Jul 26, 2022
How’s the Writing Going, Deesha Philyaw?
“For me, getting better as a writer is learning how to get to the essence of things and boil down all of that exposition and backstory.”
“For me, getting better as a writer is learning how to get to the essence of things and boil down all of that exposition and backstory.”
Nonfiction writers can get so consumed by investigating that we lose track of the story. Narrating my audiobook brought me back to the real person at the heart of it.
I expected that inhabiting the roles of both the author and the narrator at once would bring me closer to the text than ever, in a way that might feel uncomfortable.
“Comics made the confusion and desperation feel contained. By ‘contained’ I don’t mean controlled—more the feeling of ‘I can deal with this piece of my grief, explore it, turn it around, and add context to it.’”
“I think I’m trying to reconcile the need to write and have a deadline with the need to be a human? And right now, the human is winning.”
Contributing to the small body of trans-narrated, trans-written audiobooks felt both personally affirming and politically necessary.
In the final installment of her column, Kate McKean tells us about the things authors don’t expect to be in a book contract.
Jessica Wilbanks discusses the craft choices Niki Herd made while writing her poem “Bird.”
In this five-part column, Hannah Howard explores the senses from a craft perspective.
In the second installment of her column, Megan Pillow examines a short story by Carmen Maria Machado to demonstrate how some of the best examples of contemporary writing craft can be found in writing about sex.
“I know that when I’m really writing, when I’m really, really lost in a sentence, I forget I have a body, I forget what time is. I forget to eat.”
I had one male audio engineer in the room with me, politely waiting to hear me record a graphic essay about youthful sex.
In the fifth installment of our Tarot + Craft column, Sarah Elaine Smith gives advice to a writer who is growing tired of working on their manuscript.
In the second installment of her column, Kate McKean tells us all about the rights and subrights that could appear in your contract when you sell your book to a publisher.
You cannot grow, or heal, or whatever it is we’re trying to achieve when we write though trauma, by distancing yourself from your own pain.
In the first installment of her new column, Megan Pillow shows us how some of the best examples of contemporary writing craft can be found in writing about sex.
Even the most authentic voice on the page is a translation, a refraction, an altered version of the author’s actual speaking voice.
“I always battle with the realization that the stuff I write doesn’t need to exist, and I wonder how many people actually want to read the horror and speculative fiction that I write.”
As part of our Money Week series, literary agent Kate McKean shares the first installment of her column on book contracts, this one addressing advances, payouts, and royalties.
