Allison K. Williams's Blog, page 9

Why Every Writer Should Be Writing Book Reviews

By David Wogahn

Movie night at our home is invariably influenced, if not dictated, by IMDb ratings. If I’m on the fence about my wife’s recommendation, how can I argue with a 7.2+ rating? (Alas, it doesn’t work the other way.)

Speaking for our home, we don’t visit a restaurant, choose a hotel, or buy a product without first checking ratings and reading customer reviews. Considering most books are sold online, it’s no surprise that customer ratings and reviews are becoming ever more impo...

Trusting Your Senses To Tell Your Story

By Barbara Kaplan Lane

“When an old person dies, a library burns to the ground.” (African proverb)

Sometimes we hesitate to write about our lives because we think they’re not interesting or that no one will be able to relate to them. The great English novelist, E.M. Forster, famously said, “Only connect.” Why are we here, if not to try to connect with other human beings?

Writing personal narrative or memoir is humbling. We don’t often have scintillating experiences to share, and that...

Memory and Meaning in Two Voices: Writing A Mother-Daughter Memoir

By Riley Pickett and Harriet Riley

Riley Pickett

Riley, daughter: My mother and I are writing a memoir together. I am exactly half my mother’s age, having reached the age she was when she birthed me, 32. At this curious milestone, I find myself drawn to comparing my life at 32 to hers at that time—pregnant with her first child, caring for her sick mother, and married to a man who was physically and emotionally absent. My mother is a journalist. I am a poet. This memoir is what emerges when ...

Keep Showing Up, Keep Listening, Keep Looking: Ann Patchett on Writing and Life

By Hillary Moses Mohaupt

Here’s what I remember from my college graduation: the commencement speaker, a famous alumnus of my college, encouraged us, the graduates, to lie down in the grass and really feel it whenever we needed grounding. This is the only thing I remember from his speech.

Many years later, though, when I get up from my writing desk and head into the woods near my house to clear my head, I imagine that I’m only just beginning to understand what that speaker meant about th...

How to Write Something Today: A Brevity Blog Round Up

By Allison K Williams

I said, WRITE NOW!

When journalist Grace Segran discovered creative writing, she hated prompts. Her brain froze. Her writer friends agreed—prompts weren’t useful; in-class writing meant the teacher must be tired; writing on paid-for class time was a waste. Alice Lowe points out that even the physical form of the exercise sucks: “‘Time’ says the timekeeper, and you stop abruptly, mid-sentence, mid-word, it’s like taking the GRE, pencils down or you’ll be disqualified.”

...

Our Early Drafts Are Different from Our Crooked Toes and Knobbly Knees: Learn to Embrace the Difference

By Dinty W. Moore

For as long as I’ve been pecking away at the task of becoming a skillful writer, the resistance some folks have toward the practice of revision has genuinely baffled me. Why would someone not embrace a second (or third, or fourteenth) chance to get things right? Who wouldn’t treasure the opportunity to paper over early mistakes?

My being entirely enamored of revision has been a gift (more on that later), but as a teacher of writing—a mentor to eager and talented folks ...

On Nurturing the Longing to Write

By Faith Tibbetts McDonald

Some time back, I wrote an article for a national magazine that was mentioned in a cover blurb. I’d worked hard to achieve that placement, and shortly thereafter, the article was voted that month’s reader’s favorite. At the time, I thought such an achievement meant automatic and plentiful publishing opportunities were in my future.

I was wrong.

The internet’s surge began to nix print outlets that regularly featured my work. One by one, magazines and newspap...

How Decluttering Made Me a Braver Writer

By Stacey Manganelli

I probably didn’t look like someone who needed to declutter (before having kids). I wasn’t a hoarder, I told myself. I had no problem regularly throwing things away or donating them.

But the self-deception ran deep. Every few years I donated massive quantities of possessions—books read once, clothes worn once (or not at all), art and craft projects abandoned halfway through—only for them to creep back in. I was hoarding, just with bouts of purging thrown in.

My o...

The Quest for Clarity: Structuring Your Nonfiction Book Begins with Questions

By Amy L. Bernstein

When you begin with the facts, how lost can you get?

Many writers who set out to pack their hard-won expertise or their life story into a book, begin with an innocent assumption:

I know what I know. I just need to put it down in some sort of order.

But writing any form of nonfiction—whether you’re a chemist warning about the dangers of inadequate regulations or a trauma survivor recounting lessons in healing—involves so much more than, This happened, then that ...

Don’t Hire an Editor Like the Editor I Was Back Then

By Lillian Yates Duggan

Back then was about ten years ago. I was a mother of two squeezing in freelance editing work while my kids were at school. My editing career had zigzagged all over the place—from computer books to textbooks to translation to whatever came my way—but copy editing had become my sweet spot. I felt safe putting periods inside quotation marks, changing “which” to “that.”

Yet I was desperate for more creative work, for projects I could sink my teeth into—to move into “...