Chris Abouzeid's Blog

Beyond the Margins Welcome Page

  Welcome to Beyond the Margins   Sorry, but we no longer post material on this site. If you’d like to read past articles or find new works by BTM authors, please click on one of the links below. Thanks, and good luck with your writing!    Links to Beyond ...

Beyond The Margins Says Goodbye

Five years ago Beyond The Margins began—our way to explore the craft, business and emotions of writing. It’s been a fantastic journey building this site. We began running Beyond the Margins by consensus and are ending it the same way: today we sign off with great sadness, measuring the work ...

Above and Beyond Award 2014

We at Beyond the Margins were delighted to receive more than 50 nominations for 25 organizations for this year’s Above and Beyond Award. We discovered writers’ groups that do everything from guide new authors to publication to running workshops for court-involved youths and senior citizens. We heard about small presses ...

You Don’t Say

Robin Black So, here is a writing exercise it might be fun to try.  (And arguably the best part is that there’s no actual writing involved.) For one hour, during a time when you are with at least one other person, keep track of everything you think, but do not ...

The Novel with Many Narrators is a Multiheaded Beast

  By Kathy Crowley The idea of writing a novel with many narrators began growing in my mind years ago.  I blame it on Faulkner, specifically on The Sound and The Fury, which I read at an impressionable age. “Caddie smelled like trees.”  Yes, that may have been the line ...

(Impossibly Condensed) Checklists for Beginning a Novel

By Randy Susan Meyers  Last week I taught an all day seminar at Grub Street — “Writing Tools for Beginning a Novel”— where I learned how difficult it is to condense the process into six hours . . . and how exhilarating it is to step back and look at ...

On Believing — Martin Luther King

Dr. Martin Luther King’s Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech December 10, 1964 “Your Majesty, your Royal Highness, Mr. President, Excellencies, ladies and gentlemen, I accept the Nobel Prize for Peace at a moment when twenty-two million Negroes of the United States are engaged in a creative battle to end the long ...

Where Do Ideas Come From?

By Robin Antalek Ideas. Ideas are everywhere. If only they were reliable. Like Lucy from Peanuts dispensing psychiatric advice for a nickel, wouldn’t it be lovely if something similar existed for writers? Perhaps even by genre? Whenever I do a reading or teach a class or visit a book group ...

Crossing Over: From Poetry To Prose

    by Robert Thomas     My first book of poetry, Door to Door, included a prose poem called “Why I Am Not a Novelist” that ended with the narrator coming home after an evening walk in the city: “He hears his girlfriend in the back room chanting a ...

Do You Get the Same Experience From Audiobooks and Print?

    By Nichole Bernier Two days ago, I finished an audiobook that’s been captivating me for the past month — The Sparrow, by Mary Doria Russell. When I reached the end, there was no closing the book with a dramatic clap or flipping back to the first chapter, as ...