Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 26

Cover Story: Learn Your Book’s Look

By Allison K Williams

I designed my own cover, with support from my publisher-If you hate it, that’s on me!

The level of control authors have over their own book cover design ranges from “Marketing has already decided, sorry” to “You paid for it, so purple Comic Sans it is!”

Covers entice (or repel) readers from across a room or in a one-inch thumbnail. Publishers have deep marketing knowledge, but it can be painful to have your vision overlooked in favor of “what sells.” Self-publishing...

I’ll Be the Expert on My Life, Thank You

By Heidi Croot

Live long enough as a memoirist and someday, someone will state the facts of your life as if they know them better than you do.

A while back, two cherished writers’ group members who had cycled through several chapters of my memoir-in-progress, told me they believed my grandfather had molested my mother in the 1940s.

I knew he hadn’t.

“We don’t buy it,” they said.

They based their opinion on a single entry from my mother’s yearlong diary, which I’d included in my...

Using the Good Notebooks

By Joy Nicholas

I knew what the gift was before I unwrapped it. Clue 1: it was book shaped. Clue 2: I’d read my friend’s flowing cursive scrawled across the accompanying card, “Keep writing your beautiful words.”

“Oh, this is gorgeous!” I gushed, tearing the paper to reveal a notebook, its fabric cover embroidered with pink flowers on a swirling vine. “Thank you so much! I love it!” And I did—I really did. But I also knew exactly where it was going to go.

What’s wrong with you? my in...

Dramatic Structure: What Do We DO with It?

By Allison K Williams

I’ve taught dramatic structure many times. Traditional five-act and three-act structures for memoir and novels; a four-act structure for thrillers and mysteries; letter-e structure for memoir, spiral structure for essay collections; circular structure for blog posts and travel writing. In their simplest application, the writer draws the structure and maps their scenes along the graphic path, for a visual representation of building tension, turning points, major narrat...

Get Out of My Head, Stephen King!

By Katie Rouse

Hello, my name is Katie, and I don’t read enough.

That’s it. That’s my confession.

It has been 30 days since I last read a sentence that wasn’t my own. I can count the number of books I’ve read in the last six months on a single hand. If I hear one more author say, “Writers must read voraciously!”—I might quit.

I didn’t love reading for most of my childhood, getting through elementary school on Great Illustrated Classics. Then in 7th grade, I stumbled on my dad’s hi...

“What About the Cat?” Feedback from an Online Writing Workshop

By Helen Raica-Klotz

“You asked for feedback on the ending of this essay, specifically the last sentence. I agree; it is problematic. You write, ‘I put down the pencil….’ Clearly, this object is a phallic symbol, but what does this action represent? Turning away from the patriarchal system that has dominated your entire life? A rejection of your cis-gendered sexuality? The recognition that your creative potency, your life-force, has disappeared altogether? This is a rich metaphor, one that...

Draft and Revise, Explore and Invent: Gardening With a Rustbelt Feminist

In her debut essay collection Homing: Instincts of a Rustbelt Feminist, Sherrie Flick shares in intimate detail her ongoing quest to determine where she belongs in the world, as a woman, as a sometimes nomad, and as a cook, gardener, and artist raised in a “no-bullshit steel town.” Flick’s voice is compassionate, thoughtful, and refreshingly honest throughout.

Beth Ann Fennelly writes, “At times elegiac, at times sassy… Flick’s essays transport us to the places where she finds her homes—b...

Integrity as Craft: Willing Oneself Toward a Total, Messy Wholeness

By Ren K. D.

I’ve never been one for rules. Rules and their technical demands—functioning as authority, really—have filled me with vitriol and disgust for as long as I can remember. It’s a reaction like full-body hives that I never, not once, felt I could control.

At the age of 3, I lasted precisely three days in ballet classes, discovering I could not simply leap and twirl around the room in the special outfit, causing absolute chaos and getting swiftly kicked out. I lasted a few month...

A Good Title is Vital: Getting the Hang of Writing Headlines

By Estelle Erasmus

I have been called the “title queen” by my students and bosses. As a magazine-editor-in-chief in the 90s and up till the mid-aughts, I specialized in writing the coverlines, article, column and essay titles for the print publications I worked and wrote for, including Hachette Filipacchi’s Body by Jake, The American Breast Cancer Guide, W.I.T. (Women in Touch), and Esthetique. I also wrote for publications including New Woman and Family Circle, and later the online public...

Demystifying the Memoir Query: A Brief Interview with My Literary Agent

By Paul Rousseau

Paul Rousseau

The query for my first book, Friendly Fire: A Fractured Memoir—about the time my best friend unintentionally shot me in the head through two walls in our on-campus apartment, one month before college graduation—was picked out of the “slush pile” by my agent Michele Mortimer of Darhansoff & Verrill Literary Agents. Knowing of the misconceptions and anxieties that often surround the querying and “finding an agent” step in memoir publication, I thought it would b...