Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 48

Five Scenes Your Book Needs

By Allison K Williams

What I love most about being married to a non-writer is the conversations. His questions about publishing are often a reality check: yeah, sometimes publishers buy a book and pay the author and don’t bother to try to sell it, and…wait, what??? More positively, I’m often pushed to think through and clearly explain things I “just know” about story structure and character development. Last night, while walking through a souk in Muscat, Oman and valiantly resisting the of...

Imperfection

By Abigail Thomas

If I were shooting for perfection, I’d never have bought more clay. Luckily I prefer imperfection. It feels more like life. I don’t want to make smooth bodies and muscles that appear where muscles actually are, or tendons, or exactly what you look like when you squat down naked on your haunches. I’m interested in moods. I like catching whoever they are in a moment of becoming or coming undone. Perfection is sort of ho-hum. It is also beyond me. And it is not what the clay...

Hooked by a Comma

By Diane Kraynak & Scott Hurd

We are a literary couple.

We’re not famous household names, like Stephen and Tabitha King. 

Nor are we known for high-spirited libertine exploits like F. Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. We prefer to be in bed by 9:30 pm.

Perhaps we’re more like Elizabeth and Robert Browning, expressing our mutual love through our shared craft. However, unlike the Brownings, you haven’t read a syllable of it because, for some unfathomable reason, the New York Times rejecte...

Lit Mag Submissions Minus the Mystery

By Becky Tuch

The first time I heard people talking about literary magazines was at a writing conference almost two decades ago. A panel of writers were discussing their submission strategies. One poet said she submitted to an average of thirty places at once. A fiction writer said that when she got a rejection from a magazine, she immediately sent the piece to three or five more places.

In my mid-twenties, new to the idea of writing as a career, I was astounded. Thirty places at one ti...

Memoir or Novel?

By Rebecca Morrison

After losing my legal contracting job at the beginning of the pandemic, I put my fears aside and pursued my decades-long dream of writing a memoir. I’d been a lawyer for over twenty years and didn’t know much about creative nonfiction. So, I signed up for an online writing class hoping it would give me the push I needed to pursue this impossible seeming goal.

With each class I took and each story I wrote, the fire that had been burning for years within me to write a ...

Work Your Writing

By Clorisa Phillips

Writing essays and a memoir-in-progress is work for me. In a good way.

When I retired from my four-decade career in higher education, colleagues encouraged me to write a book. “Do it!” “It would be so informative!” All I could think was ugh. Strategic planning, community relations, fund-raising? Performance tracking? That would just continue the impersonal work I’d always done. Eager instead to go on what Isabel Allende describes as “a journey into memory and the sou...

Crafting Persona: The Art of Omission

By Jill Talbot

Some moments won’t ever come around again. In March of 1997, Hale-Bopp made its closest approach to Earth, and by the first week of April, the comet—at its brightest—held in the sky as if suspended. Late one night that week, I stepped out of my car on the shoulder of a highway, while my best friend, T., scrambled for her gun, tucked beneath the passenger seat. We were both a few months from turning twenty-seven, forever in khaki shorts and flannel shirts, stranded by a flat ...

Turning the Corner on Confidence

By Mimi Nichter

After pushing the send button, my excitement lasted for all of thirty seconds. It was quickly replaced by twinges of doubt. What had I done?

I’d written my first essay and submitted it to Newsweek. Well, not exactly my first submission since I’d published several academic books and over seventy journal articles. But this was different — this piece was based on personal experience not research findings. Having spent years avoiding sentences that began with “I”, an essay r...

Improve Your Memoir by Thinking Like a Photographer

By Grace Hwang Lynch

My father handed me a black plastic USB drive in an old bill envelope with a glassine window. It was smaller than my finger and looked like one of the many useful things a retired engineer gives his children in the hopes of improving their lives in practical ways. Little did I know at the time that this tiny piece of technology would become a window into the family history I always sought, but could never find.

Who am I, and how did I get here? Those are two of the ...

Writing in Place

By Jean Iversen

As writers, we’re often encouraged to create a personal, inspiring space to write. Virginia Woolf advocated a room of one’s own. Dickens wrote from a favorite desk and chair. Colson Whitehead writes to a 2,000-song playlist at ear-splitting volume.

Less attention is given to the surprising benefits of writing in the same location in which our stories take place. In other words, we can summon mysterious forces that shift our writing by simply placing ourselves in a certai...