Innehållsförteckning för September/October 2020 från Writer's Digest

VIET THANH NGUYEN Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize winner, Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner, finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, and finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has been called bold, elegant, and fiercely honest. Along with teaching at the University of Southern California, he works as a cultural critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times. MAAZA MENGISTE Maaza Mengiste is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose work examines the individual lives at stake during migration, war, and exile. She was a runner-Up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, BBC Radio, and Lettre International, among other places. REGISTER NOW GET MORE DETAILS AND REGISTER AT: WRITERSDIGESTCONFERENCE.COM…

NINA AMIR, the inspiration to creation coach, is a 19-time Amazon bestselling hybrid author of such books as How to Blog a Book, The Author Training Manual, and Creative Visualization for Writers as well as a host of e-book writing guides. She supports writers as an author coach and Certified High Performance Coach (CHPC)—the only one of 800 elite CHPCs working with writers. Additionally, she is the founder of the Nonfiction Writers’ University, the Author of Change Coaching Program, and the Write Nonfiction in November Challenge. An award-winning journalist and blogger, you can read her three blogs, Write Nonfiction NOW!, How to Blog a Book, and As the Spirit Moves Me, by visiting NinaAmir.com. DAVID CORBETT (DavidCorbett.com) is the award-winning author of the writing guides The Art of Character (“A…

POETIC FORM: HUITAIN The huitain is a French poetic form that is quite musical when done well. Here are the basic rules: • Eight lines per poem (or stanza)• Eight to 10 syllables per line (but consistent within the poem)• Rhyme scheme: ababbcbc Here are a couple of examples by Poetic Asides readers: “Cody at the Leaf Blower” by Jane Shlensky I watch a game that’s underwaybeside the woods, across the lawn,as Cody faces winds at play—a kind of keep-away at dawn.He revs his blower, hefts its brawn,betting on tough technologies.Wind scatters leaves as if they’re sown,takes Cody’s hat, quick as you please. One tricky feature of this poem is carrying the b rhyme throughout but changing the pattern at the fifth line. While both these poets chose to use…

Dear FYSA, I didn’t really do my research on best practices before sending out a wave of queries and now I’m afraid I’ve undermined my novel’s chances with a few dozen of my top targets. I’ll look more amateurish if I send out follow-ups with better queries, but if I don’t, I’m afraid I’ll just get deleted. Will a too-long query without a good hook get me thrown in the trash? Sincerely,Eager Beaver Dear Beav, I too am a “jump-first-check-for-water-second” kind of person, and thus, I get it, and I appreciate your honesty. I say this a lot but it always bears repeating: Your query is your book’s résumé and you want it to have the best shot of moving to the interview round, thus attention to detail is the…

When I think of the future of writers and writing, I often look to literary journals. It’s not that writers have to get published in literary journals to find success. Rather, it’s that many award-winning novelists tend to cut their teeth publishing fiction, creative nonfiction, and poetry in literary publications. Maybe that’s just the nature of literary journals. As Lynne Nugent, managing editor of The Iowa Review, says, “Literary magazines are able to take a chance on writing that wouldn’t necessarily make money in commercial publishing. Writing by currently unknown writers, experimental writing, writing that crosses genre boundaries. We give that writing a platform where it may cross over to a wider audience and expand everyone’s understanding of what’s possible.” Many writers find success through publications in literary journals. In…

Due to physical disability, I’m effectively house-bound. Even before the rest of you joined me on Team Stay-Home, I only got out for medical appointments and occasional (post-ATL-rush-hour) evening drives with my husband. For me, writing is a way to pretend normalcy. Whenever I write, and in whatever form it takes—poetry, prose, or something in between—it’s a chance to, by proxy of the character in the heart of my tale, just live out a single No-Pain-Do-Glorious-Things day. My goal is to share my story, as I know it could help other women to read what my life has been and to know that if they’re in any part of the same boat, they’re not alone. Once that book is set free, my heart craves to share all of the fables,…

I’d like to lodge a complaint. As a kid growing up, I imagined my career choice of “writer” would be filled with adventure and private jets, possibly an estate in Hawaii where my own personal private detective would routinely borrow my sports car.1 Every single television show and film that had a writer as a character typically showed them in full-on Castle mode, wealthy, and (for some reason) solving crimes, and I wanted that life.2 The reality of the author-agent relationship has turned out to be … different. CRIME-SOLVING CATS I found my agent, Janet Reid, wayyyyy back in 2002, utilizing stone tablets and smoke signals. OK, maybe it wasn’t quite that primitive, but I did mail her an actual paper query letter.3 The fact that she signed me as…

I’ve been writing since before I could write. As a toddler, I dictated stories (most concerning an imaginary owl) to my parents, who still have some saved on scraps. About 12 years ago, I was living in New York City and pursuing an MFA in creative writing. For years I’d been experiencing trouble with a binocular vision disorder, but in New York my symptoms worsened dramatically. I became unable to read or write for any substantial length of time. I tried vision therapy, an overhead projector, a special pair of prism glasses—all to no avail. Eventually, I discovered a computer program for the visually impaired. As I typed, my words were read aloud by one of those automated voices that tells you how much longer you’ll be on hold or…

“I grew up in Portland—Oregon, because you have to specify that on the East coast—went to school in Nashville, then took some time to consider my options and try my hand at manual labor working for my uncle before finishing up college and moving to New York, with a keen (and ridiculous) sense of being drastically belated at the tender age of 24.” As a graduate of the Columbia Publishing Course at Columbia Journalism School, and with a BA in English with a focus in creative writing from Vanderbilt University, Bonaparte landed his first job in publishing at Farrar, Straus and Giroux, working in sales, publicity, and marketing. He switched to agenting and joined Janklow & Nesbit in 2016. “I consider myself lucky to do what I do,” Bonaparte says.…

DAVID CORBETT THE COMPASS OF CHARACTER: Creating Complex Motivations for Compelling Characters David Corbett—award-winning author of The Art of Character and The Compass of Character—will guide participants in a detailed examination of how to create, develop, and portray on the page compelling characters with complex and recognizably human motivations. WINDY LYNN HARRIS PERSONAL ESSAY ESSENTIALS: How to Break Into Print With First-Person Writing Windy Lynn Harris—founder of Market Coaching for Creative Writers and author of Writing & Selling Short Stories & Personal Essays—will teach you how to find publication success in the literary magazine market by crafting and selling short personal essays. REGISTER NOW GET MORE DETAILS AND REGISTER AT: WRITERSDIGESTCONFERENCE.COM NOVEL.WRITERSDIGESTCONFERENCE.COM…

With more than 40 titles to her name, including bestsellers such as Indigo, Topaz, and the Blessings series, Beverly Jenkins is nothing short of a superstar in Romancelandia. The activity on her multiple Facebook pages/groups and among her 18K+ Twitter fans is evidence of that. When I comment that the kindness and generosity of the folks participating was somewhat antithetical to most of Twitter, Jenkins isn’t the least bit surprised. “They’re the best,” she says about her readers. There’s “a lot of sharing, a lot of uplifting.” But anyone who’s had even the briefest of encounters with her knows this is thanks, at least in part, to the positivity she puts into the world. Her love stories, ranging from historical, to contemporary, to young adult, and inspirational, don’t just offer…

Out of 250 entries, Writer’s Digest editors and readers selected the following 10 winners. 1 When Defb eijklas hijacked this human body, he thought it would be inconspicuous to wear the black and white box the humans stared so fondly at. —Janell Lim 2 The shattered cathode-ray tube currently lodged into my jugular vein keeps me both alive and dead, famous and infamous. —Greg Bauch 3 Still onstage with the magician, I screamed for help, but the only sound that emerged from my mouth was static. —V.P. Villalobos 4 He wondered if the punishment fit the crime of excessive viewing. —Sara McNulty 5 Tom had read that to properly repair a television set, you must understand how it works, inside out. —Ken Brodeen 6 It was not the best hiding…

WHAT SETS THE IOWA REVIEW APART FROM OTHER LITERARY PUBLICATIONS? The Iowa Review is located at the heart of the writing culture at the University of Iowa. An interest in writing permeates Iowa City from the undergraduate to the graduate level to the town as a whole. We benefit from the talent of university students drawn here to write, who work and volunteer at TIR, but also from the support of the entire community. WHAT TYPE OF WRITING DO YOU SEEK? In reading submissions, I look for what I haven’t seen before. Maybe it’s a perspective that’s underrepresented in literature, or a metaphor that makes me think about something differently than I ever have before, or a passage that makes me feel or think more deeply than I have all…

1 Great Lakes Writers Festival Sponsored by the writing program at Lakeland University, this “celebration of writing” provides seasoned and emerging writers the opportunity to talk with peers, discuss their work, and learn from pros through workshops. Ed. note: The date of this conference was changed just prior to the publication of this issue. WHEN: November 4–5, 2021. WHERE: Lakeland University, Sheboygan, Wis. PRICE: Free. COVID-19 CONTINGENCY PLAN: There is enough space for participants to maintain social distancing. Therefore, no virtual alternative is offered. If the campus shuts down, participants will be informed and a postponement announced. WHAT MAKES THIS CONFERENCE UNIQUE: “This event is perfect for creative writers—whether they’re residents or visitors to the area, college students, or high school students,” says festival coordinator Karl Elder. Day two consists…

Welcome to our special double-sized September/October issue! Our theme, “The Future Is …” is open-ended, allowing each of us to consider where our writing fits in this strange world. As we put this issue together, it was impossible to ignore the events happening around us. We saw writers struggling to make space for their writing (both emotionally and literally) so we thought it was important to look forward and to remember the power of the written word. The first way this issue invites you to look to the future is with our annual agent roundup. Here we spotlight 20 agents who are open to submissions in a variety of genres. Perhaps your future lies in partnering with one of them. Then, novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Connie Schultz revisits an…

As nonfiction writers, we know that framing this amorphous mess called reality is incredibly hard. What do we include? What do we leave out? Where do we begin? Where do we end? What goes in the middle, and in what order? These are key questions when one is arranging, say, 30 years of one’s life into 300 pages. In answering these questions, let me first defer to the empress of memoir herself. In her book The Art of Memoir, which consists of 24 chapters, Mary Karr writes only a one-page chapter on the subject of structure. She admits to using the same approach in all three of her memoirs: “I start with a flash forward that shows what’s at stake emotionally for me over the course of a book, then…

Chuck Palahniuk released his newest novel, The Invention of Sound, in September. In honor of this release, we’re revisiting Palahniuk’s 2007 interview with WD. When he tried to get his first novel published, some editors secretly loved the dark novel about a model who’s shot in the face, but shied away from acquiring it. Frustrated and rebellious, the Portland native embarked on an even darker book. The result was Fight Club, a novel about fist-fighting, anti-corporate power, and identity, which rocketed Palahniuk from obscurity to fame when the book was adapted into a movie. When do you know that something has the meat to become a novel? It’s usually a premise that I can present in a short story and bring to my workshop. Hopefully, they can instantly get it…

A.H. Kim A Good Family (Domestic thriller, July, Graydon House) “When a glamorous Big Pharma executive pleads guilty to a whistleblower lawsuit and goes to prison, she’s convinced someone in her family helped set her up—and she’ll do anything to bring them down.” WRITES FROM: San Francisco. PRE-GOOD FAMILY: When I read The Fault in Our Stars, I felt inspired to write a YA book from an Asian-American teenager’s perspective. I wasn’t able to get an agent for that book, but I’d caught the writing bug. I started writing another book, which turned out to be A Good Family. TIME FRAME: My husband bought me Structuring Your Novel Workbook by K.M. Weiland. I started writing with a group that met once a week, and in two months, I had a…

One morning in early 2002, I parked my car in front of the same house I’d been visiting for weeks in Cleveland’s Hough neighborhood. Robert Mandell, a man who’d been answering my questions for weeks, was waiting on the other side of his front yard fence. He usually greeted me with a big smile, but this time his face was a map of concern. I stepped out of my car and walked toward the house, pausing at the fence gate. “What’s the matter Mr. Mandell?” He shook his head and spoke slowly. “I can’t believe you keep showing up here, and it’s not because someone’s been killed.” We both knew why he was wondering. The reasons fueling his skepticism were why I was there, and they have driven my work…

This article is printed here in its original form, as it was first published in 1966. —Ed. I’ve heard impatient beginning writers scoff at the dramatic scene as pedantic and artificial, when instead, it is an indispensable and rewarding device which can be mastered with steady practice. Advantages of the scene are numerous. It provides structure and continuity to your short story or novel. It takes care of chapter breaks, one of the frequent laments of the struggling young novelist. It advances character and plot, and the transition between scenes shows passage of time, for time must pass for characters to change believably. The formula of the dramatic scene is a reliable way to test your story as you go along. Perhaps you begin to sense that nothing is happening.…

KEEPING TABS ON YOUR AGENT How do you know what your agent is doing? How do you find out? How do you know what his strategy is—if he has a strategy—and whether it will succeed? Agents have different styles and keep their clients informed in different ways. One agent I know sends a weekly email update to her entire client list in which she recounts the editors, producers, or foreign publishers she lunched with or met with that week, any sales she made, and any submissions she made. She is a paragon among agents and basically makes the rest of us look bad. However, we all need something to which we can aspire! Other agents send a submission list to their clients, listing every editor who has or will get…

Here’s my confession: Every morning when I open my email, I feel guilty. At the end of the day, when I close my email and turn off my computer, I feel guilty then, too. No matter how hard I try, I feel like I can never answer emails as quickly as I want to. I can’t remember if I heard the following suggestion in a career class, or if my first managing editor shared it with me, but during my first job as an editor, I set a rule for myself to answer every email within 24 business hours. Years later, this is still my goal and not hitting it is the source of my guilt. You’ve probably seen the guidelines on submission pages letting you know it’ll be weeks…

WHAT SETS SUBTROPICS APART FROM OTHER LITERARY PUBLICATIONS? I’d say our strengths are the quality of the work we select, the range of writers we publish (from stories by Nobel Prize winners to first appearances in print), the beautiful covers that our managing editor, Mark Mitchell, selects, and the beautiful design of the journal (for which we have the estimable Connie Hwang to thank). We also put a strong emphasis on translation and see ourselves as a global journal. WHAT TYPE OF WRITING DO YOU SEEK? Good writing. We are really open to anything, and pride ourselves in the great range of work that we publish. In our new issue (Issue 28/29: Spring/Summer 2020), for instance, you will find an essay recounting a personal experience of police brutality by a…

How do you know when you’re at the point in your career that you might benefit from a writing conference? The question you’re really asking is: Should I invest in one? No matter where you are in your pursuits, attending a conference can be of benefit. The purpose of conferences is to help writers realize their potential. Attendees include published and unpublished authors, editors, agents, and publishers. You may attend lectures, participate in workshops, receive manuscript critiques, and network. Some events offer exhibitor booths for you to learn about literary services such as writing clubs, unions, e-book distributors, or bookstores. Look for events with sessions that support your needs in order to sharpen your skills and renew your productivity. By attending, you’re embracing yourself as a writer and opening yourself…

• Keep in mind that there may be more than one workshop in each of the listings. • These workshops are listed alphabetically by state, country, or continent. • Unless otherwise indicated, rates include tuition (T) only. Sometimes the rates also include airfare (AF), some or all meals (M), accommodations (AC), ground transportation (GT), materials (MT), or fees (F). • When you find workshops that interest you, be sure to call, email, or check the website of the instructor or organization for additional information. • All listings are paid advertisements. WRITER’S DIGEST ANNUAL CONFERENCE, presented by Writer’s Digest IS GOING VIRTUAL with NEW dates November 5–7. The Writer’s Digest Annual Conference offers everything you need to advance your writing career creatively and professionally. Gain invaluable tips to improve your craft, explore…