Reading 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 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.
Read MoreI'm a big fan of drawing ekphrastic inspiration from other art forms to inform my own creative writing, and in a stroke of luck (though maybe not for my husband), I recently rediscovered some of my teenage musical theater obsessions. As such, I thought I'd bring up one of my favorite elements to borrow from the world of music—the leitmotif.
Read MoreInstead of forcing my brain to create a lackluster and possibly unconvincing beat sheet, I took my solution straight from the pages of the Player’s Handbook (Fifth Edition) and made all characters involved “roll for it.”
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