Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 13

Think of Your Reader as the Smartest Friend You Have

By Dinty W. Moore

Storytelling is always a balancing act. How much description of people, places, lush hills, brilliant sunsets, memorable meals, is too much and how much is too little? Do we plot our life’s ups and downs into breathless cyclones of page-turning suspense or let our stories unfold more gently, more naturally? How much of our inner dialogue do we share?

The biggest challenge for many of us, though, is often determining how much do we explain? We don’t want to overwhelm ou...

Send Us Your Personal Essays!

Call for Submissions – The International Amy MacRae Award for Memoir

By Alison Wearing

In May 2019, a small group of women met at a writing retreat in the south of France. Among them was a sparkling young woman named Amy.

Amy spoke often of her daughter, then four years old, the years of heartbreaking infertility Amy and her husband had endured before a beautiful adoption, and how much she loved being a mother. “The best thing I’ve ever been called is Mama.”

Amy also talked about her ...

Publishing Companion Pieces Served My Memoir Well in Unexpected Ways

By Julie Brill

Publish short, related pieces before you publish your memoir is advice I heard from many teachers. It’s the basis for Susan Shapiro’s jam-packed class “Instant Gratification Takes Too Long,” which I took twice. Having more than a dozen essays published about my relationship with my family’s Holocaust experiences prior to the publication of my memoir Hidden in Plain Sight: A Family Memoir and the Untold Story of the Holocaust in Serbia served me well for reasons beyond what I...

On Blurbs That Matter and How I Did It.

By Nina B. Lichtenstein

A few days before submitting the precious blurbs I had procured for my forthcoming memoir, the publishing world was abuzz: Simon & Schuster decided to drop their blurb requirement, in what Lit Hub called “a dazzling move.” In his statement piece in Publishers Weekly, S&S publisher Sean Manning said, “…trying to get blurbs is not a good use of anyone’s time. Instead, authors who are soliciting them could be writing their next book.”

Considering the many hours I sp...

How a Box in the Woods Taught Me to Write About Nature

By Kasey Butcher Santana

My science teacher uses a ruler and twine to mark a square-foot box in the damp blanket of leaves covering the “outdoor classroom.” My task today is to observe this small patch. Part of a log has fallen within the boundaries, and I note the moss that grows on it and the bugs that seek shelter under its flaking bark. We return once a month to note how this woodland square changes with the seasons and maybe even write a poem.

I do not remember completing this assi...

Discovering I Was Not a Poet: Letting Your Purpose Find You

By Deborah Saki

From the time I was six or seven years old, I knew I wanted to be a writer. I would bind sheets of paper together, scribble short stories and lines of poetry, and proudly finish each with an “About the Author” page. In my collection, I wrote: “Deborah Saki is a writer and poet. She has been writing since she was six.”

Even though I wrote both stories and poems, what I really wanted to write was poetry. I kept the lines of other poets close to me, memorizing verses, recit...

Writing as a Way to Live in the World: An Interview with Emily May

Emily May came of age in a time of the Spice Girls declaring “girl power,” riot grrrls combining punk music and politics, and numerous cultural messages suggesting that the time for women’s equality was upon her.

In her debut essay collection Some Girls, May explores the harsh realization, as she passed from teenage dreams into adulthood, that the bill of goods she’d been sold was a faulty one. In the more than fourteen years May spent writing Some Girls, she watched as her own artistic p...

On Allowing the Work to Rise

by Jan Priddy

One of the earliest bits of advice I received about writing—other than using correct punctuation and cutting adverbs—had to do with holding on to work. Write the draft, take it as far as you can, maybe even to where you think it’s done. Then set it aside. Come back a few months or at least wait a few weeks and read it again. Rethink the piece, revise.

Like bread dough, writing needs time to rise undisturbed.

I am here to tell you that this is excellent advice. When you ...

Deeper Character Connection: An Audio Flow

By Britta Jensen

I’m often queried about characterization and how to access a deeper POV that’s missing in a developing narrative. I frequently hear:

“Why can’t I get my characters to speak to me?”

“How can I explore my character’s backstory?”

“How do I go deeper with my character’s voice and find their motivations?”

Every writer has these struggles, whether you write fiction or memoir. Sometimes cultural contexts complicate how we handle our own emotions and that bleeds into o...

Why Literary Citizenship Matters? A Brevity Blog Round Up

By Dinty W. Moore

The Brevity Blog‘s central focus is writing: ways to keep our writing alive in the face of discouragement, specific craft tips aimed at making our writing more clear and appealing, and how to navigate the complex publishing landscape. But we also focus on what we call ‘The Writing Life,’ and that includes more than just putting down words, moving sentences around to create vivid stories, and sending them out into the world.

The writing life includes—or should include—a...