Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 34

Meet Me in the Middle: Reflections on 33,000 Words

By Allison Kirkland

As a teenager I lulled myself to sleep with fantasies of a literary life. Lying in my white four-poster bed, I’d stare at the ceiling and imagine myself other places:

On glamorous vacations with other writers, feeling like part of the club.

Giving keynote speeches at universities, followed by parties with free-flowing wine and copious cheeses.

Being told I was genius, that I’d written a great American work of art, that I’d changed the world.

Back to reality:...

Blind Optimism is Better Than None at All

By Dana Shavin

I have been struggling to write the same story for three weeks. About a week in, I thought it was finished, so I sent the seventeen-page behemoth off to my trusty writing mentor, thinking she would respond with high praise and a directive to submit it instantly to the most prestigious journal I could find. This is not what happened. This is not even close to what happened.

So I worked on it for another week. There’s a well-known joke that circulates among writers, that wh...

Should Writers Ever Look at the Comments Section?

By Samantha Ladwig

“Do you ever read the comments?” I’m always asked – usually towards the end of a session – when I teach a workshop on pitching.

For a long time, I said, “No, and you shouldn’t either.”

My experience with comments is that, if I’m not prepared for the negative ones, looking at them at all, even if they’re overwhelmingly positive, sucks the initial excitement out of the otherwise pleasurable experience: an editor accepting a draft, taking and shaping it into something...

Left-Brain Right-Brain: A CPA Turns to Creative Writing, With His Dad’s Approval

By Brian A. Rendell

After thirty years of building a financial career, I did what any self-reflective CPA would do – begin an MFA and focus on creative writing.

Huh?

Twenty years ago, a career coach suggested I take a personality test to discern why my professional career wasn’t satisfying. The results revealed my left and right brain functioning were relatively equal, 54% left-brained (logic, facts, and math) and 46% right-brained (imagination, creativity, and rhythm).

I call my ...

The Art of Writing Metaphor

By Alyson Soko

I once titled a piece Stomach In Knots and Other Cliches. Laden with lots of old sayings—sweep it under the rug and knickers in a knot, as examples—my writing instructor wrote a comment beside the title, “Not in my class!”

Regardless, I submitted it to a writers’ event, and I was invited to read. Still, I agreed with my instructor. A cliché is a low-level device if there ever was one. And, as I’ve recently learned, clichés are indeed metaphors, however hackneyed and over-...

Writing Beauty and Meaning—On Your Own Terms

By Michael Copperman

I was going through a tough time trying to find an agent a few years ago, and a literary mentor sat me down. He’d seen me flailing on social media, despairing after six months of being rejected for a project I had high hopes for because I felt it was commercially viable. Agents didn’t necessarily think so.

“Enough of this,” he said. “There are only two questions that you need to answer. The first is, what kind of artist do you want to be? When you know that answer, ...

How A Student’s Hostility Helped Me Become A Better Writing Workshop Facilitator

By Laura Gaddis

When Greg came into the writing workshop that I run at my local community arts center, I was excited to have a new face. For the past two years, I had filled a niche in Oxford, Ohio where the writers exist but are hiding like ants deep down in their mounds. To coax them out of their holes, I worked hard to recruit students. Some sessions I have five or six students. I’ve also had two or three (where most weeks only one shows up). But this particular spring session was fille...

When You Can’t Write: Collage, Craft, Create

By Yvette J. Green

Recently, having finished my manuscript and starting the submission process, I felt lost. There were no images with Joan Didion shimmers around them propelling me towards my notebook. I sat at my desk and sifted through memories, hoping one would step forward and connect itself to the present. I thumbed through my thoughts, but no intense emotions requested interrogation. So I veered somewhere outside of my head, to an arts workshop sponsored by The Phillips Collection, ...

Why Is Humour the Orphan of the Literary World?

Good humour writing is seriously hard work

By Doug Jacquier

It is indisputable that laughing is good for your mind and body.

But, like beauty, humour is in the eye of the beholder. There are distinct differences between different cultures, and indeed sub-cultures) find amusing. What might be a knee-slapper in your local bar over a beer may cause pursed lips at a dinner party over wine.

For some reason, many people look down on witty writing. They seem to believe that it requires l...

Write It Like It Is: The Power of Group Freewriting

By Deborah Sosin

Fifteen summers ago, I signed up for “Writing from the Heart,” a workshop on Martha’s Vineyard, an island off the Massachusetts coast. Each morning, a group of a dozen strangers gathered outdoors in a circle of garden chairs, surrounded by lavish blue and white hydrangeas. Nancy Aronie, the facilitator, gave prompts, we wrote, then we took turns and shared.

I’d dabbled in the craft of freewriting on my own using Natalie Goldberg’s classic Writing Down the Bones, but the...