Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 40

Avoiding the “Road to Hell” with Powerful Adjectives and Adverbs

By Sarah Chauncey

The road to hell is paved with adverbs. — Stephen King, On Writing

The road to purgatory is paved with adjectives. — Lianne, a former writing colleague

Readers don’t like being told what to think, feel or perceive. They want to have an experience, and our job is to use words that facilitate that experience. We all experience the world—including books and stories—through the filters of our own experience and conditioning, so it requires skill and practice to evoke th...

Brevity Craft Merges with the Brevity Blog

Brevity has grown in size and scope over the past two decades and our flagship magazine of concise nonfiction exists now side-by-side with an active daily discussion of craft and the writing life on The Brevity Blog.

As we grew, we began to note that the Craft Essays we published with each new issue of Brevity often overlapped with the Blog content, and our submissions for Brevity Craft began to taper off as well. At the same time, Julie Riddle, our Craft Editor, stepped aside after decad...

In Short: A New Journal of Flash Nonfiction

A Q&A with Steph Liberatore

By Andrea A. Firth

At the end of January, Steph Liberatore, a writer and a professor in the English Department at George Mason University, added another line to her cv: Founder and Editor in Chief of the new journal of flash nonfiction—In Short. Brevity Blog editor Andrea A. Firth spoke to Steph about her new lit mag and the craft of flash nonfiction.

Andrea A. Firth: What motivated you to launch a literary magazine, and why now?

Steph Liberatore:  I’ve...

What’s In A Name Anyway?

By Regina Landor

Last fall I joined the choir of the Unitarian Universalist Congregation of Rockville near my home in Maryland. I love singing with others, it lifts me, and it allows me to spend an hour and a half once a week focusing on nothing but music.

Recently during our 10 minute break, a fellow alto scooched next to me and said in a chipper, curious tone, “So, tell me about the book you’re writing.” I had mentioned to her the previous week that I was writing a book, but didn’t sa...

The Hard Sell: Why Memoirs Get Fewer Book Deals

By Allison K Williams & Jane Friedman

A writer asked me, “Allison, why are memoirs so much harder to get published than fiction?”

I took the question as fundamentally true—that memoirs are harder to publish than fiction—but why?

For one, fiction has genres, and genres have fans. Writing a mystery? There is an existing pool of mystery readers who want to read more mysteries. They are already on mailing lists. They are already browsing that section in the library or bookstore. Publishe...

“Live Writing” & Nurturing the Freedom to Make Abstract Connections

By Alexandra O’Sullivan

When people ask me what I do and I tell them I’m a teacher, their faces often brighten for follow up question, ‘What do you teach?’ then quickly twist into humorous disgust to exclaim, ‘Oh, I hated English!’

Some days just walking into my classroom to face the ever-present hatred, not of me, but of the subject I happen to love, is uniquely discouraging.

In my first year of teaching, I handed out reader’s notebooks filled with lined paper for the students to fi...

Not Telling It All

By Bev Stevens

I was in my sixties before I turned my hand to creative nonfiction. I was, and still am, writing web copy and how-to guides for online accounting software: dry stuff, but that’s okay; it pays well, I have an analytical mind and a good deal of persistence. For a long time, I had no pretensions to be a real writer. I had been mightily discouraged by a primary school teacher. She read my poem and said I’d never be a writer, too many lists. Actually the poem was okay for a seven...

Writing in the Water

By Samantha Ladwig

A blank page never scared me until I bought a bookstore months before the pandemic—an endeavor that pushed me into retail hell, the stress of which sucked all the air out of my creativity.

I didn’t want to admit my reality because I didn’t know who I would be without writing and that scared me. But after a year of trying to force ideas out onto paper, I put the pen down; my job needed me to be all in, and I had a responsibility to show up.

Those in between, writing...

Hitherto, the Amazingly Flexible Essay

By Dinty W. Moore

Memoir, despite its occasional detractors, remains a popular, powerful genre of nonfiction, and thanks to the creativity and inventiveness of contemporary writers, the form isn’t losing any steam. But there is another genre in our field, an older one, sometimes called the personal essay, occasionally called the ruminative essay (“we chew things over”), sporadically called the reflective essay, and any writer interested in expanding their range would do well to consider th...

What Are You Showing? Two Vital Components of Powerful Scenes

By Heather Sellers

Most of us are familiar with the dictum, “show, don’t tell.” Allow your reader to participate in making meaning with you, don’t bore them with explanation.  When I teach, I love to quote Dinty W. Moore: “Show a lot, tell a little, never explain”—the best recipe for calibrating scene, summary, and reflection that I’ve ever come across. Many writers rely on scenes—units of dramatic action, playing out in real time—to carry the weight of the narrative through showing.  

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