Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 53

Discovering the Why of Your Essay Collection

by Patrice Gopo

In the early days of the pandemic, words fell from my fingers, returning to me after a time of absence. Several years before, in the aftermath of the publication of my first book of essays, I had found myself unable to create. How strange that this time of lockdown existed side by side with my emergence from a creative wilderness.

I didn’t ponder this oddity, though. Instead, I wrote and wrote and wrote. And later as the headlines filled with George Floyd’s murder and th...

The Grief-Growth Cycle of Being a Writer

By Megan Aronson

“I’ve been lost and reclusive of late as I deal with the most recent iteration of my grief-growth cycle,” my friend Candace Cahill, author of Goodbye Again, wrote in an online writing group I belong to the other day. “Learning—the hard way, mostly—new things about myself and the challenges still ahead.”

My eyes hovered over her words as her thoughts echoed my own. I wasn’t the only one who’d stopped at the words “grief-growth cycle.” Soon the comments were flooded with ...

Toward the Walrus: Remembering Why You Like Writing

By Lindsey DeLoach Jones

Last year I taught creative writing at a residential arts high school for gifted students. My students had applied and been selected from across the state, and they were wildly talented. But a couple of weeks into the semester, it dawned on me: they didn’t like writing.

Presumably, they had liked it at one point—back when it lived in their diaries and book margins and notes apps, back when a pen and paper inexplicably produced, inside their lonely middle school ...

The Art of Juggling Simultaneous Projects (or Trust Your Own Process)

By Michelle Redo

“No one but you will get this right.”

I was surprised by the words that slipped out of my mouth as I sat, headphoned, at my studio desk in Maine. The writer I spoke to, Charlotte Maya, stood in her blanketed closet in Los Angeles reading from her memoir, Sushi Tuesdays, exploring her husband’s death by suicide. The section she was about to read described the seminary project her son created memorializing his father after years of not being able to hear, much less say, t...

The Value of No

By Marjie Alonso

I’m taking a course on how to get pieces published. I’m doing this because the longer I’m a full-time writer, the less I write. Though I claim no expertise, this seems bad. I recognize I have a problem to solve.

In my previous life I was an expert in animal behavior, and in that world we understood something called a rate of reinforcement. This refers to the number of rewards per a given unit of time, usually minutes, or even seconds.

When training a dog to sniff out...

The Future of CNF Writing, Editing and Publishing in a World with AI, Part 2

AN INTERVIEW WITH SIL HAMILTON

Find Part 1 of this interview here.

AAF: Our conversation has focused on OpenAI’s model ChatGPT (4). Several competitive models have launched. Do any rival that model?

SH: Right now, I think ChatGPT and Claude.ai from Anthropic are the best for end users.

AAF: Writers of creative nonfiction and memoir tell true stories. There have been several articles citing examples of ChatGPT “lying” or “hallucinating.”

SH: ChatGPT has never seen the world, so ...

Many Ways of Visualizing Story Structures

By Nancy McCabe

If you try typing “Narrative Structure” into Google Images, a long string of diagrams will appear, most of them variations on ideas outlined by Aristotle in his Poetics about how a story works, a diagram commonly known as Aristotle’s Incline. While he was writing about drama, these concepts were handed down from drama to short stories and novels and then from fiction to creative nonfiction.

In her book Writing Fiction, Janet Burroway describes they typical Aristotlea...

You’ll Never Write in This Town Again

Buckle up.

By Allison K Williams

I know an editor who is a liar and a thief. Or rather, I know of one. Several years ago, a writer got in touch to say, Can you warn people about this editor? I am afraid to speak.

I tracked down others who, the grapevine told me, had also suffered. Writers had hired this editor for manuscript evaluations, book coaching, ghostwriting, proposal help, or paid to attend workshops. The services were not delivered, or were delivered poorly, or were delivere...

The Future of CNF Writing, Editing and Publishing in a World with AI, Part 1

AN INTERVIEW WITH SIL HAMILTON

By Andrea A. Firth

Sil Hamilton, machine learning researcher at McGill University, has spent the last five years studying how generative artificial intelligence (AI), new tools like ChaptGPT, is impacting our literary culture and scrutinizing how authors are working AI into their writing. He is on a mission to share his understanding of what AI holds for the writing, editing and publishing fields. Brevity Blog editor Andrea A. Firth talked with Sil about A...

American Breakdown: Crafting a Literary Mystery & Memoir

by Marcia Meier

Jennifer Lunden

In her genre-crossing literary mystery, American Breakdown: Our Ailing Nation, My Body’s Revolt, and the Nineteenth-Century Woman Who Brought Me Back to Life, Jennifer Lunden crafts a story that interweaves wide-ranging threads such as chronic illness, environmental pollution, chemical sensitivity, and the history of a little-understood illness that was questioned and made fun of by the medical community for over 100 years into a complex and fascinating memoi...