Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 86

A Review of SJ Sindu’s Dominant Genes

By Hannah White

When I was a girl, my grandmother taught me how to sew. She was quite young for a grandmother—always mistaken by strangers for my mother—but she was obsessed with old things. Her basement was littered with antiques: a giant loom for weaving blankets, a sewing machine with a foot pedal, colorful textiles, and furs. She wanted me to learn things the old way, the right way.

I spent afternoons by her burning wood stove, practicing stitching together scraps of fabric or watc...

Why Are You Telling This Story?

On the intersections of art, justice, and personal responsibility

By Jeannine Ouellette

Pamela Paul’s recent New York Times column, “The Limits of Lived Experience,” argues that writing about people whose lives differ from ours involves empathy and imagination, and is therefore good, while “policing” what others should or shouldn’t write is bad. Paul writes,

What troubles me most about the increasingly dogmatic emphasis on ‘lived experience’ is that it feels like yet another way of ...

The Persistent Metaphor of Birds

By Paula J. Lambert

For so long, I swore I didn’t where the birds in my writing had come from. Their bones, beaks, feathers—so many kinds of feathers. The feet, toes, talons. Every odd, intricate detail of a bird’s anatomy would turn itself into a poem or appear in an essay—eventually, hundreds of pages. They keep coming.

I’m not a birder. I’m no ornithologist. When I finally remembered the birds in my grandfather’s yard, it seemed to explain…something. All those flashes of color: b...

The Myth of the Extrovert

But what do you do if you’re an introvert?

I’ve been asked this question a lot, when I talk about book marketing and author platform.

You’re so positive and energetic about marketing your work to agents and publishers. But what about us introverts?

Well, what about you?

What should we do differently?

Not a damn thing.

There’s a persistent idea that introverts aren’t good at social media or outreach or dealing with rejection or talking about their book in public. But extrove...

A Beach Blanket Brainstorm (for Writers)

by Abby Alten Schwartz

How I turned Billie Eilish’s BAD GUY to a BEACH BOYS song … in Hawaii surrounded by roosters.

I stumbled across this tweet by Ali Spagnola two months ago and naturally had to click on her video. I was captivated watching Ali transform the edgy “Bad Guy” into a sunny, Beach Blanket Bingoesque song, complete with music video of the final cut. It was hilariously entertaining and, days later, I was still thinking about it.

I’m fascinated by the creative process—no...

Against the Shitty First Draft

By Gabriela Denise Frank

Can we strike shitty first draft from our vocabulary?

No wants to do a shitty job at anything. Writing time is precious and we know words matter, yet we erode our efforts with faux-cheerful statements: “I’m writing my shitty first draft this weekend!”

It’s just an expression, you say. It doesn’t mean anything.

Well, honey, self-talk matters.

We seek to move people with the same language we use to label our writing shitty. When this phrase infiltrate...

The Absence of Yes: Why Agents Don’t Answer Your Email

By Di Brown

I’m querying a memoir.

Is there any single sentence in a writer’s life that is as debilitating, exhilarating, and soul-crushing?

Got a gut-wrenching story that took a decade to live, two to recover from, and five years to write? Summarize it in two to three paragraphs. Synopsis. Outline. Show the arc. Outline your platform. Demonstrate the market. Do it really well and an agent might glance at the first ten pages. Or not.

In most cases, I’ll never know. Because agents ...

A Review of Suzanne Roberts’ Animal Bodies

By Elizabeth Bales Frank

Grief is a canyon that rings with unexpected echoes.

Suzanne Roberts’s latest essay collection Animal Bodies: On Death, Desire, and Other Difficulties relates her experience with all of these things: grief, its canyons, and its echoes. “The essay is an accumulation of grief. Mother says to get over it,” reads a paragraph from the collection’s opening essay “The Essay Determines How I Will Begin.” A common reply to grief is “get over it.” The very phrasing of...

Yes, You Can Successfully Publish Your Book

By Dinty W. Moore

Writing a book is hard enough, but for many what follows is a path to publication fraught with anxiety and concern, and for too many writers, a depressing sense of being powerless.

All that hard work, and then what? Agony and frustration?

It shouldn’t be that way, and it doesn’t have to be. Yes, the market is highly competitive, and various publishing industry practices contribute to those feelings of isolation and hopelessness, yet success is more within our grasp...

Rotating the Writing Crops

by Kate Walter

After writing and publishing a memoir in essays in less than two years, I felt my essay ideas had dried up. I had pushed myself hard because the subject of my book – a pandemic memoir – was timely, and because I had a firm deadline from my publisher.

By the time my memoir, Behind the Mask: Living Alone in the Epicenter, was released last fall, I felt completely wiped out. Not just from writing and editing and proofreading during such a short window of time, but I was ...