Never Give Up! A Winner Tells You Why: A Guest Post by Memoirist Elizabeth diGrazia

Elizabeth diGrazia joined me last week on Madeline Island, where she worked on her storyboard for her memoir-in-progress--the same memoir that won her a recent place in the renowned Loft Mentor Series, sponsored by the Loft Literary Center in Minneapolis.   

Being a Mentor Series award-winner means a year of close mentorship by a well-known writer, and Elizabeth was thrilled to hear that her manuscript won.  Here she tells exactly the process she went through and how long it took.  Her story is very inspiring to all writers, especially book writers, so I wanted to share it with you this week.

Be sure to check out Elizabeth's blog at WordSisters to read more.

I was a Loft Mentor Series finalist four times.

This doesn't count the many times that I submitted to the Loft Mentor Series and wasn't a finalist.

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Some Notes from Bestselling Author Cheryl Strayed about Writing Wild

Bestsellers make me curious.  Sometimes they are worth attention, sometimes they are all hype and bad taste--a great example of the latter is 50 Shades of Grey, which sold 700 million copies for content instead of good writing.   

Then there are books that make it big and deserve it.  One of these is the memoir by Cheryl Strayed, Wild.

I read Strayed's Wild and her compilation of advice from "The Rumpus" column, Tiny Beautiful Things.  Both books were so well crafted, so engaging, I've become one of those readers who are eager to know more about Strayed's writing practice, her ideas, and her book structure techniques--anything I can absorb.

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Writing Hopeful, Inspirational Books--The Story behind Nancy McMillan's March Farm

March Farm in Fall

Nancy McMillan had already fallen in love with the beautiful March Farm in Bethlehem, Connecticut, by the time she decided to write a book about it.  She'd met an author at a farm event who had written about a dairy farm in Eastern Connecticut, using photographs and narratives to document a year in its life.  

Nancy kept saying to herself, "Someone should do that for March Farm here in Bethlehem."

  

"You know what happens when you start saying that: you're that someone," she says.   

Nancy had already gotten a few articles published; she wrote a series of theater reviews for Warner Theater and essays for Edible Nutmeg.  And she was passionate about the locavore movement and sustainability.  So writing about March Farms fit her on many levels.

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I Did Everything Wrong at First--An Interview with Award-Winning Novelist Lynne Spreen

After a lifetime as a corporate suit, putting all her creativity into keeping employees from fighting with each other, Lynne Spreen, author of the debut novel, Dakota Blues, was finally able to cut back to part-time and write. Unfortunately Lynne discovered that, for all her brilliance in composing corporate memos, she knew almost nothing about constructing a novel.  

She says, "Dakota Blues was my first novel and I did everything wrong at first, which necessitated having to go back and rethink everything a million times. Or at least it seemed like a million. Maybe only a thousand.  I spent years learning--attending classes, conferences, and reading books and articles." 

Dakota Blues went on to receive the 2013 Next Generation Indie Book Finalist Award for Women's Issues.

Lynne shares her experience as a new writer who battled the learning curve of a first novel--and came out successfully. 

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Writing Strong Suspense: The Difference between Speed and Tension in Story

An Interview with Mystery Writer Hallie Ephron

The Boston Globe calls her novels "gripping" because of her real and nuanced characters, and Hallie Ephron's first love is mystery and suspense, although her last three novels cross over into women's fiction.   

She says she likes to write stories "inspired by personal experience with a creepy twist."  This week Hallie talks about the difference between speed and tension in story and how strong suspense comes from a combination of the two, engineered just right.

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Are You Getting Enough Listening Time in Your Life? The Value of Silence for Book Writers

I've been reading a wonderful book this week, by writer Terry Tempest Williams, called When Women Were Birds:  Fifty-Four Variations on Voice. 

When Terry's mother died, she left the legacy of several shelves of journals, and she asked Terry to read them after her death.  Terry was astonished when she opened the first, the second, each journal, to find the pages were completely blank.  When Women Were Birds is a meditation on the meaning of this extraordinary experience--and also on the value of silence, the blank page, in the life of a writer.

I'm reading this amazing book while retreating at a cabin in the mountains.  I give myself this retreat time each August.  I allow myself as much silence as possible. 

Silence means hearing the call of two pairs of nesting loons from the lake down from the cabin, the loud red squirrels and Blue Jays, the creak of trees in the wind, and the crackle of the fire in its old stone hearth in our cabin's main room. 

Slowly, these sounds allow the silence in me to emerge.  And with the silence, an emptiness that makes way for new ideas.

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Do Your Creative Brain a Favor: Write What You Love, Not What You Know

Guest Post by Rosanne Bane 

 

Rosanne Bane is a Creativity Coach and author of Around the Writer's Block: Using Brain Science to Solve Writer's Resistance (JP Tarcher). She's a veteran Teaching Artist at the Loft Literary Center and other art/writing centers. For more of Rosanne's brain-based advice for writers, visit her blog.

Some writers don't write because they don't know what to write. They've been misled by the conventional wisdom that you should "write what you know." How stultifying, how limiting, how uttering boring!

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Guerrilla Marketing for Book Writers: Winning Ideas from Mystery Author Nancy Wood

It's been over a year since Nancy Wood's novel, Due Date, was published. It's been quite a journey for this first-time author, trying to figure out book marketing. 

If someone had told Nancy that she'd be spending as much time on marketing as she spent on writing, she says, "I wouldn't have believed them. But it's true. And, if someone had told me that I would enjoy book marketing, I would have looked at them as if they had a screw loose!"

But Nancy says that's true too, and an unexpected gift.  

Book marketing has been a lot of fun. She's met many, many authors, writing in a variety of genres, and has read dozens of amazing books. She's had the opportunity to cross-promote, helping other authors promote their books and be promoted in return. And she's been able to connect with readers as well.  

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Finding Your Way to Great Characters--An Interview with Three-Time Novelist Jay Gilbertson

  Jay Gilbertson says he began dabbling in the mysterious world of novel-writing while running his hair salon in NE Minneapolis.  Though a voracious reader, he noticed that he had a large client base of single, beautiful, successful women who were not looking for a companion.

     They were content being single and many had forged strong relationships with their friends who really were family.  Jay felt there was not enough in the literary world that supported this and set about to create a series.  

Full Moon Over Madeline Island, though easily enjoyed as a stand-alone novel, is the third in his series.

  And yes, he says, there will be more.   

Last week Jay was interviewed in the Huffington Post, and he also joined me this week on Madeline Island, for our week-long book-writing retreat.  Here are some insights on how he brings his quirky characters to the page.  

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Simple Tricks for Editing Your Manuscript's Prose--Five Steps from Pro Editors That Make a Scene, Chapter, Book Shine

Books enter our lives in distinct stages. 

First comes the wild idea.  It grows gradually in your creative self, until it feels like an elephant in the corner of a room, not letting you ignore it.  Until you're compelled to get it on paper.

You write for months or years.  You now have a huge file on your hard drive or piled on your desk.  You rework it, get feedback, rework some more.  Hate it, love it, feel neutral.

Finally, you're ready for revision.  Revision is essential; we know that professionals spend most of their book journey on this final stage.  But if it's our first book, how do we figure out what needs attention?  It reads OK, our writers' group loves it.  But we still sense the book isn't ready to go out to agent or editor. 

Without a plan, a map, revision can feel endless.

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