Articles by A Guest Author

National Parks and Creative Nonfiction: How Unexpected Writing Opportunities Can Boost Your Literary Career

By Felix Bill If you’d told me a year ago that my first three publications and my first writing grant would be for creative nonfiction, I’d have been baffled. When I started writing, my stories were dyed-in-the-wool speculative. Amid myth retellings and narratives that go bump in the night, I never expected to write anything…

The 4 Best Techniques for Revising Poetry

By Rebecca O’Bern Based on my time in Southern Connecticut State University’s MFA program and subsequently running the manuscript review service of Mud Season Review, what I learned is that “the key to the universal is through the specific.” You can’t write poems that connect with readers unless there’s clearly a person behind the scenes,…

An Unexpected Journey: My Path to Publishing When Fragments Make a Whole

Lory Widmer Hess I’ve always wanted to be a writer. Reading was my passion from a very early age, and authors seemed like gods to me, as they connected with the creative impulse and gave it form. I could think of no greater vocation than to do what they did, producing more of the kind…

Overcoming the Loneliness of Being a Writer

By Emily-Jane Hills Orford Loneliness is something that can affect anyone, anywhere. You could be in a crowded room and still feel the overwhelming weight of loneliness. There are some jobs that make loneliness a handicap and, yes, writing is one of those jobs. It’s a very lonely occupation. In fact, writing as an occupation…

“Are You a Good Writer?”

By Jessi Waugh We sat together at a bistro table in a one-hundred-year-old building, during the monthly writer meet-up. It was intermission time – an opportunity to order wine, socialize, or run away before the prompt writing and critiques began. Sensing her imminent escape, I struck up a conversation with the woman across from me….

One Day It Happens: How One Author Got Published Just Before Turning 70

By Mary Lou Dickinson After I retired from my job at the Assaulted Women’s Helpline, I was determined to have a book published. Following almost a lifetime of writing and raising two children as a single parent as well as working at various other jobs, there were a few of my short stories in literary…

What I Wish I Knew Before I Signed My First Book Deal

By Patricia Westerhof Before I sent out my first book-length manuscript for publication, I’d spent a total of two days learning about the publishing industry. Pretty much everything I knew came from a weekend workshop: a beginner’s guide to getting published, taught by the former president/publisher at Penguin Canada. I followed the steps she suggested,…

Case Study: How Ordinary Devotion Got Published

By Kristen Holt-Browning Ten years ago, I took a writing class in my small town in upstate New York with the novelist Julie Chibbaro. Although I had written poems and stories as a kid and a young person, I had pretty much stopped writing in my thirties. My husband was working full-time and commuting, I…

The Real Benefit of Persistence

By Gabrielle Brinsmead H. F. Brinsmead, the environmentalist, author and my grandmother, gave me the ambition to write. She and my grandfather (whose successful weed-spraying business may have prompted her environmentalism: they argued about everything), lived in a two-storey colonial homestead on Australia’s Gold Coast. Her writing room was a tiny cubby-hole on the ground…

The Secret Sauce for Pitches and Blurbs

By Lynne Curry It wasn’t until a development editor said, “You’ve written a reader-facing novel” that I got it. The secret sauce I’d missed for years that would make my blurbs, pitches, stories, and author newsletters sing. If you’ve read craft articles on blurb and pitch writing, you’ve built the foundation you need. Add this…

How This Simple Strategy Changed My Writing Process Forever

By Sam Muller My second, and still-in-the-works novel, People of Dust, revolves round a mysterious disappearance of booksellers. To make the plot work, I needed a city with a flourishing book industry and, naturally, a large reading public. My genre was fantasy. Wouldn’t a technologically advanced and socio-politically sophisticated city seem too modern or science-fictionist…

A Surprisingly Effective & Simple Strategy for Selling Your Books at Libraries

By Kathryn Haueisen I’ve yet to meet the author who claims getting to market their books is the reason they write. Like most authors I love playing with words and editing them. The publication process is tedious, but predictable and manageable. But, oh my, how I dread the marketing required to sell books. I was…

3 Avoidable Submission Mistakes that Sabotage Your Acceptance Odds

By Jess Simms It’s not easy to get your work published. I know this from both sides of the table as a fiction writer as well as Managing Editor of the literary journal After Happy Hour. The journal’s acceptance rate is around 3%, meaning we say “no” about 32 times for every time we say…

How to Actually Stay Focused On Your Writing in the Age of Distraction

by Tanya Shaffer Struggle with focus? You’re not alone. Here are 11 tips for keeping your attention where you want it to be—on your writing.  As a writing workshop leader, I hear a lot about the struggle writers have in getting themselves to the table and staying there. Wrenching yourself away from bills, dishes, and…

My Agent Failed to Sell My Book. So I Landed a 3 Book Deal on My Own. Here’s What Happened.

By Sally Jenkins My first novel was self-published and my second was partnership-published. I was determined to get my third book traditionally published.  A round of agent submissions created a mound of rejections. I entered a Twitter agent-pitching contest. Honing my blurb to its bare bones resulted in a call for the full manuscript. The…

« Older Entries Newer Entries »