Formal writing courses are, of course, incredible experiences, but I think there’s also something to be said for self-taught craft. That is, putting together your own curriculum to explore during your writing-adjacent time, especially for those of us who aren’t in a position to go back to school. Even if you attend an MFA or regularly get into prestigious workshops, those experiences will take up only a fraction of your life. Are you really not going to learn more and stretch the boundaries and capacity of your writing talent in the off years?
What follows is a bit of advice on building a self-taught writing curriculum, which is then rounded out by a bulleted list of resources I’ve found useful in my own writing life and the lives of my writing friends and clients. I hope it’ll help you, too.
Read MoreReading is largely a disembodied experience, so when we are reminded out of the blue that we have bodies—by the thing doing our disembodying, no less—the result makes our immersion in the work all the stronger.
Take the challenge. Dial up your readers’ emotional investment in your work with embodied language.
Read MoreWriting workshops can be wonderful. They can connect with other writers, build community, and add strong points to your writing CV.
But workshops can also be perplexing and downright frustrating. Whose feedback, if anyone’s, should you prioritize? Do you have to take every suggestion into consideration, even the ones with which you disagree? Read on for Jessica Hatch’s best tips—gleaned from attendance in adjudicated workshops in three different countries—on making the most of your time in the Cone of Silence and beyond.
Read MoreLife can be heavy sometimes, but you can’t beat yourself up about not showing up at the writing desk. In these instances, it’s not a lack of motivation but a lack of resources that’s keeping you from moving forward. If you get mad at yourself for that, it’d be like getting mad at your car for not moving forward if it ran out of gas. This post includes five things you can do when writing doesn’t come easily.
Read MoreHave you browsed the narrative nonfiction shelves lately and thought, “Oh man, I don’t have it in me to read another grief memoir”?
Here are a few thoughts on the memoir market as it stands, a few things you might prioritize inside and out of your own work. A note before we get started: This blog post should be seen as a primer. It contains observations I’ve made in the recent past, while working with memoirists who have attained agent interest, that I feel will help improve memoirists chances of trade publication, but it is certainly not the be all, end all of advice.
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