Category: How To and Tips
Losing Steam: the Pros and Cons of Launching Two Books back-to-back
By Jennifer Lang Six months after signing a contract for my first book with a small, independent press, I held my breath, crossed all ten fingers, and submitted my second manuscript to them. After an OFFER OF PUBLICATION email arrived in my inbox a few months later, I was overcome by a mixture of joy […]
Four Ways Being a Magazine Editor Helps Me Write Fiction—and One Big Thing I Had to Learn
By Erin Quinn-Kong When I was a sophomore in high school, I took an Intro to Journalism class where we learned about news and feature writing, the role of editors, and more. That was it—I knew what I wanted to do with my life. After attending the University of Missouri School of Journalism, I moved […]
My Writing Process: An Ever-Changing Work in Progress
Katie Keridan Let me start by reminding you of something you already know, which will also serve to clear up one of the most common misconceptions I continue to hear about the writing process: There is no right way to write a book. There are, however, ways to write a book that will work better […]
Write Local by Sarah Angleton
Write Local About twenty years ago, I stepped into an intimidating academic building that smelled of old books and institutional knowledge to receive some great well-worn advice I should have taken much sooner than I did. At the time, I was looking to change directions from my as yet unused undergraduate degree in zoology toward […]
From Medicine to Writing to Crime: a Natural Progression? By Anne Pettigrew
By Anne Pettigrew You don’t have to search far to find medically trained folk who’ve become writers. For example, Anton Chekhov, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, Richard Gordon, Michael Crichton, Khaled Hosseini, Adam Kay and Freida McFadden were qualified doctors. Even Agatha Christie, the world’s most successful crime writer (two billion book sales) was ‘medical’, being […]
Seasoned Romance Empowers us All
A decade ago my friends and I started a monthly gathering called “Dirty Old Women.” There we were, in our fifties and sixties, reading our sexy stories to a packed audience in a California bookstore. Women in their thirties would thank us afterwards because everywhere else they went, the message they heard was romance and […]
What Hallmark Taught Me by Mary Flynn
By Mary Flynn On the very first day that I “cared enough to send the very best,” I sat down with the Editorial Director of Hallmark Cards in Kansas City. I admit I felt intimidated. As someone who routinely wrote book reviews for The New York Times, Web Schott was the most serious and erudite […]
Lessons I Learned in a Comedy Club
One Wednesday evening in 2008, I sat at a table in the back of Go Bananas Comedy club in Cincinnati, Ohio. I took notes as people in the room made suggestions to a young guy in a backwards hat on how to make his joke work better. “What if instead of saying you chugged a […]
Echoes of the Heart: Finding Voice in the Void
By Gwen Suesse (Notes from Planet Widow: Finding My Way After Loss) Memoir: I enjoy reading a good one, but write one? Moi? The very thought is unsettling at best and, in the dark of night, downright terrifying. Why would anyone want to read my story? And yet, that’s what my latest book, Planet Widow: […]
Researching a Book in the Time of Covid, and What I Learned
By Pamela Toler One of the oddities of my career path as a writer of historical non-fiction is that I didn’t have the chance to do archival research for my first nine books. In some cases this was because I often had ridiculous deadlines, which did not leave time to hunker down in an archives […]
Recent Comments