by Tia DeShong On Keeping a Notebook “Keepers of private notebooks are a different breed altogether, lonely and resistant rearrangers of things, anxious malcontents, children afflicted apparently at birth with…
Stacey Gross Writing the next David Sedaris Novel I took a break with my kids today. I knew I told Jess, who’d asked me to write her a story, that…
by Joe Taylor Legitimate Doubts Just the other day I tore up and threw away the list of over 80 literary agents that I had queried about finding a publisher…
by Joe Taylor To be brutally honest, it's been worse than brutal. It's been silent. A month after Labor Day, when I thought my responses from prospective agents might pick…
by writer Patricia Thrushart The words ‘prolific’ and ‘writer’ are used together as often as ‘rough’ and ‘draft' or ‘copy’ and ‘editor.’ The assumption is that writing a lot is…
My first couple of days of submitting to agents were exhausting and extremely frustrating. I would identify a target agent then send her (90% are women) whatever she requested. About a quarter of them came back immediately as undeliverable. Thinking, I guess, that "this agent was my only hope" I'd keep trying to find a better email address or resending it. Finally, I realized she may be out of business or posted a bad address and moved on.
Surgeons have often been accused of being emotionally removed from the patient they're operating on, removing 'this' and 'rewiring' that. I could relate to that as I performed literary 'surgery'…
Engaging and engrossing writing can be simple or complicated, but never flat. Just as in real life, we can incorporate adversity and differences, rather than avoid them, in order to build a system that feels real and moves our readers. Even when our goal is to find patterns, draw conclusions or describe a beautiful future, our stories are more powerful when we consider the exceptions to the rules we create. Introducing dissonance into our writing invites our readers to bring themselves into the story and empowers them to take our narratives personally.
That’s why, several years into my teaching career, I laid down the Red Pen, thanks to some good advice from a colleague, and changed the way I looked at writing instruction entirely. I had to stop working for my students as their copy-editor. Neither of us wanted me to do that job in the first place. In other words, instead of tearing the writing apart, I had to focus on developing what was already there. If I was going to evaluate someone’s writing, it was just as important for me to identify strengths as it was to identify weaknesses. Maybe even more so.
As my Beta reader, Jo discovered repetition, describing the same era of my career in different pieces or talking about the same aspect of the business in two pieces. She did me a huge favor in pointing out that the reader would have trouble following my stories and trying to place them in some coherent chronological order. From this came her most important suggestion-make the book a memoir, rather than a collection.