So you’re in the query trenches. You’ve been gritting your teeth through this process for months, weeks, years, millennia, and suddenly, an e-mail comes in with the golden ticket: OFFER OF REPRESENTATION. The call goes beautifully, you are ready to sign. Then your inbox dings again. And so it begins. ...
Josh Barkan is the author of Mexico (January 24, 2017; Hogarth/Crown Books), a collection of short stories that capture the beauty, strangeness, and brutality of life in modern Mexico. He’s also published two other books: a novel, Blind Speed, and a collection of stories, Before Hiroshima. His writing has appeared in Esquire and as...
Congratulations on publishing your first book! Maybe it’s actually the second or third book you’ve written, or your tenth, but at long last a publisher has recognized the genius even you had begun to question. Go on and open that bottle of wine that has aged so gracefully, if a little dustily, for the...
Note: The following is a guest post from Stephanie Stokes Oliver, an author, editor, and scout for Simon & Schuster’s Atria Books. For more information on Stephanie’s scouting guidelines, see below. You can find her online at stephaniestokesoliver.com. Cheers! You’ve finished your manuscript, and are preparing to begin your search for the perfect agent...
2. Take advantage of small moments. Let’s be realistic. If you work a full-time job and have any kind of life, sometimes small moments are all you’re going to get out of a day. If you’re in the doctor’s office (okay, that may be a large moment), or waiting for your kid to finish...
I’m willing to offer this generalization: whatever level we’ve attained in our development as readers, we always lag behind that standard as writers. I’ve never met a good writer who wasn’t also a great reader. The more broadly and deeply we read, the more we recognize excellent writing in its endless guises and the more examples...
(This is Part 1 of a three-part series to kickstart your awesome 2017. Part 2 is a roundup of query letter submission tips, and Part 3 is a list of literary agent pet peeves.) 2017 is here, and that means new goals, new resolutions, and new writing projects to send to literary agents and...
Do you want readers to love your protagonist? Or to be inspired by her? A powerful tool for achieving the strong visceral responses you want is outside your conscious mind, but it’s not out of reach. Everything you write, especially a first draft, is a collaboration with another writer: your subconscious. You can micromanage...
Whether you publish traditionally or independently, you will want to do as much as possible to help launch your book. Here are 18 things I found helpful in the launch of my debut picture book, A MORNING WITH GRANDPA, illustrated by Christina Forshay (Lee & Low Books): 1-2 Years Out About the time you...
How many times have you wanted to throw your laptop across the room when Microsoft Word started moving slower than a three-toed sloth with a bad case of vertigo? If you’re like me and your manuscript is over 100,000 words, it probably happens on a fairly regular basis. I’ve had it simply give up...
1. Write a good book. Sounds simple, doesn’t it? Yet it can be difficult to accomplish. A good book is unique, with compelling characters, voice, and plot. It’s not easy to come up with something original when you’re writing within the confines of a genre like romance, where the tropes are set in stone...
When I say you can ignore these rules, I don’t mean that you should. These “truisms” floating around about writing are useful to think about, especially when you’re starting out, and they can point you to weaknesses in your work. In the end, though, you have to trust your own process. Here are seven...
Does the name one selects to grace the cover of his or her book feel right to build a reputation and writing career on? Only the author can ultimately decide what is right.
It turns out Author Anxiety is a Thing. It’s not just me. I discovered this on the eve of publication of my debut novel, DECEPTION ISLAND, when I was silly enough to Google my shiny new title. Up popped a Netgalley reviewer live-tweeting as she read it. Only she was hating it—pulling it apart...
We all hit a rut on occasion. The trick is not to let it get in your head and drag you down. Instead, keep your confidence up and use these steps to dig your way back out of it.
I've been more curious about myself, which, I believe, has directly led to seeing other people more clearly. This also translates to character writing: in my new book, my characters are more accessible to me, though no less complex. I find I write with more joy. It's the self-work that has opened up the...
Finding the time to write is a universal struggle for writers. Day jobs, kids, pets, presidential elections, to-do lists…there are a million things that require our time and attention before we can give anything to writing. When I was in college, I wrote a terrible young adult novel. I worked on it during holiday breaks...
I’ve been thinking a lot about perfection recently. As a creative writing teacher, I often hear statements about the writing process from my students—statements that involve one of my least favorite words: should.
3. Participate in NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month). On November 1, participants work towards the goal of writing a 50,000-word novel by 11:59 on November 30. It allows you to focus on word count and the completion of a novel, even if the writing is (at first) complete crap on the page. You can...
An appealing protagonist (or villain!) gives readers someone to root for, but appealing characters are not the same thing as perfect characters. Characters that never make mistakes and have lives without incident are not only boring, they are the quickest way to turn-off your readers. Column by Emily Littlejohn, author of INHERIT THE BONES (Nov. 1,...
A good editor is like a good spouse, or your best friend: someone you trust completely, who you know will tell you the truth that you need to hear. And a good editor “gets” you the way your friends do. That’s why you trust them with your work: you both want the same thing...
Once upon a time, before I was a writer, I attended births. Not as a midwife or a doctor. I was a doula—the person who often came to a labor early, who did their best to stay awake for the duration, who drove home in the wee hours, windows open and radio blaring and...
It’s been said that great authors act as stenographers, jotting down thoughts and actions as their characters dictate. Whether you’re focused on a single protagonist or penning a novel with multiple points-of-view, you must know your characters, so that when they talk to you, you’ll recognize their voices. But how do you develop this...
Five years ago, I knew nothing about the Progressive Era. I mean naught, nothing, nada. I had some vague notion that they washed their hair with egg yolks and drank Coca Cola laced with cocaine, but that was about it.
Before I had a garden, I remember how desperately and urgently I craved success. I remember staying up all night, writing as fast as I could, or agonizing over the same few paragraphs. I would do anything to get published. And all of that was profoundly unhelpful. What I needed to do was leave the...
