Tag: featured
Take a Little Off the Top: Seven Tips to Help You Self-Edit Your Novel Manuscript
By Susan K. Hamilton There’s no feeling quite like completing the first draft of your manuscript. There is an immense feeling of satisfaction, even of triumph. That giddiness, however, can quickly be subsumed by the dawning realization of what’s on the horizon: editing. Editing can be a daunting prospect, but it is one hundred percent […]
Authors Interviewing Their Characters: Susy Norman interviews Marcus
In the novel, The Ground is Full of Holes, Marcus, a consultant anaesthetist in a busy London hospital, is trying to cope with the demands of the operating theatre and the dying days of an extra-marital affair. The author, Suzy Norman, interviews Marcus. What is the most important thing we need to know about you? […]
Writing for Small Markets Gives You Power
By Elizabeth Ann Quirino When you pitch your writing, or manuscripts, and you’re told “You’re a niche market. Ethnic topics are a hard sell,” don’t be discouraged. Do not feel like you are the small fish in a big pond. There is an advantage to being a writer in a niche market. A niche market […]
Out of the File Drawer and Onto the Page: My Journey from Writer to Author
I didn’t set out to write a memoir, or a book, or even a story. The scraps of memory that eventually became Waking in Havana began to surface as I sat at my small formica kitchen table, placed a cassette in the ancient tape recorder I had unearthed from a jumble of give-away items in […]
The New Mom Question: How Long Before I Can Write Again?
By Vanessa Lillie www.vanessalillie.com My mother said to expect a burst of energy before going into labor. With me, she’d been throwing a baby shower for a friend. With my brother, she was picking pecans when her water broke. The burst of energy before I went into labor with my son is not something I […]
Writers – Do Your Job and Stop Worrying About Reviews
Standing before my fourth grade class, reading aloud a story I’d written, it never occurred to me they wouldn’t like it. The teacher, Mrs. Nungazer liked it. Mrs. Nungazer loved it. I can’t even remember what the story was about. Probably a girl figuring out how to get what she made her happy, and put […]
Memoir Writing Tips
I confess I’ve become a compulsive participant in memoir writing workshops. My first one was with Joyce Maynard in Guatemala in 2014, and my own memoir was born there under the volcanoes. Five years later, it will be published on October 1st. Listening to the authors sharing those drafts of memoirs in the writing circle […]
Psychology and Writing
The connections I’ve made, and resisted, between my career as a psychologist and my career as a writer have shifted over time. For many years, I felt the pull between my work as a psychologist and my desire to write as a constant conflict. I spent a considerable amount of time studying, working to get […]
Me And My Agent by Holly Seddon
Where to start? To be frank, I can’t think of another job like literary agent. It sits in the Venn diagram of creativity, inspiration, career management and business acumen. But that doesn’t really explain it. A good agent helps shape ideas, offers editorial notes on outlines and manuscripts, pitches novels to publishers and then argues […]
Longing for Treasure
By Sandra A. Miller Sometimes I wanted to leave, but I couldn’t. There were always brown bag lunches to prepare and a pile of papers to grade, kids to drive to music lessons and weekends crammed with soccer games—so many soccer games. I couldn’t even tell where my own needs began and ended. I read Eat Pray […]
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