Chris Abouzeid's Blog, page 40

My Book’s Message in 800 Words or Less

  By Julie Wu “So, what’s your message?”  She asks. I press the phone to my ear.  It’s a radio interview–my first–and her voice sounds tinny and faint.   “Message?” I say.  Normally, I pace all over the house while talking on the phone, but all our cordless phones have ...

How to Be the Best Writer Ever (of Your Own Writing)

By Dell Smith [Photo by Liz Smith] “Well, I think that curiosity is probably the biggest thing that can keep you going, and the feeling that you can do something that hasn’t been done before…”* As writers, we write the story we want to read because it hasn’t been written ...

The Unbearable Lightness of Metapages

By Bethanne Patrick Last month I was fortunate enough to be invited to present at Grub Street’s The Muse and the Marketplace Conference in Boston. As is almost always the case (at least for me), the most valuable part of the event had nothing to do with the panels in ...

Better Presentations at Bookstores, Panels, Festivals & Other Events: 10 Tips For Writers

By Randy Susan Meyers The first time I read aloud (a Grub Street open mike at Johnny D’s ) I sucked. Years later (no more experienced) with my debut book launch looming, I had to do better. Pre-publication months were spent attending bookstore events with a notebook (and money*) in ...

Friday Faves: Let’s Play

By Laura Harrington I’ve been teaching introduction to playwriting at MIT for many years. It never gets old. Because wherever we are in our writing, as professionals or students, we are always facing a blank page. Every new beginning is simultaneously fraught with danger and risk and full of excitement. ...

Excavating the Beginning of The Story

By Juliette Fay Hoarding utterly fascinates me. I suppose it’s like any compulsion you don’t have—you can’t imagine why anyone would want to do it. If anything, I’m the opposite of a hoarder. I’m a chucker; I get great pleasure out of getting rid of things I don’t need, especially ...

Race, Identity, and Writing

“The single story creates stereotypes, and the problem with stereotypes is not that they are untrue, but that they are incomplete. They make one story become the only story. Stories matter. Many stories matter. Stories have been used to dispossess and to malign, but stories can also be used to ...

A Book Club Guide To Discussing Short Story Collections

    By Robin Black   Why am I writing this? I’m writing this because in the three years since my short story collection came out, I have had some amazing experiences discussing it with book clubs but I have also been told by many other groups that they find ...

Practical Guide to Practically Unrejectable Query Letters

By Nichole Bernier Teach a session on query letters to a room of writers seeking representation, and you’ll probably get more groans, rapt attention, and questions than you will teaching anything else. That’s because there’s so much confusion over what does and doesn’t belong in a query letter. A query ...

Guide to Query Letters That Are Stylistically Masterful & Technically Unrejectable

By Nichole Bernier Teach a session on query letters to a room of writers seeking representation, and you’ll probably get more groans, rapt attention, and questions than you will teaching anything else. That’s because there’s so much confusion over what does and doesn’t belong in a query letter. A query ...