Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 17

Making it Fun: How Blogging About Doing Ordinary Things in Extraordinary Situations Exploded My Audience

by K.L. Sullivan                                                                                 

Two hundred miles south of the Equator and a thousand miles from land, my husband and I were crossing the Pacific from Mexico to New Zealand on our 24-foot sailboat. It was Spring 2012, the trade winds had stopped unexpectedly, and we were becalmed for three weeks. How calm was it? So calm that the avocado peels thrown overboard after lunch passed us.

How calm was I? Not very, after chasin...

Blurbs: What You Need to Know

By Andrea A. Firth

Here at Brevity Blog, we love being in dialogue with and sharing other excellent literary sites. I recently wrote a an essay for the Blog about my approach to writing blurbs for books. Shortly after, I read a terrific essay on Rebecca Makkai’s Substack, Submakk,  called “Blurb No More” in which she provides a comprehensive deep dive into blurbing books in today’s publishing landscape.

Makkai is a New York Times bestselling novelist and the Artistic Director of StoryS...

Don’t Do the Thing That’s Not the Thing

By Caroline Langerman

A few years ago, a woman who had seen my essays in The New York Times wanted to connect with me about “how to get published.” At this time, I had two babies (my main work!), and unsure I had any advice to offer about a serious writing life, I paced around my house in my cuffed pajama pants, preparing to Have The Phone Call. When the phone rang, I plunked the kids in front of the TV.

“I want to be doing what you are doing!” she began.

Me? I looked down at my cuff...

Ouija Boards, Erasure, and Speculation: Experimentation in Memoir

By Marty Ross-Dolen

In December 1960, when my mother was fourteen years old, her parents were killed in an airline disaster involving the collision of two commercial jets in the blustering skies over New York City. My grandparents were traveling from Columbus, Ohio, to seek placement for their family’s iconic magazine, Highlights for Children, on the newsstands. I was born six years later to my nineteen-year-old mother, two weeks shy of her twentieth birthday. My parents named me for my mo...

Make a Space: Writing on Retreat or at Home

By Allison K Williams

We all want more time to write. To explore on the page, to revise, to finish. Another writer tells me, “All I want to do is have other things go away so I can focus on my book, and day after day, something comes up.”

Things don’t go away. We have to go away from things.

Recently, I took a self-guided writing retreat, on board Cunard’s Queen Anne (privilege + travel agent brother + last-minute sale of unsold rooms + flyer miles). I picked an itinerary of cold, gr...

Once Upon an Epigraph: Framing Your Story with a Touch of Magic

By Deb Miller

“The things I do for love.”
— Jaime Lannister, A Game of Thrones by George R.R. Martin

What a way to start a chapter. Martin’s epic “epigraph”—a short quotation or saying at the beginning of a book or chapter, intended to suggest its theme—sets the tone for Jaime Lannister’s pivotal actions and character arc in A Game of Thrones. It’s universal, even if you haven’t read the book or watched the cultural phenomenon on television.

But you don’t have to be a New York Times b...

Vultures, Check Your Email: Fast-Pitching Reactive Essays

By Allison K Williams

Recently, there was a terrible tragedy. Or a momentous political event. Someone famous got a bad diagnosis or got divorced or got canceled. A war started. Someone famous got arrested. A government toppled.

So I screenshot a relevant detail of the dreadful news and emailed a writer I know.

RE: Your Tragedy Is Timely

Gruesome, but this might be the time to take part of your existing essay about [your past tragedy], and make it more of an immediate reaction to...

Learning to Play with Words Again

By Samantha Ladwig

There are some who claim writer’s block is a fiction. But a little over a year ago, whenever I sat down at my computer, that’s exactly what I was confronted with—and I knew why.

My time was limited during this maddening period, wrapped up in my then-job as a bookstore owner, and I had developed a bad habit of only writing on assignment. I needed an acceptance to justify shifting my attention from the shop to an essay. The problem with this approach was that my writing...

My Reader Lives in My Head. Does Yours?

By Amanda Le Rougetel

“Who is your reader?”

I ask this question in two different writing classes and get two different reactions.

The first class receives my question with puzzled looks and silence, then offers a few tentative answers. “Um, my reader is me, I think.” “I write for my own amusement.” “I’ve never really thought about that.”

The second class is more definite. “I don’t think about a reader when I’m writing. I just write the story I want to write.” “I don’t want to be s...

How a Medium Informed My Memoir

By Julie Ryan McGue

Three years ago, after my husband passed away from cancer, my grief counselor suggested I use a medium to help with healing. Connecting to the other side through a vetted professional was something I had never tried much less considered. I was skeptical.

Curious, doubtful, and anxious about what might be revealed during the channeling, I signed in to my computer video session with the medium, Cyndi. In a gentle voice, she asked, “What brought you here, today? What qu...