this webinar and all of our other webinars for free. Learn more about our membership program or start your free trial at writermag.com/memberships. Write short. Win big. Last year more than 1,000 writers tried their hand at writing microfiction in our inaugural 100-word contest. This year, will you be one of them? Enter your best work…

I’m taking an art class. The instructor, Alfonso De Anda, is a guy who loves skateboard art and is truly beyond cool. (He wears a beanie and colors in highlighter.) Don’t get me wrong. I like his art, and I like what he’s teaching us, and I’m not the slightest bit intimidated by his cool factor. We’re meant to be drawing an hour a day for 30 days straight. It’s not happening for me – I’m drawing at the most five days at a stretch for the hour – but he said something in the introduction to this onerous exercise that made me perk up. We’re to spend the first five minutes of each hour, he says, in free drawing. “OK,” I thought to myself. “I can do this. It’s…

Sometimes it’s hard to understand why anyone would want to be a writer. As journalist and screenwriter Gene Fowler once said, “Writing is easy: All you do is sit staring at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood form on your forehead.” Or, as novelist Paulo Coelho once wrote: “Writing is a socially acceptable form of being naked in public.” OK, I don’t like being naked in public. But I do have a passion for humor writing, and recently, I’ve started publishing my work. In the past, I was always writing funny bits for family and friends. I found outlets for my humor as a marketing and communications executive. I wrote everything from press releases and community magazine articles to awards ceremony speeches and ad copy. I crafted…

“What terrified me will terrify others; and I need only describe the spectre which had haunted my midnight pillow.”—Mary Shelley In this room where I write in the summertime, I avoid looking over my shoulder. I know what lurks behind me: three cloth dolls trapped in a shadow box my mother mounted on the wall. One doll holds her arms wide, inviting you in closer. Another’s face stays serene, but her painfully angled body appears broken. The third’s flying hair and feet suggest she was pinned in place while fleeing. They press their faces to the glass and stare, unable to move or blink. It’s no wonder I was inspired to write horror stories here. I grew up in Stephen King country, among deep woods, old barns, and Maine accents.…

Self-publishing has always been the rebel of the industry, pushing back against “rules,” forging its own path, and pushing up against the established system. Unfortunately, this has also resulted in a stigma that it is somehow inferior to traditional publishing – and one that’s been hard to shake. Over the past decade, however, it has made great strides, garnering more attention and finally getting the respect it deserves as a viable path to publication. The past decade has seen explosive growth in self-publishing with print-on-demand capabilities, eBooks that can now be read through apps on a variety of devices (including phones), distributions to readers around the world, unique marketing opportunities, and an abundance of resources on how to self-publish. There has never been a better time to be an independent…

How do you gauge your level of writing and how to improve? I have different types of writing experiences, and as I move up in my writing career, I would like to figure out my strengths and what I need to improve upon. Thank you, —TRYING TO PROGRESS Dear Trying, Oh, my stars. Are you telling me you’ve never heard of the Pen-to-Paper Skillorometer? Well, then, you’ve never lived! Please send $299 to me in care of The Writer magazine, and I’ll send one right out to you. You hold one electrode up to your forehead and the other to your heart and read your work into the attached funnel mic. If you don’t Feel Something™, then you have no skills and can move on to something else, like pig…