Category: How To and Tips
Mollie McNeil’s A-Z of Publishing a First Book: B IS FOR BOOKS
I became passionate about reading at age eleven, shortly after my mother died, and books, particularly coming of age novels, became my solace and entertainment, as well as a source of information. While all my friends had mothers, I found plenty of orphaned or motherless girls in fiction and devoured novels such as in Anne […]
Persistence in Publishing by Teri Roche Drobnick
At a children’s literature writer’s conference many years ago, the author speaking informed the audience that it took her seven years to land an agent and get published. What? There’s no way I can hang in there that long! But that’s exactly how long it took me; and an incredible amount of patience and persistence. […]
On Writing by Jessica Clem
I grew up on a farm in rural Nebraska, in a family of horror and thriller readers. I spent countless hours as a child exploring the natural world and building my own stories from the landscape and found objects on the farm. All these objects found their way into my imagination. Icicles became monstrous teeth, […]
How to Use Eno and Ono While Revising Stories by Alex Behr
While revising stories for Animal Kingdom, my second collection, I turned to Brian Eno and Yoko Ono as patron saints of risk and ingenuity. I’m blessed with untreated ADHD, discovered in adulthood. That means, for me, the first burst of a story or a poem can feel like a high: anticipation and adrenaline leading to […]
Mollie McNeil’s A-Z of Publishing a First Book: A IS FOR AGE
A IS FOR AGE For pro-athletes, runway models, rock and rollers and dancers, age is the enemy, but for writers, it’s the opposite. Margaret Atwood’s latest book came out when she was eighty-five. Wallace Stegner published Crossing to Safety at seventy-eight. Patti Smith wrote her luminous memoirs in her seventies. Toni Morrison and Cheryl Strayed […]
Why I Filled My Novel with Unlikely Friendships and Eccentric Characters by Linda K. Sienkiewicz
You Can Be a Disaster and Still Get Invited to the Fish Fry: At the beginning of Love and Other Incurable Ailments, Serenity Tomczyk doesn’t emerge from loss with newfound wisdom or enviable resilience. She nurses a cat. She attends group therapy. She catastrophizes every headache with a late-night Google search. Years after losing her […]
4 Tips for Writing Characters That Feel Resonant and Real By Melanie Faith
I played with paper dolls and stuffed animals aplenty as a child, and both provided many hours of entertainment and story-building fun. One of the great joys of being a writer is creating characters, too. Let’s take a look into what makes a believable character and how we can develop characters that readers will long […]
Second-Chance Books: the Why, the How, and the How Much of Rights Reversion by Sharon Maas
Last month, my six-year-old novel The Violin Maker’s Daughter woke up to new life, with a brand-new cover and brand-new energy. It’s been updated, edited, polished. It’s as if a whole book’s out there: except this time, I didn’t spend hours, weeks, and months writing 100,000 words from scratch. Getting here was a long-winded learning-by-doing […]
Full Circle—The Journey From Writer to Editor to Author by Kelli Christiansen
I floated through hallways crammed with floor-to-ceiling shelves teeming with books. My first editorial job in book publishing had landed me in a sprawling single-story building in Chicago’s north suburbs, and everywhere I looked I saw books. I remember thinking “I can’t believe I get to work here!” After having spent four years as a […]
Writing Authentic Female Characters Across Three Generations
A teacher told me at a young age that I had empathy. Empathy—the ability to understand and share the feelings of another. That holds a lot of weight for a young person, that a person of authority recognizes something inherent in them. I had never thought about it before, but I found it true. Whenever […]
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