Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 42

Google Gets Me

By Sonya Ewan

I believe we should not ignore or dismiss our fears of the writing, but, rather, befriend those fears. – Jeannine Ouellette

I counted twice. Exactly seventy-eight times, my developmental editor had suggested I write more on how I felt about events in my memoir. That process—delving deeper into repressed and unexpressed emotions and coaxing them forth with a promise of potential book success and the bonus of greater emotional maturity—took me six-and-a-half, early-pandemi...

From Page to Stage—Angst to Bliss in < 48 Hours

By Bella Mahaya Carter

My chest tightened as I listened to fellow cast members perform their stories two days before the show. What am I doing among award-winning storytellers? I wondered. Must I follow a Moth GrandSLAM Champion and share a stage with professional actors?

I’m a writer, not a thespian. I’d planned to read a carefully crafted true story. An earlier version had been published in a literary journal. The director said, “No need to memorize, but definitely be familiar enough ...

Gentling the Wild Beast: Imagery as a Path to Grief Writing

By Helene Kiser

In my husband’s dream about a month before he died, he saw me seated at a table in a funky bookstore, a steaming mug of tea and a stack of books waiting to be signed. A line of people jostled in front of him, chatting, tugging off knitted stocking caps. Some clutched a book with my name on the cover, titled The Cancer Poems.

This book will never exist.

I went on a poetry-writing hiatus after the birth of our children. My husband, a fiction writer and essayist, also pi...

My Tender, Tender Writer’s Skin

By Mary Hannah Terzino

“I feel as if I am walking on eggshells with your writing,” one of my closest friends texted. She’d just read a flash piece I’d written. More precisely, she’d just read a flash piece I’d written in a retreat that included professional writers, where it was discussed through two iterations; revised; reviewed again separately by the two writer friends who read most of my work; revised; workshopped with my local writers’ group; revised again; submitted to a well-known j...

In a Book I Haven’t Read, I Found Permission to Write

By Jen Gilman Porat

Recently, my newsfeed featured a link to an article from The New Yorker, “Can a Memoir Say Too Much?” Instead of clicking it, my eyes snapped shut as if I’d stumbled across a dead body. The article focused only on Blake Butler’s new book, Molly, but I didn’t know this yet. I feared cancel culture had come for the entire genre.

How could a mere title wound me? It couldn’t. I was primed for defense. I’d been wrestling with the ethical challenges of writing memoir for y...

How an Old Blog Pulled Me Out of My Writing Slump

By Nikki Campo

The first time I wrote a blog post in 2011, I had to laugh. Me? A business person with no writing credentials starting a blog? What was I thinking? I was thinking that since my mom and I had overhauled our diets, we should document our findings. What I wasn’t thinking was that stirring up food-related insights with words, adding a sprinkle of what awed me, and hitting “publish” would later provide a path when I fell off course with my writing.

Before we go further, I shou...

A Place for AI in Your Writing: Book Proposals

By Ann Kathryn Kelly

How many writers out there love writing book proposals? Show of hands, please.

Just as I suspected. I see very few hands going up.

Book proposal research and writing is not for the faint-hearted. If I’ve learned anything over months of querying my memoir to deafening silence, it’s that book proposals need to be about the sales viability of one’s project.

Yes, proposals also need to showcase your creativity—in concept, craft, and writing style. But I’ll admit t...

The Sto Po: A Hypothetical Rant Against the Knee Jerk Content Constabulary

By Marjie Alonso

Recently I posted to a Facebook group for fellow writers:

Would anyone be willing to be a beta reader and review the first draft of my book about my trip through White Sands National Park, New Mexico, when I was abducted by aliens?

Everyone in the group where I posted this request is a writer. As writers, we all need readers for first drafts. We’re all citizens of the same literary community. I have read people’s drafts in this way, and, while this was the first time...

The Fine Art of Literary Fist-Fighting

Lee Gutkind, founder of Creative Nonfiction magazine, began promoting the genre in the early 1990s, pushing for acceptance in both the academic and publishing worlds. Along the way, Gutkind witnessed the resistance, the battles, and the victories that led to the vibrant genre (and multiple sub-genres) that thrive today. Dinty W. Moore, founding editor of Brevity, interviewed Lee recently about his latest book, an engaging, surprising, fast-paced, and enthusiastic blend of critical history, m...

How to Know If a Publisher is the Real Deal

by Allison K Williams

Today’s essay is a little different than our normal posts. I’ve seen a wave of new publishing scams recently, and we all have to know how to protect ourselves before we buy into a story with a very unhappy ending. So I want to show you my real research process for finding out if a publisher is the Real Deal. You can watch this video, which shows exactly which websites I visited and how I evaluated the information, or you can scroll down and read the transcript, below my ...