Holly Walrath's Blog, page 10

How to Approach Editing Your Book, From the Point of View of a Professional Editor: The Three Types of Edits Most Books Need to Stand Out in an Agent’s Queue

You’ve just finished a first draft of your novel. It may have taken you a few months or a few years. But what’s the next step? How do you approach revising a novel when it feels so huge?

​As a professional editor, I deal with hundreds of clients a year who are eager to submit their books to agents and publishers. The process I use for editing a book involves three steps. Not all books need all of these steps, but knowing the difference between them can help you edit your own work.

Read the Article at Feedium . . .

Poetry Reprint: Elegy for a Body - Cultivating Body Positivity

I take up ashes
like taking up space.
I am dis-embodying my body
or what I once called skin,
its remnants rounding out,
the insides of a blue funeral urn
whose curves make sense...

Read the full poem at Storymaker . . .

Poetry: Bearing the Light - A Poem for Gentle Things

White-tendriled weed
in bloom, cotton shrouds
a hundred of your hearts
each one a white world
sweet, unruly, unknowable...

Read the full poem at The Junction . . .

How to Organize Your Writing Drafts With inspiration from Marie Kondo

Poets who have been writing for several years end up with lots of unfinished drafts and notes. As a freelance editor, I often work with clients who have tons of old drafts and no clue how to process them. For myself, I often write 100+ poems in a year, resulting in a massive amount of poem clutter.

After all, you don’t want to abandon those poems that are older, because they feel like your babies. But it is necessary to sort through them, to choose poems for publication or to just decide how to categorize them. As Paul Valery said, “No poem is ever ended, every poem is merely abandoned.” Poems that don’t work now might work later. Poems that aren’t published in a journal or magazine might make it into the later draft of a book.

As I was thinking about this process, I wished there was a good method for sorting through old drafts. Then I remembered one of my favorite Netflix shows and a woman named Marie Kondo.

Read the full article here . . .

Revising Poetry and Wildness: Crafting an Entirely New Vision for Your Poems

“The writing of poetry is not a craft. We are making birds, not birdcages” –p.47, Dean Young, The Art of Recklessness

Revision is one of my least favorite things to do as a writer of fiction, but when it comes to poetry, I absolutely love it. As an editor, I work with many poets who are struggling to understand what a poem is and how they can improve their poetry. They see other poets succeeding (getting poetry acceptances, writing full-length collections, etc.) and want to know how to be a better writer of poetry.
In her MasterClass, Margaret Atwood says, “Revision means re-vision — you’re seeing it anew, and quite frequently when you’re doing that, you see possibilities that you didn’t see before and that light up parts of the book in a way that wouldn’t have happened if you hadn’t done that.”


Read the full article here . . .

Writing Successful Book Reviews:How Not to Harsh Readers’ Squee and Still Be Objective

This might seem like a hot take, but no one wants to read your opinion about a book. No one cares. We don't read books so we can learn what critics like or dislike about them. We read books to escape our lives, to be enriched, to enlarge our imagination. 

Book reviews are vital to the book publishing world. They help readers determine whether they will want to read a book. They're a major factor in book sales. If you want to be a successful book reviewer, you have to look beyond just your own complaints.

Read the full article here . . . 

What Makes a Poem Memorable? It’s in the Science of the Brain

Have you ever thought about memory? It's such an important tool in writing poetry, and yet we remember things without even realizing it. Every moment of every day, we're remembering our grocery lists, our tasks, but also the memories of emotion and love and wonder and fear. Memory gets us through our day.

Mary Oliver said the goal of revising is to write "memorably." So what makes a reader remember a poem? As children, we were taught to memorize poetry. But most readers usually only memorize poems they love as adults. 
 
Read the whole article here . . .

Interview with Stephanie Wytovich

I am stoked that Stephanie Wytovich, Bram Stoker Award-Winning Poet, asked me to interview for her blog! Stephanie was also kind enough to write this blurb about my forthcoming full-length book of poetry, The Smallest of Bones , now available for pre-order from CLASH Books. 

"A striking meditation on the body and its ghosts, this collection is a blossoming of bones and the trauma we hold inside, a gorgeous homage to the fever dreams and nightmares we collect, break, and survive with each and every day." —Stephanie M. Wytovich, author of The Apocalyptic Mannequin

Read the interview here . . . 

New Flash Fiction: Speaker for the Unborn

I stand here today holding the hands of the dead.

How I was given voice I cannot say. The unborn chose me to speak because I alone among us, the unbirthed, have grown. Untamed by the shackles of statuary and gravestones, my spirit roamed free above the Hudson River for the first sixteen years of my unlife. Truly unwanted, as they say, my parents did not get to bury me...

Read the full story at Write Wild . . .

New Poem at Barely South Review - SACRUM

I have a new poem up at Barely South Review. This poem also happens to be part of my new book and debut full-length book of poetry forthcoming from CLASH Books in September of 2021. Stay tuned for more boney weirdness, y'all. 

Read the poem here . . .