The following essay is one of a collection of 39 essays by distinguished editors about the practical and theoretical aspects of publishing that appear in Editors on Editing: What Writers Need to Know About What Editors Do, edited by Jerry Gross, Grove/Atlantic, 1993. It is reprinted with permission of the author. When should a writer … Continue reading →
We’ve seen movie versions, television versions, and stage adaptations of Dickens’s famous story. We have had the story read to us and in turn have read it to others. Like people all over the world, we have been haunted by the mean, miserly character of Ebenezer Scrooge, which makes us think, amidst the gifts and … Continue reading →
During the winter holidays and New Year’s season, I usually search my files for writing I’ve done on previous holiday seasons, just to see what I was thinking in other years. Looking through my files this past week, I became interested in writing I did a decade ago, when I was exchanging letters with Christi … Continue reading →
Last March, I met Sondra Perl at the National Council of Teachers of English‘s Conference on College Composition and Communication in San Francisco. We talked about her book Felt Sense: Writing with the Body and I recognized the aspects of writing that she was addressing. I took my copy of the book home and excitedly … Continue reading →
Writing in BOOK PROMOTION newsletter, Francine shares the following quotes and biographical information about four dynamic motivational speakers and book authors: “Whatever your mind can conceive and believe it can achieve.” Napoleon Hill (1883-1970) “You become what you think about.” Earl Nightingale (1921-1989) “You can have everything in life that you want if you will … Continue reading →
About seven years ago, Sheila agreed to judge a personal essay contest for a writing magazine. Her task was to choose and rank the ten top essays among the submissions. Told to expect about 1,000 essays, she was surprised when 3,500 showed up at our door with only three weeks to choose the winners. I … Continue reading →
As you read this short story by magical realism enthusiast Tamara Sellman, pay attention to the ways in which the omniscient third person narrator reports the main character’s thoughts and ideas. Techniques of magical realism allow readers to understand and accept the mother’s way of understanding what is happening. With this acceptance comes an ability … Continue reading →
We come to journaling to record what we are doing and what we are thinking. As a writing teacher, I spend a lot of time onsite teaching and even more off-site creating lessons. When I was journaling about my son’s death, it is not surprising that I recorded the teaching part of my life as … Continue reading →
When he was a boy she was always painting the ceiling of his room. Once she painted it blue for a sky with lazy white clouds and faint daytime stars. And in one corner, as if just disappearing into his closet, the tip of an angel’s wing. “It could be only a bird’s wing,” she … Continue reading →
Viewing poetry as a gift, Edward Hirsch writes in his book “How to Read a Poem and Fall in Love with Poetry: “The question poses itself as how to keep alive an interior life in the face of our own and the world’s corruptions.” As an example of a solution, he presents Charles Baudelaire‘s prose … Continue reading →
Yesterday, I saw a sign in a shop announcing Halloween items were now half off. I was shocked to realize that Halloween was now close enough for merchants to start reducing their inventory. They’d started selling Halloween goodies in August, and that feeling that there was lots of time before October 31 was still with … Continue reading →
This article was originally published by Writer’s Digest Magazine. Reprinted here with the permission of the author. I’m willing to bet my favorite pen that most people who are reading this have no idea what a book packager is. Until I worked for one, I didn’t know they existed, either. Book packaging is a quiet … Continue reading →
I am a young schoolgirl watching the early dark fill my bedroom windows. I sit at a small drop leaf desk doing vocabulary homework, folding paper long ways in half and writing the date in whichever upper corner the teacher has asked me to. By now I’ve heard stories about Plato and Socrates. Thinking about … Continue reading →
Before I started studying poetry writing, I littered my work with the word soul. What was poetry but the soul making itself known? How else to talk when making an exploration of emotions but to use the word? John Donne, who I had studied in college, did: Our two souls therefore, which are one, Though … Continue reading →
In the conversation we posted last week between Kaylie Jones and Beverly Donofrio, you read about what these two authors think about the similarities and differences between memoir and fiction. Kaylie Jones states: “…memoir becomes an exploration of the author’s life choices” and “In memoir, the writer is allowed to draw conclusions for us.” In … Continue reading →
In February 2005, old friends, novelist Kaylie Jones and memoirist Beverly Donofrio reunited to teach together in San Miguel de Allende, Mexico. In the months before the workshops, they conversed with one another about their respective genres and the experience of having movies made of their books. The following is the transcript of that conversation … Continue reading →
I once created a daily writing exercise for myself by opening the dictionary to random pages and, eyes closed, circling my finger until it landed on a word. “This is something like throwing the I Ching,” I thought. I read the definitions of the words my fingers landed on and wrote the words at the … Continue reading →
In 2002, Grace Jackson wanted to start a community-based literary magazine filled with the voices of her women neighbors on Bainbridge Island, WA. To find her contributors, she distributed a flier at coffee houses, bookstores and libraries near her home. The flier asked women to: Tell me where you are in the world right now. … Continue reading →
Earlier this year, Hannah R. Goodman emailed me about her book, My Sister’s Wedding, a young adult novel she published in 2004 that addresses the effects of alcoholism on individuals, friends and families and asked me if I would like a copy. The topic was on my mind as I had only recently spoken to … Continue reading →
To write a good character, you have to imagine that you live in the character’s body and listen for his or her inner voice. Ask the character you are inventing what secret he or she most wants to keep. Decide if the story you write will reveal that secret or just inform the characters gestures, … Continue reading →
My Sister’s Wedding by Hannah Goodman (iUniverse, 2004) is a young adult novel that addresses alcoholism among family members and high school students from the point of view of a younger sibling who realizes her family is denying her older sister’s alcohol abuse and she is doing the same thing in a relationship with a … Continue reading →
At every conference I teach, participants commiserate about rejection notices– not only about getting them but about the insulting nature of their standardized messages. Occasionally, someone has a story of a personalized rejection or of actually having received suggestions from an editor on the rejection slip. Usually, though, the talk ends the same way–wall paper … Continue reading →
We benefit from writing about how something important to us became a passion. Reliving the decisions leading up to reshaping our lives around our passions and reflecting on how our efforts changed us, we learn more about our journeys. When we read accounts of others following their dreams, we experience the exhilaration of overcoming obstacles … Continue reading →
Steven Winn, columnist and critic for the San Francisco Chronicle and past contributor to Writing It Real, tells a good story about a series of articles he wrote that were extremely popular. He was eating lunch with one of his newspaper’s editors and telling her about Como, the one-year-old rescue dog his family had adopted, … Continue reading →
Joanne Rocklin’s young adult novel, For YOUR Eyes Only is in the form of a young teen’s notebook. You can read an excerpt at Amazon.com to see how effectively the writing strategy evokes the main character and the world in which she is immersed. Writing for the Children’s Book Insider, Joanne Rocklin provided tips for … Continue reading →
In March, 2005, Sarah Dickerson and I were on a panel along with Boise State University’s Karen Uehling and San Francisco writer Steven Winn in which we addressed attendees at the National Council of Teachers of English’s Conference on College Composition and Communication about using journaling in the classroom. I asked Sarah if she would … Continue reading →
Beggar Woman of Naples by Max Jacob When I lived in Naples there was always a beggar woman at the gate of my palace, to whom I would toss some coins before climbing into my carriage. One day, surprised at never being thanked, I looked at the beggar woman. Now, as I looked at her, … Continue reading →
Lucy Grealy, author of Autobiography of a Face, and five-time novelist Ann Patchett were acquaintances at Sarah Lawrence, where Lucy was legendary as a poet and inspired her classmates with her courage in facing and healing from constant surgeries to restore her face, scared and disfigured from cancer surgery when she was nine. When they … Continue reading →
We come to journaling to record what we are doing and what we are thinking. As a writing teacher, I spend a lot of time onsite teaching and even more off-site creating lessons. When I was journaling about my son’s death, it is not surprising that I recorded the teaching part of my life as … Continue reading →
School is almost out and the lazy days of summer are right around the corner. Well, the days we experienced as lazy when we were kids, anyway, because for a few months our schedules were more open. Some of us may be anticipating the time our children will have on their hands and others may … Continue reading →
Jack Heffron was my editor at Writer’s Digest Books for almost a decade, and we have been teaching colleagues for going on six years now.I still have the editorial letter he wrote to me after he’d read Writing Personal Essays:How to Shape Your Life Experiences for the Page, my second book on writing and the … Continue reading →
Writing It Real is happy to post an article this week by editor and creative fiction writer Jack Heffron. “The Flowering of Rabbit Hash” originally appeared this fall in Cincinnati Magazine. Jack lives in Cincinnati where he works with Emmis Books. As a fiction and creative fiction writer, Jack was hooked on an article idea … Continue reading →
From The Cartographer’s Tongue: Poems of the World Leaving Sarajevo by Susan Rich The bus driver stops to pick plums from an abandoned late summer garden, the pale blue carrier bags pulled from his bed where he sleeps underneath the bus. All night we watch movies, drink beer in the dark, cross borders where Bosnians, … Continue reading →
This week we are very lucky to have an article about revision by poet Susan Rich, described by Naomi Shihab Nye on the back cover of her first prize-winning collection The Cartographer’sTongue as “a caring citizen of every heart-land.” Not only that, she is a brave and dedicated teacher: her article is filled with examples … Continue reading →
A few years back, I received an email from Christopher Buckley requesting permission to reprint a review I’d written in an anthology of work by and about the late poet Larry Levis. I was thrilled to share what I’d written many years earlier for Poet Lore, a literary magazine in the Washington DC area. I’d … Continue reading →
…if you do not express your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole. — Rollo May, The Courage to Create It’s National Poetry Month and time to rededicate ourselves … Continue reading →
This material was originally published in the Making the Perfect Pitch: How to Catch a Literary Agent’s Eye, edited by Katharine Sands Pitch Perfect by Jandy Nelson Years ago, I received a query letter that began: “I am a Vietnamese American man, a witness to the Fall of Saigon, a prisoner of war, an escapee, … Continue reading →
This year Marlee Millman wrote an essay to read to her family and friends who were gathering to celebrate her 65th birthday in her hometown of Chicago. She was excited and wanted to have a speech prepared. She emailed me: Hi Sheila, Here’s the beginning of my essay on meeting Medicare. It’s hard to believe … Continue reading →
So often, we believe we have to put our daytime work aside in order to write and in order to reach the place inside ourselves where writing comes from. But I believe we will be more successful at tapping into and mining the writing part of ourselves if instead of always waiting for the time … Continue reading →
After creating an exercise from which her fiction writing students wrote stories, Meg did the exercise herself. She says, “In my story, a woman is suddenly afraid to leave a grocery store. Why? As I began the story, I didn’t know. I had this scrap of paper that said ‘Fear of exiting a supermarket.’ So … Continue reading →
“Our most promising fictional characters are obsessed,” says Meg Files, Writing It Real correspondent and author of Write From Life: Turning Your Personal Experiences into Compelling Stories. “They’re looking desperately for love or passion or parents or fame. They’re searching for answers to questions they can barely ask. Their obsessions offer writers a way to … Continue reading →
When I walked into an independent bookstore recently and saw Apprentice of the Flower Poet Z. on a table of new fiction paperbacks, I picked it up because of its title and then read the first of the back cover blurbs: “A splendid satire of literary life…Annabelle is the perfect naïf, the babe in the … Continue reading →
Three days ago, the weather grew suddenly cold where I live in Port Townsend, WA, and for the last two mornings there has been light snow and frost on our roofs and on the ground. This is not typical weather for Western Washington, so when I arose and saw sudden snow falling fast and sticking … Continue reading →
Last Valentine’s Day, I read an essay in The Seattle Weekly by Marilyn Meyer, a friend of mine who had raised a family in Seattle the same years I had and who, having survived remarriage and divorce a time more than I, was single again. Dating was getting harder as she got older, and at … Continue reading →
I am currently teaching an online course entitled Journal Like the Pros for Writers.com. Each week, participants use prompts and examples I send to them to comb their memories and observations and put words on the page that surprise them with wit, charm, and poignancy. The entries the participants send affirm the idea that when … Continue reading →
Janice Eidus, author and Writing It Real correspondent, currently teaches creative nonfiction for the University of New Orleans and uses writing prompts with her students based on the essay anthology In Brief, a book I discussed in my December 16, 2004 article. This week, she shares those prompts with us, and I offer a demonstration … Continue reading →
I have been enjoying humor writer Judy Gruen’s essays since she published her first collection of them, Carpool Tunnel Syndrome: Motherhood as Shuttle Diplomacy, and began an Internet newsletter to deliver her humorous column, Off My Noodle, to a wide audience. She has since written a second book entitled, Till We Eat Again: Confessions of … Continue reading →
These essays first appeared in “Off My Noodle“. Revenge of the Chihuahua by Judy Gruen I have always had a secret hankering to take bold and dramatic action to further the cause of liberty. Sadly, I have had few opportunities to foist my valuable opinions on the public. Heck, I haven’t even served on jury … Continue reading →