writing advice
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Outside the Lit Community, Looking In
Most writers, especially those who are just starting out, feel lost and lonely in a literary world that seems to have pre-constructed cliques that are so hard to infiltrate. Anne Korkeakivi, an ex-pat and ever-traveling author with literary connections spread…
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You Have to Get Up
Corporate escapee-turned-author Xu Xi shared a few choice fiction writing tips with the Jakarta Post. She suggests utilizing the formulas in spreadsheets to calculate timelines and characters’ ages, and recharging your writing energy by getting up from your desk and “being…
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No More Writing Advice Listicles
The Internet is flooded with copied and re-copied lists of writing advice from “legendary” writers from all genres and time periods, shuffled over and over in “Top Ten Quotes About Writing” articles. At Lit Hub, Guy Gavriel Kay wants us to…
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Admit It! You’re A Writer
For The Millions, Marcia DeSanctis shares how she learned to become a “second-career writer” after resisting her literary ambitions while working as a television news producer: A stifled artist was scratching through all of my work identities, and though my jobs…
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Pressing Send
A writer friend recently asked me a brief but not-so-simple question: How do you decide where to send your work? Over at Lit Hub, Erika Dreifus answers this simple yet crucial question with some useful advice.
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Writing Badly
Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself. Over at the Guardian, writer Toby Litt explores what makes…
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Advice for Writers Anxious of Rejection
I know of no level of success where writers stop getting rejected (and stop at least occasionally feeling bummed about it). People generally make more noise about publications than rejections, the same way people mostly share pictures of happy moments…
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The Art of Losing Isn’t Hard to Master
Just as there is subjective rejection, there’s subjective acceptance—the editor who sparks to your characters, your plot, your manuscript because of their personal experiences—and you want someone who understands your story to be the champion it needs. Let’s be real.…
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Disquiet at the Finish Line
The idea of art-making as a refuge from reality has become a cliché. But a cliché often becomes a cliché through the repeated force of being true. Jonathan Lee, author of High Dive, writes about the sense of disquiet experienced…
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Author in the First Person
There’s humor and advice on the long haul of novel-writing in an interview with Porochista Khakpour over at Prairie Schooner. Khakpour describes “problem-solving a chunk at a time,” and pushing through a “stalling chapter” to get from drafting to publishing.
