Friday, January 24, 2020
How to Help Your Manuscript Submission Stand Out--Being Part of a "Discourse Community"
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I often refer clients and students to Jane Friedman, clearly one of the most savvy publishing gurus out there today. Friedman is the forme...
Friday, January 17, 2020
A Cool Character-Building Exercise from Comic-Artist Lynda Barry
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January is often a good time to shake up the writing routine, examine different ways of approaching recurring problems in your book, get in...
Friday, January 10, 2020
Best-Selling Children's Book Author Shares How He Busted Tradition and Won Anyway
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Winner of three Caldecott Medals (the best win in kid lit), Mo Willems was rejected some billion times (his words) by publishers who said...
Friday, December 20, 2019
Getting Away from Your Life to "Entrain" at a New Level: Benefits of a Writing Retreat or Class Away from Home
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Winter is the time of year when I think about entrainment. Entrainment, as it pertains to the writer's life, is the art and science ...
Friday, December 13, 2019
Interiority? How Much Should You Show or Tell about Your Characters' Inner Lives?
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Interiority or "internals" is a fancy way to describe the reader's view into your characters' thoughts, feelings, and i...
Friday, December 6, 2019
Can You Use Real Place Names in Your Books? Can You Fictionalize Details?
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Maggie is writing a novel about a group of people living in a made-up place, based on a real location. She faced a dilemma this month ab...
Friday, November 22, 2019
Finding a Writing Group or Writing Partner--From Afar (Online and On Demand)
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Nikki, who travels a lot, took one of my writing workshops and recently emailed me with a great question: how do you find a writing grou...
Friday, November 15, 2019
Wisdom from the Irreverent Anne Lamott--on Writing and the Writer's Life
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We all need inspiration. Writing can be a solitary, even lonely, process, often discouraging. Thanks to my student Mary for this excellen...
Friday, November 8, 2019
Should You Pursue Your Manuscript--Or Set It Aside--After Multiple Rejections (AKA Who Are You Writing This For?)
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One of my students from Canada recently contacted me after the third small press rejected her memoir manuscript. The publisher was serious...
Friday, November 1, 2019
The Confusing World of Copyrights and Permissions--A Brief Overview for the New Author
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Although I don't recommend spending much time on the legal aspects of publishing until you are close to that long-awaited time, there a...
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