Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 10

A Fresh Brevity: Survival Stories, White Camellias, and Reading to Our Mothers

Brevity’s Spring 2025 issue features brilliant new essays from Barbara Hurd, Gary Fincke, Daniel Wallace, Clare Needham, Lindsey Pharr, Anne Valente, Rachel Nevada Wood, Laura Johnsrude, C.R. Calabria, and Sean Lovelace, featuring a husband’s ashes, shadowy beginnings and endings, and two girls trying to survive one night at a bar. 

Please join us for some incredible stories.

Krakens, Bigfoots, and Vampires: What My Teacher Forgot to Tell Me About Writing

by Ilona Bray

We filed into eighth-grade language arts class, cafeteria mystery-meat heavy in our stomachs. Seattle’s omnipresent cloud cover drifted into our pre-adolescent brains, filling whichever gaps weren’t occupied by crushes and personal insecurities.

It was up to Miss Willis to keep us alert. Miss Willis of the stylish ‘70s outfits, shiny boots, and long blonde hair. Unlike some public school teachers, who ranged from psychologically damaged to alcoholic, she inspired thoughts ...

Worth the Climb: Self-Editing Secrets That Actually Work

By Allison K Williams

Perhaps you’re staring at your manuscript, thinking, This is either brilliant or a dumpster fire, and I genuinely cannot tell which.

Congratulations!

You’ve reached the sacred ground where all good writing eventually finds itself: Revision Land. Population: every author who’s ever published anything worth reading.

I’ve spent fifteen years watching writers transform jumbled first drafts into powerful, funny, compelling, entertaining books. Talent makes it easy...

Write Only What You Must (And Never Force Your Sentences)

By Beth Kephart

There has to be a spark.

How obvious it sounds. How impossible to manufacture. How easy to gauge—the sparked or the spark-less. The book, essay, or poem rising out of some undeniable, unquenchable human need, or its opposite: the diligent, the dutiful, the biddable, the pro forma, the project emerging from the general anesthesia of a desire to write something, which is not the same as the thing.

I can’t-help-myself vs. I should.

I can’t sleep until I know where thi...

Once Upon a Time and Narrative Plotting

By Anna Rollins

Several years ago while I was in the query trenches for my forthcoming memoir, I tried to distract myself from agent ghostings and rejections by outlining my next book.

I enrolled in #AmWriting’s Blueprint For A Book challenge and over the course of ten weeks thought about the skeleton of a book’s structure: from the hook and the back jacket copy to the overarching “why” the book should exist in the first place.

One exercise involved using the framework of a “once upo...

The Urge to Move, the Courage to Pause

By Katie Wiles

In the past few weeks, it’s felt like I’ve stepped into a quantum leap.

I’ve been flooded with insight and energy around my writing. My Substack space — once a quiet corner for essays and reflections—suddenly feels like it has potential. Not just a hub for scattered musings, but a creative platform I can grow from. Something real.

New ideas came rushing in: interviews! Guest essays! A website refresh! I dove in, as I always do—fully and fast.

But alongside that mome...

I Could Have Written an Essay. I Wrote My First Mystery Novel Instead

By Andromeda Romano-Lax

Photo of Andromeda Romano-Lax by Adrianne Mathiowetz

I was a nonfiction writer—essays, journalism, travel writing—long before becoming a novelist, so when I witnessed some alarmingly toxic behaviors at a writing workshop six years ago, I thought, I’ll write an essay. This wasn’t the first time I’d seen people mistreated in a writing workshop, but it was a particularly strange experience involving an especially vulnerable group, including young writers and first-timer...

What My Ancient Six-String Guitar Taught Me About Daily Writing Practice

By Candy Schulman

Writing is like music, I tell my students every semester—not only in its rhythm and dynamics but in its daily discipline. Writers and musicians must practice every day.

It’s easy for me to dole out this advice as I’m almost always eager to sit down to write. I don’t belong to the club of writers who bemoan that they’d rather do anything else—including housework. I’d much rather write than vacuum.

Yet, I am humbled when one day I dust off my guitar, which has been hi...

Story Before Shape: How Hermit Crab Essays Elevate Your Writing

By Nancy McCabe

Long ago, I resisted “hermit crab” essays, which use extraliterary forms such as instruction manuals, recipes, and glossaries as containers for telling stories. I prefer storytelling that doesn’t call attention to itself, that draws me in so that I forget that I’m reading.  My own early drafts tend to be relatively linear and straightforward.

But years ago, I ran across Michele Morano’s masterful essay “The Subjunctive Mood” in her collection, Grammar Lessons: Translatin...

Building on Brilliance—How to Bring Another’s Genius to Your Own Writing

By Marianne Bohr   

As writers, we’re all familiar with the wall. Things are going swimmingly, all is flowing—the ideas, the emotions, the words—and then suddenly, inexplicably, they stop.

We’ve hit the creative wall.

All writers have ways of dealing with the loss of inspiration and forward motion—they take a walk, hit the gym, meditate, leave the project for a few days, journal, read a good book, throw perfectionism out the window and just keep writing, even though they know it’s l...