It’s the weekend! Time for links! From my favorite blogger, Penelope Trunk: How to write about your life.”Write your own messy life, and let it spill out,” she says. What to ask a literary agent when you’re offered representation. From Casey McCormick at Literary Rambles. A guide to Search Engine Optimization for WordPress from a […]
Before I get to the meat of this post, some good news: I’m almost done* with my last round of revisions. That’s right, my LAST* round! I don’t want to say my manuscript will be complete by the end of the month, because we all know I never meet my self-imposed deadlines. I’m giving myself […]
Are you reading Dani Shapiro‘s new memoir, Devotion? I am! I am! Had to buy it after interviewing Dani earlier this month. Partly because I wished I had a book club to discuss it with, I asked Dani if she’d be interested in visiting a vitual book club, through a Twitter chat. She agreed! Details: […]
I am so close to finishing* my manuscript that I’m giddy. Giddy! It helps that I love revising; turns out this is my favorite part of the process. Everything is right there on the page and all I have to do is make it better! But. Enough of me being overly excited (especially since the […]
I keep a yellow Post-it note behind my computer. It reads: *Why you should follow your dream* Appreciate what you have Value of solo travel You can probably tell what these three phrases have in common: they’re themes in my book. Why you should follow your dream gets asterisks because it’s the main theme. I’m […]
Author Dani Shapiro said something in Monday’s interview that struck a chord with me: The art of memoir isn’t in discovering what happened, but rather, in how to tell the story. If she’d told me this before I wrote my memoir, I wouldn’t have believed her. Memoir is largely about recounting what happened during a […]
Back in July, I read an essay about the making of memoir by an author named Dani Shapiro. She really impressed me, both because she offered insight into the genre and because her piece was so beautifully written. Then I heard she was about to publish another memoir. And I thought, I want to read […]
I’m on a high, about to jump into my final round of revisions! But I’ll pause for a moment to compile some links for you from this week: The paradox of memoir, Ami Spencer writes, is the more personal details you reveal, the more readers will relate. Author James Patterson is a publishing machine. And […]
Every once in a while I come across a piece of writing advice that really resonates with me. And when I reviewed Elizabeth Gilbert’s Committed last week, I forgot to mention that she had one of these bits in her book. In Gilbert’s prologue, she writes about her difficulties writing Committed, how she ditched her […]
Every week I read the New York Times’ Modern Love column. Not because it’s about love (although that helps). I read it because it’s often a good story. Occasionally it’s written really well. And since a different contributor writes the column each week, it always has a different voice. In other words, reading this column […]