Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 112

My Writing Time is Sacred, but Please Don’t Ask Me What I Did All Day

By Sally Schwartz

It’s easy to be a writer. All you have to do is tell people, “Hi. I’m a writer.”

Gosh. All this time I thought I wrote memoir, and then this nugget of fiction pops out of my fingertips.

The nonfiction version goes more like this: It’s not so easy to be a writer.

Already I need to make an edit. One thing about being a writer is crazy easy: dressing the part. Really, I can’t say enough about the wardrobe. Everyone is going around, giving credit to COVID-19, as if ...

Small Miracles: Sweet-Talking Short Pieces from Your Full-Length Manuscript

By Alle C. Hall

It is a marvel, to create an entire world and a complete life in 500-5000 words—especially if you hope to do so by pulling a few paragraphs or pages from a full-length manuscript. Be warned, however: creating short, standalone pieces is just as consuming—if not more so—than starting from the God-space of The Blank Page.

There is dejection is leaving out the 70-or-so thousand words that took years to write. We ask ourselves, Is my work is superfluous, the time wasted? Th...

Memoir and Indescribable Magic: An Interview with Alden Jones

In The Wanting Was a Wilderness (Fiction Advocate, 2020), Alden Jones blends literary analysis, craft essay, and memoir to create a thoughtful, distinctive examination of Cheryl Strayed’s Wild: From Lost to Found on the Pacific Crest Trail. Alex Marzano-Lesnevich terms Jones’ compelling hybrid “a beautiful, lyric, unexpected book about the power of memoir.” Morgan Baker interviewed Jones recently for the Brevity blog, exploring issues of honesty, self-awareness, “likeability,” persona, and h...

A Review of Jana Larson’s Reel Bay: A Cinematic Essay

By Rachael Hanel

A picture in a newspaper in 1999 sent me on a journey to find out more about a woman who is impossible to know. Jana Larson, too, also saw a newspaper article that began a nearly 20-year journey to find out more about a woman who is impossible to know.

Sometimes I can’t believe I’ve put more than twenty years into the research and writing of my subject—practically half my life. So as I read Larson’s Reel Bay: A Cinematic Essay, I didn’t feel so alone—here was another w...

A Universe of Context: How Research Helped Me Understand My Story

by Jennifer Berney

Seven years ago, when I began to draft my memoir The Other Mothers, I thought I understood my own story. It went like this: I wanted to build a family with my wife. I spent over a year and thousands of dollars trying to conceive using a method I thought would be quick and easy. We chose an anonymous donor from a sperm bank and paid a fertility clinic to perform the inseminations. The care I received was at best insensitive and at worst incompetent.  At our initial consu...

That Flow

By Chelsey Clammer

I can’t carry a tune with my voice so I let my pen do the singing. Melodies of life moments, those metronomed memories, a symphony of sentences, and some harmonized hashtags (I actually don’t know what that last one means, but it sounded cool and that’s eventually going to be my point). There’s a certain flow a writer must follow. Each time pen hits page, it’s a different flow. But the pen is that steady rhythm in each writing attempt. The movement of words tapping thei...

Use Your Words (and Everyone Else’s)

Perhaps you’re in a writing group. Maybe you give each other live feedback, maybe you write it down, maybe both. And maybe, each time you look over your marked-up pages, you think:

Well…Bob certainly added a lot of commas…

Wow…Jane left like 30 comments. Now I feel bad I only gave her 4…

Cindy, that word doesn’t mean what you think it means…

“Enjoyed reading”? I made thoughtful comments on every one of your pages and I get back “Enjoyed reading”?!?!?

And yet, a writing group i...

Your Voice is You

By Michelle Redo

About five years ago, I downloaded my first audiobook. It was Gloria Steinem’s My Life on the Road. She’d just been interviewed about it on the prominent public radio station I worked for and I thought it would be a great way to test drive my new Audible subscription. I climbed onto the elliptical machine at 5:30 am before the onslaught of my workday and hit play as I began to pedal. The narration opened by clarifying that the introductory sections would be read by the au...

A Review of Courtney Zoffness’s Spilt Milk

By Nicole Graev Lipson

On a recent morning, I poked my head into my son’s room during virtual school. It was literacy period, and his teacher was introducing his second grade class to the concept of “mirrors” and “windows.” Say you’re a boy who lives in New England and loves birds, and you read a book about a boy who lives in New England and loves birds. That story would be a “mirror” reflecting your world. But if you’re this same boy, and you read a book about a girl who lives in Madagas...

The 21st-Century Book Launch

Dinty W. Moore’s latest book To Hell with It Of Sin and Sex, Chicken Wings, and Dante’s Entirely Ridiculous, Needlessly Guilt-Inducing Inferno dropped early. Happy readers posted selfies with their Amazon-shipped copies before Dinty himself got a published book. Other writers report Amazon jumping the gun, too. Conversely, the wrenchingly beautiful Inside Passage has pushed back a month. My own publication date for Seven Drafts moved from May to September (sorry but thanks for sticking with ...