Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 39

Get On Board: Keeping Readers on the Dramatic Train

By Allison K Williams

There is a glorious moment in almost every manuscript where the editor realizes, “Aha! THIS is where the story starts!” and breathes a prayer of thanks that the author does indeed have a book. Their labor has paid off, we discover, and we don’t have to send a diplomatically worded editorial letter suggesting they start again from scratch.

This moment is usually somewhere in pages 34-50.

Don’t get me wrong—I see plenty of strong first-page hooks. Intense confront...

Crabby Hermits and Simone Biles: Using Satire and Experimental Forms

By Carlos Greaves

Simone Biles had just withdrawn from the women’s gymnastics team event at the Tokyo Olympics, and reading Piers Morgan’s tweet made my blood boil.

“Are ‘mental health issues’ now the go-to excuse for any poor performance in elite sport? What a joke.”

How someone with zero experience competing in elite sports — let alone Olympic gymnastics — could say something so heartless and ignorant about an athlete’s struggles was baffling to me. So, as a satirist, I did wha...

For the Edification of My Soul—And the Enhancement of My Writing Craft

By Laura Johnsrude

I go to art galleries for the edification of my soul.

I go to art galleries to gasp and moan and wonder and pause.

Pause, as I do at a good line on the page. Captivated, I read the good line again, to savor the craft and the way the prose makes me feel.

At an art gallery, I want to see through someone else’s viewfinder, see inside someone else’s mind, yes. And visual art—I find—can nourish a writer’s imagination, generating ideas for new work.

Reason enough f...

Does It Have to Be Memoir?

By Beth Kephart

In the end, we make it. We craft the poem, we THE END the novel, we choose the cover art that will announce our work. No matter which pronouns we’ve used, no matter how many autobiographical facts we’ve either deployed or disguised, no matter how we defend or announce ourselves in our gussied-up flap copy, the books by us begin with us; they are personal. There is always the glimmer of an I standing in plain sight.

Having written and taught memoir for more than thirty ye...

What Columbo Taught Me About Writing Essays

By Andrea A. Firth

I’ve been watching reruns of Columbo lately. Why? At a young age, I was fascinated by the quirky detective from the 1970’s TV series—Columbo the rumpled, cigar-chomping, trench coat-wearing detective who investigates and solves a high-profile murder case each week. And now, I’ve come to see what the show and the character have taught me about writing essay. Yes, Columbo is a fictional character, but much of the craft we employ in creative nonfiction, like personal essay,...

Your Media IS Your Market

By Allison K Williams

How is the media you regularly consume supporting your book?

Writing a book is tough enough, but when we’re ready to bring our words into the world, we get overwhelmed and confused. What goes under Marketing and Audience in our book proposal? Which titles make great comps, showing the book’s place in the market? And, uh, who are your audience…and once you know that, where do you find them, and how do you get your voice into those places?

Scrambling to identify ...

Hit Play: Tapping the Power of Song

By Gretchen Cion

“Just listen,” my friend said, handing me her headphones. 

At thirteen years old, I sat on the steps of my junior high school while Martin Gore of Depeche Mode spoke directly to my soul. Martin had me at that first word of his tragic yet electrifying lyric— “fragile!” With puberty and unrequited crushes and pimples strewn across my face, I too knew what it meant to be fragile daily. Tears brimming from having been seen, I promptly went out to Bill’s Records and bought “...

Tending the Lotus

By Elizabeth Jarrett Andrew

Vietnamese Buddhist monk and teacher Thich Nhat Hanh told this story in his book The Heart of the Buddha’s Teaching:

When a young man wanted to learn how to paint lotus flowers, he approached a master for instruction. The master led him to a lotus pond, inviting him to sit. The young man saw flowers bloom when the sun was high, and he watched them return to buds when night fell. The next morning, he did the same. When one lotus flower wilted, its petals falli...

How Do You Know When Your Work Is Done?

By Suzanne Roberts

One of the questions I often get about writing is this: How do I know when a piece is finished? The first answer I give is that it’s done when it says what it needed to say, which is usually something different or deeper than what I had set out to do from the beginning, so there are both surprise and recognition. I’m the sort of writer who often has no idea where I’m going until I get there. Writing is an act of discovery, and I only figure out what I’m trying to say by ...

In Search of Today’s Literary Zeitgeist … and an Agent

By Kathy Watson

After reading the wish lists of 353 literary agents, I’m considering writing a novel about an emotionally damaged dragon girl who steals an ultra-secret spacecraft with time-travel capabilities and then beams to a distant galaxy 5,000 years in the future to find a giant lizard shaman who can excise her demons, and while there, falls in love with the shaman’s shape-shifting daughter, who is secretly plotting the overthrow of her planet’s evil kingdom. It ends happily.

My ...