» A Guest Author

Scary Things for Writers to Do to Challenge Themselves

By Ratika Deshpande In my psychology classes in school, I learned that you overcome your fears not by avoiding them but by facing them. So, as a young, ambitious writer, I started doing the things I was afraid of doing, such as submitting my work to a magazine I really admired. I don’t know if…

Issue Five Hundred Forty Nine

How to Carve Out Time to Write

By Aliya Bree Hall We’re all busy. From balancing our jobs, families and social calendars, it can be hard to justify using our hard-earned free time to write when there’s hundreds of other things we could spend that energy on. As you can imagine, the problem with that approach is that if we’re not actively…

Issue Five Hundred Forty Eight Special Feature

How to Write Effective Subplots

By Ley Taylor Clark So you’ve finally plotted out — and maybe even drafted! — all the major beats of your story. You know what’s meant to happen and when, and your novel is starting to take impressive shape. You’re feeling good, but after you do another read through or pass it off to a…

Issue Five Hundred Forty Eight Uncategorized

Why and How to Get a Chapbook Published

By Jess Chua I’ve always wanted to publish a book. Some of my happiest childhood moments were with books that gave me so much joy, comfort, and inspiration. Self-aggrandizing as it sounds, I always thought it’d be glorious to be able to hold a book with my name on it as The Writer. I self-published…

Issue Five Hundred Forty Seven Uncategorized

Dancing to the Finish Line

By Ruth Wilson It all started with a phone call. My friend, Jeannie Dennler, called to say that she needed help finishing a book that she had started ten years earlier. “If there’s one thing I need to do before I die, it’s to finish this book. It’s been hounding me for way too long….

Issue Five Hundred Forty Seven

Mental Health and the Muse

By Kaki Olsen Aristotle is credited with the famous quote, “No great genius has ever existed without some touch of madness” and it is true that great art has often emerged from troubled minds, but it is inaccurate to think that authors can’t have one without the other. I absolutely encourage putting your soul into…

Issue Five Hundred Forty Six

To Tag or Not to Tag: Unraveling the Use of Dialogue Tags

By Emily-Jane Hills Orford Dialogue is quite simply a conversation between characters; it is what the characters say to each other. Dialogue is an effective way to move the story forward, enhance the plot, and develop the characters. Dialogue tags are the means to identify who is saying what and how they are saying it….

Issue Five Hundred Forty Six

5 Ways to Make Revision Easier

By Ratika Deshpande Revision often feels like an insurmountable task and can take much longer than actually writing the first draft of a story or novel. Here are some ways to make the process easier: Take a break to distance yourself from the story (and relax) I start the revision process as soon as I’m…

Issue Five Hundred Forty Five

On Writing and Commuting

By Ellen Levitt Lately when I ride my local trains and buses, I see most passengers spending their time on their cellphones. A few might read tangible printed materials such as books, magazines, even a newspaper. Others chat with people, stare into space, or nap. Maybe one person is knitting. Occasionally I find someone doing…

Issue Five Hundred Forty Four

Case Study: The Road Uphill to a Publishing Contract

By Sam Muller This is part of our ongoing series on how authors published their first book. You can read our other stories in this series, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. I will Paint the Sky, my first novel, had three lives. It had its first incarnation as Life Begins with Murder. Its second…

Issue Five Hundred Forty Three

A Title Is Born

By Lory Widmer Hess When a book I’d written chronicling my spiritual and healing journey was accepted by a publisher, I didn’t expect the process of publication itself to hold further spiritual challenges. Choosing a title, for example, proved to be unexpectedly fraught with emotion. From the other side of this trial, I now see…

Issue Five Hundred Forty Two

Case Study: How Discount Ceremony Was Published

By Timothy Day This is part of our ongoing series on how authors published their first book. You can read our other stories in this series, here, here, here, here, here and here. What a unique relief to be writing about my short story collection Discount Ceremony from this perspective. After many years of wondering if it…

Case Studies Issue Five Hundred Forty One

Tips for Plotting a Memoir

By Emily-Jane Hills Orford Are you writing a memoir? A story about your life or someone else’s life? Have you considered your theme? Or your plot? Remember, every life has a story to share and that story needs, no, in fact, it has both a theme and a plot. So, don’t randomly launch into the…

Issue Five Hundred Forty Special Feature

What’s a Sensitivity Reader, Why They Are Important, and How To Hire One

By Niesha Davis A sensitivity reader is a type of editor that looks at manuscripts and other works of art to ensure minorities and diverse identities are accurately represented. After the #metoo and Black Lives Matter movements ushered in a social reckoning, these specialized types of editors are becoming more and more prominent. Though authenticity…

Issue Five Hundred Thirty Nine

Mindfulness and Writing

Martha Witt Many years ago, during a residency at an artist colony, I was sitting at my desk struggling to write when my eye caught a phrase scrawled into the wood of my desk: “Writers write.” At the time, stalled trying to draft a story, I naturally moved to the existential question, “Am I really…

Issue Five Hundred Thirty Seven

Articles by A Guest Author