Innehållsförteckning för January/February 2021 från Writer's Digest

Ernest Hemingway’s writing advice gave strength to me to write. “All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” —Sayeed Anwar You have to work your writing muscles just like any other muscle in your body if you want them to get stronger and more agile. —Adir E. Golan I loved [the essay] “Let’s Write It in Red” by Philip Pullman; his metaphor on the story being like a path in the forest and how not to sidetrack and lose your reader is what helped me restructure and edit best … Also, don’t try to write everything in red is so obvious, yet so important! —Amy Be Primarily a nonfiction author, I was happy to receive rare and cherished feedback for a fictional piece I submitted to a…

In her two New York Times bestselling novels, Yangsze Choo’s historical fiction about colonial Malaya is suffused with local legends, superstitions, and customs, a magical realism seamlessly interwoven with unusual plots involving mysterious murders, intrigue, and romance plus power dynamics of gender and class. In the first, The Ghost Bride, a young woman in 1893 Malacca, a major trading port, is asked to posthumously marry a man from a wealthy family who recently died. The man invades her dreams, and she wanders the Chinese afterlife—a world of bureaucrats; ghosts who have servants, houses, and horses; corruption, revenge, and longing—much like real life. A Netflix series based on the book debuted in 2020. In The Night Tiger, due to the belief a dead person’s soul is fated to wander forever if…

My husband jokes with me that my midlife crisis was having my now 11-year-old daughter in my 40s. I started my career in publishing as Associate Beauty Editor at Woman’s World magazine in the late ’90s. Then I was a magazine editor-in-chief for five national consumer publications, including at Hachette. I also freelanced, writing about health, beauty, fitness, and relationships for print magazines like Longevity and New Woman. After getting married in 2005, I struggled with infertility. Four years later, I gave birth to my daughter, Crystal. As I wrote on Parenting.com: “As the doctor checked her vitals and my husband counted her 10 perfect fingers and toes, I realized I had achieved what no amount of clips or professional accolades could ever duplicate: my body had produced a miracle.”…

Zabé Ellor grew up in Washington, D.C. He graduated from Cornell University in 2016 with bachelor’s degrees in English literature and biology. He began his agenting career as an intern at Inklings Literary, and he moved to The Jennifer De Chiara Literary Agency in 2018. “Jennifer De Chiara, our agency founder and president, always encourages new agents to be confident and trust our judgment,” Ellor says. “In a challenging industry, you can’t let fear stop you from setting your own course.” Ellor has done just that and is uniquely suited to understand the life of a writer. His debut novel, May the Best Man Win, comes out from Roaring Brook Press in 2021. “It’s an incredible honor to be trusted by my clients with their creative work, and to collaborate…

For about two years before I became an editor, I was an English composition instructor for first-year college students. (I was not good at it.) During that time, one of the most important things I tried to drive home to the students was: Know your audience. Whenever, wherever, and whatever you are writing, knowing who your audience actually is vs. who you want it to be is crucial. And that means, unfortunately, your book is not for everyone. But instead of fixating on that disappointing fact, let’s focus on identifying your audience and what that means as you write your nonfiction book and the corresponding book proposal. (Meta lesson one: By saying “your nonfiction book,” I’m identifying part of my audience as people writing nonfiction.) BEFORE YOU START WRITING It…

CALIFORNIA CALIFORNIA CREATIVE WRITERS CONFERENCE™ WITH GENRE-LA™ 2021, produced by West Coast Writers Conferences. February 26–March 6, depending on health and safety regulations at the time. Writers of all genres and disciplines will benefit from this educational and inspirational event focused on the craft and business of writing. Our 28th conference will feature a weeklong stream of consecutive creative writing programs for fiction & nonfiction, as well as genre writers (from our popular Genre-LA™ event for Memoirs and Speculative Fiction). CCWC will include workshops for the 3-A’s™, (Aspiring, Active, and Accomplished) writers of fiction, nonfiction, and screenplays. Topics will be presented by 40+ literary agents, editors, veteran educators, bestselling authors, and industry professionals in progressive tracks of workshops, and panels. Reserve FREE one-on one pitch meetings with literary agents and publishers…

It’s that time again, the beginning of a new year. A time for saying good riddance to the disappointments and frustrations of the previous year, and the ushering in of all the potential goodness the next 365 days can bring. While this particular new year may present unique challenges for a fresh start, we can, in our writing lives at least, make the most of this moment. We can take the difficulties of the past year and use them to strengthen our resolve—forcing this new year to be better than the last. Because now, we know what it’s like to live and work during a pandemic. We know how to live with the uncertainty that life as we know it can change in an instant. But more than that, we…

As an academic, I have been conducting research and writing scholarly work for more than a decade. And while my first novel, His Only Wife, was published just this year, I have been writing fiction for even longer. When I was about 10, I started writing stories mainly for myself and have continued ever since. Fiction writing came first, many years before I wrote a single research article. Nonetheless, my academic work ended up influencing how I approached the novel, including how I imagined readers would respond to it. His Only Wife tells the story of Afi, a young woman in Ghana who enters an arranged marriage to Eli, a wealthy man. She agrees to the marriage at the behest of Eli’s powerful mother, who disapproves of her son’s long-time…

Meg LaTorre The Cyborg Tinkerer (Steampunk/space opera, November, iWriterly LLC) “A circus competition. A tinkerer tasked with removing the losing cyborgs’ implants. Who is she to protect when she falls for both the handsome ringleader and the beautiful acrobat?” WRITES FROM: New Jersey. PRE-CYBORG: I’d been writing fantasy for years and wanted a palate-cleanser. While I was working at a literary agency, I spoke to a colleague at a conference about something unrelated and the idea struck me. The Cyborg Tinkerer was born. TIME FRAME: I wrote The Cyborg Tinkerer starting in June 2018 and ending June 2020. That time frame includes working with three freelance editors to prepare the book for publication. ENTER THE AGENT: This book is published through my company, iWriterly LLC. I’ve always wanted to be…

Persistence. It’s the theme that runs throughout Viet Thanh Nguyen’s writing career, and it has paid off. Nguyen’s debut novel, The Sympathizer, was the recipient of the Pulitzer Prize, the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence in Fiction, an Edgar Award, and the Dayton Literary Peace Prize, among many others. Although it was his debut, it wasn’t the first book he wrote. Nguyen worked on a short story collection, The Refugees, for 20 years before it found a home. “Twenty years of rejection and misery and isolation was a terrible experience,” he said. “But on the positive side of that, I came out focused on the writing, thinking that the writing was what mattered.” With that focus in mind, Nguyen writes books that he would like to read, without worrying what…

At the outset of any story, most characters find themselves beset by the following motivational factors: • A state of LACK: Something is missing from his life. • This lack speaks to an unfulfilled YEARNING, or dream of life: the kind of person the character longs to be, the way of life he hopes to live. • The reason this Yearning remains unfulfilled is due to various forms of RESISTANCE holding him back, internally and externally. • The Resistance and Yearning are embodied in habitual behaviors referred to as PATHOLOGICAL MANEUVERS and PERSISTENT VIRTUES. Then something happens—the character makes a decision, goes on a journey, confronts an adversary, helps a stranger, discovers something, conceals something. Or the world around the character shifts, yields, convulses. The market crashes. At long last:…

RACHEL MENARD (RachelMenard.com) earned her degree in marketing from Arizona State University, during which time her work was printed in the university paper and in her own, self-published punk zine, Chelsea. Her short fiction has been featured in the New England Speculative Writers’ Anthology and on Cast of Wonders. Her short story, “Blame it on the Bees,” was chosen as a “Best of 2019” by Diabolical Plots. Most recently, her YA fantasy novel, Steel Hand, Cold Heart, won the Grand Prize in the 7th Annual Writer’s Digest Self-Published E-Book Awards. PEACE ADZO MEDIE (PeaceMedie.com) is a Ghanaian writer and senior lecturer in gender and international politics at the University of Bristol in England. Prior to that, she was a research fellow at the University of Ghana. She has published several…

POETIC FORM: VIATOR The viator is a form invented by poet Robin Skelton, author of The Shapes of Our Singing. Here are the basic rules: • The first line is a refrain.• The refrain appears as the second line of the second stanza, third line of the third stanza, and so on for however many stanzas the poem has.• This means the final line of the poem is the same as the first line of the poem.• It also means the length of the poem is dictated by how many stanzas there are. There are no rules on line length, rhymes, or subject matter. Here is an example by a Poetic Asides reader: “Dusk” by Jane Shlensky A twilight toad sits by the water spoutpatient as Buddha, catching beams of…

Dear FYSA, I have been querying agents for my debut and have had zero requests for the manuscript. But when my critique group read my novel, they said things like “This deserves to be published.” And “This was one of the best books I’ve read all year.” I figure something has got to be off about my query. What are some common red flags that could tank a possible request? Signed,Tanked Dear Tanked, First of all, if we can all assume that your “critique group” isn’t comprised of a mirror on a mop handle and a trench coat full of cats, then we can absolutely move through some possible missteps in the query letter. I can never say it enough, but the query can be broken down into: the hook,…

POPULAR COURSES The world of the feature film is booming and you are gushing with ideas. TEN WEEKS TO YOUR FEATURE FILM will give you the tools to get the ideas out of your head and into a completed screenplay by introducing you to the methods that professional screenwriters use to write under deadlines. If you have been sitting on an idea for a feature film, this is your chance to complete a draft of your screenplay in just 10 weeks, with expert feedback at every step. Whether you have finished a dozen screenplays or are working on your first, this workshop will give you what you need to get you writing and keep you on track to finish your script. The expert guidance offered in this course will help…