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Get an - F+W Media

MEET SABRINA HICKS, WINNER OF THE 85TH ANNUAL WD WRITING COMPETITION!
Writer
for Hire
•
8
WAYS TO MAKE MONEY
FROM YOUR WEBSITE
• START FREELANCING NOW!
NO PORTFOLIO? NO PROBLEM
•
6
KEYS TO BUILDING A
GHOSTWRITING CAREER
• HIRE YOURSELF: PROMOTE
YOUR BOOK LIKE A PRO
+
Write a Novel
in 30 Days!
W D I N T E RV I E W
Robert Crais
THE BESTSELLER BEHIND THE
ELVIS COLE & JOE PIKE SERIES
ON MASTERING CRIME FICTION
US $6.99
THE HOWS & WHYS
OF NANOWRIMO
CAN $9.50
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Display until November 21, 2016
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016 writersdigest.com
WD2016
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Featuring New York Times bestselling authors:
GARTH
STEIN
Credit:
Susan Doupé Photography
A Sudden Light; The Art
of Racing in the Rain
JANE
SMILEY
Credit:
Derek Shapton
Some Luck; Early Warning;
Golden Age; A Thousand Acres
CHRISTOPHER
RICE
Credit:
Cathryn Farnsworth
A Density of Souls; The
Heavens Rise; The Vines
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34:*1;7.8*7).,*8(43+*7*3(*(42
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02_wd1216_TOC.indd 1
events
9/1/16 10:24 AM
F EATUR ES
WRITER
FOR
HIRE
24 30
8 Ways to Make Money Hire Yourself
e best marketing support you can get often comes
From Your Website Th
directly from the source (you!). Here’s how to
BY JANE FRIEDMAN
promote like the pros—even on a tight budget.
BY NICK COURAGE
28 34
Just Say Yes Your (Ghostwriting)
If you have your eye on a freelance writing
Business Blueprint
career but are intimidated by your prospects,
take note: Sometimes the shortest distance
between two points really is a straight line.
BY JEFF SOMERS
There’s a big difference between landing one or two gigs
and making a career of ghostwriting—or any kind of
writing, for that matter. Use this plan for long-term,
full-time success.
BY JOHN PERAGINE
ILLUSTRATION © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM: VECTORKAT
Why not put your home page or blog to work for you?
Start with these smart and simple tools and services.
2 I WRITER’S DIGEST I November/December 2016
9/1/16 10:22 AM
NOV EMBER / DECEMBER 2 016 | VOLU ME 96 | NO. 8
INK W ELL
10 THE ROAD ALREADY TAKEN: With the right
38
approach, even well-tread subjects can lead to
compelling new books or articles.
THE WD INTERVIEW:
Robert Crais
BY BARRY SPARKS
This master of crime writing makes
modern classics the old-fashioned way.
12 PLUS: 5-Minute Memoir: A Tribute to Pat Conroy •
Poetic Asides: Ovillejo • Creatures of Habit: Gretchen
Rubin • You’re Saying It Right • On the Record •
#CompleteThisTweet • Top Shelf: Holiday Gift Guide
BY JESSICA STRAWSER
42
C O LU M NS
How a Month of NaNoWriMo
Can Lead to a Lifetime of
Better Writing
For hundreds of thousands of writers worldwide,
November means National Novel Writing Month. Learn
how and why the 30-day challenge can be a serious
boost.
21 MEET THE AGENT: Paul Lucas, Janklow &
Nesbit Associates
BY KARA GEBHART UHL
2 2 BREAKING IN: Debut Author Spotlight
BY CHUCK SAMBUCHINO
5 0 FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK: Reading Into Vague
Rejections; Turning Up the Tension
BY GRANT FAULKNER
BY BARBARA POELLE
46
5 2 YOUR STORY: Contest #74, First Things First
Detour
6 2 STANDOUT MARKETS: Poetry; The New Press;
The winner of the 85th Annual WD Writing Competition
shows that diverging from your path might just lead you
where you want to go.
PLUS: The complete winners list across all 10 categories.
Lucky Peach
BY CRIS FREESE
6 4 CONFERENCE SCENE: Key West Literary Seminar;
Writer’s Block Festival; Writer’s Winter Escape Cruise
BY DON VAUGHAN
W R ITER ’S WORKBOOK
7 2 PLATFORMS OF YORE: Charles Dickens
R & Le Sto
ON THE COVER
54 5 COMMON FLAWS IN ROMANCE NOVELS
5 4 The Best Tips for Writing Romance & Love Scenes
BY LEIGH MICHAELS
2 4 8 Ways to Make Money From Your Website
2 8 Start Freelancing Now! No Portfolio? No Problem
COVER PHOTO © JULIE ANN FINEMAN PHOTOGRAPHY
5 7 TIPS FOR ROMANTIC DIALOGUE
3 4 6 Keys to Building a Ghostwriting Career
BY LEIGH MICHAELS
3 0 Hire Yourself: Promote Your Book Like a Pro
4 2 Write a Novel in 30 Days!
6 0 HOW TO WRITE COMPELLING LOVE SCENES
3 8 WD Interview: Robert Crais
BY DEBORAH HALVERSON
PLUS:
4 online exclusives
5 editor’s letter
8 contributors
Writer’s Digest (ISSN 0043-9525) is published monthly, except bimonthly issues in March/April, May/June, July/August and November/December, by F+W Media Inc., 10151 Carver Road, Ste. 200, Cincinnati,
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Right Now at
Secrets of Web-Savvy Writers
If you’re hooked by the strategies in “8 Ways to Make
Money From Your Website” (Page 24) but still wondering what they look like in action, you’re in luck. Our bonus
sidebar puts a whole roster of examples just a click away.
Finding What It Takes
Perseverance played no small part in the crafting of our
Annual Competition–winning story “Blink.” Read the
full story—and more useful lessons writer Sabrina Hicks
learned along the way.
To find all of the above online companions to this issue in
one handy spot, visit writersdigest.com/dec-16.
PLUS:
Get an extra shot of inspiration daily on the WD blogs!
LOVE BETWEEN THE COVERS
PREPPING FOR PRIMETIME
This new, uplifting documentary peels
In his ongoing blog series, WD Books
away viewers’ preconceived notions
associate editor Cris Freese explores
about the romance genre. Get a
behind-the-scenes look in our Q&A
what hit TV shows—from “Fargo” to
“The Office” to “Friday Night Lights”—
with director Laurie Kahn.
can teach us all about writing.
bit.ly/love-coversWD
bit.ly/learn-from-tvWD
5 STEPS TO SURVIVING YOUR COPY EDIT
If you think writers with editing backgrounds don’t sweat being edited, think again.
WD’s own Jessica Strawser shares how the process can make us all better writers,
with examples from the copy edit of her forthcoming novel, Almost Missed You.
bit.ly/copyedit-survivalWD
LOVE OR MONEY ILLUSTRATION © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM: BAKHTIAR ZEIN; LAPTOP PHOTO © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM: ESB ESSENTIALS; EYES PHOTO © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM: IRENA BG; BLOG ILLUSTRATION © FOTOLIA.COM; BLOSSOMSTAR
For Love or Money
In talking more about how his bestselling career has
unfolded and what might be next for him, Robert Crais
(WD Interview, Page 38) emphasizes why passion, not
the market, should drive everything we write.
04_wd1216_OnlineTOC.indd 4
9/1/16 3:36 PM
EDITOR’SLETTER
NOVEMBER /DECEMBER 2016
VOLUME 96 | NO. 8
EDITORIAL DIRECTOR
Jessica Strawser
ART DIRECTOR
Claudean Wheeler
MANAGING EDITOR
Tyler Moss
ASSISTANT EDITOR
Baihley Grandison
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
David Corbett, Jane Friedman,
Steven James, Barbara Poelle,
Elizabeth Sims, Kara Gebhart Uhl,
Don Vaughan
WRITER’S DIGEST
WRITING COMMUNITY
VICE PRESIDENT/GROUP PUBLISHER
Even If …
We live in an era when most of us have adapted,
perhaps without even realizing it, to a constant
stream of information coming at us from all
sides. We can’t even watch a news program without different news scrolling across the screen. We
certainly can’t make a phone call without being
barraged by Facebook and Twitter notifications.
And thus, we learn to filter things: This sounds
like a fit for me—click. This is not for me—skip.
This is for me but I don’t have time—save for later.
This is for me but I can’t take it anymore—hurl device across room.
I mention this because I’m certain you’ve scanned our table of contents to
pick out, at a glance, what looks interesting or relevant to you. But this issue
features an eclectic mix of specific topics that delve deeper than a passing
glance. So I wanted to call out a few in particular, lest you think they not apply:
Phil Sexton
SENIOR ONLINE EDITOR
Brian A. Klems
WRITING COMMUNITY EDITORS
Robert Lee Brewer, Cris Freese,
Rachel Randall, Chuck Sambuchino
WRITER’S DIGEST
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Subscription inquiries, orders and address
changes can be made at
• Even if your only online home is a simple blog, you might be able to turn
it into an unexpected moneymaker using the “8 Ways to Make Money
From Your Website” (Page 24).
• Even if you aren’t a ghostwriter, you’ll likely find that the “Ghostwriting
Business Blueprint” can serve as a useful guide for growing any type of
writing business (Page 34).
• Even if crime fiction isn’t your genre, look for inspiration in our Robert
Crais interview, in which he talks compellingly and relatably about how
all authors can feel lost in the midst of writing a story—and what important gut check can ensure our work is on track (Page 38).
• Even if you aren’t planning to participate in this November’s National
Novel Writing Month challenge, NaNoWriMo director Grant Faulkner’s
“How a Month of NaNoWriMo Can Lead to a Lifetime of Better Writing”
delivers meaty insights into how challenging our writing habits, on any
terms, can transform our work (Page 42).
• Even if you’ve never considered entering a writing contest, you might
think again after reading about our latest winner—who had given up the
craft entirely before deciding to take another leap of faith (Page 46).
writersdigest.com/contact-us
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g
x
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W
86th ANNUAL WRITER’S DIGEST
z
WRITING COMPETITION
e
BIG OPPORTUNITY
MEETS BIGGER PRIZES
f
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A
s
What could really turn your writing around? More readers? More
money? Attention from editors and agents? An impressive line to add
to your bio? Enter WD’s annual writing competition, and you could win
them all! With almost 500 winners across nine categories, there’s a lot of
oomph to go around.
j
Q
The grand-prize winner and top 10 in each category will be spotlighted
in the November/December 2017 Writer’s Digest, and all other winners
listed on WritersDigest.com. Plus, every entrant receives a free webinar
worth more than your entry fee—so even when you lose, you win!
GRAND PRIZE:
MEET SABRINA HICKS, WINNER
OF THE 85TH ANNUAL WD WRITING
D
r $5,000
r Your name on the cover of Writer’s Digest!
(subscriber edition)
r A trip to the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference
r Face-to-face meetings with four literary agents
or editors at the conference
Writer
for Hire
ē
8 WAYS TO MAKE MONEY
FROM YOUR WEBSITE
ē START FREELANCING NOW!
NO PORTFOLIO? NO PROBLEM
ē
6
KEYS TO BUILDING A
GHOSTWRITING CAREER
ē HIRE YOURSELF: PROMOTE
YOUR BOOK LIKE A PRO
+
Write a Novel
in 30 Days!
W D I N T E RV I E W
Robert Crais
THE BESTSELLER BEHIND THE
ELVIS COLE & JOE PIKE SERIES
ON MASTERING CRIME FICTION
THE HOWS & WHYS
OF NANOWRIMO
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016
writersdigest.com
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Early-Bird Deadline:
May 5, 2017
COMPETITION!
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VIEW PRIZES AND CATEGORIES OR ENTER ONLINE AT
writersdigest.com/writers-digest-competitions/annual-writing-competition
9/1/16 9:36 AM
s Memoir/Personal Essay, Children’s/Young Adult Fiction and Magazine Feature Article: 2,000 words maximum.
s Mainstream/Literary Short Story and Genre Short Story: 4,000 words maximum.
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* Entries in the Magazine Feature Article category may be previously published.
4. Winners will be notified before Oct. 13, 2017. Grand Prize and First Place entries in each category will be
published and all winners will be listed in the 86th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition Collection and on
our website at writersdigest.com.
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86th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing Competition
OFFICIAL ENTRY FORM
Entry Deadline: June 1, 2017
Early-Bird Entry Fees: Poems $15 for first entry; $10 for
each additional. All other entries $25 for first
manuscript; $20 for each additional.
After May 5: Poems $20 for first entry; $15 for each
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CON TR IB U T ORS
F+W, A CONTENT + ECOMMERCE
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CHIEF EXECUTIVE OFFICER
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NICK COURAGE (“Hire Yourself,” Page 30) is
an author and publishing consultant who splits
his time between Brooklyn, N.Y., and Pittsburgh,
where he is also co-founder of Littsburgh.com.
Prior to consulting, he spent a decade working for
“Big Five” publishing companies. Courage’s essays
and short fiction have recently appeared in The
Paris Review Daily, Story and Full Stop. His debut
novel, The Loudness, is available where books are
sold. Find him online at nickcourage.com.
GRANT FAULKNER (“How a Month of NaNoWriMo
Can Lead to a Lifetime of Better Writing,” Page 42)
is the executive director of National Novel Writing
Month and co-founder of 100 Word Story. His essays
have appeared in The New York Times, Poets & Writers
and WD, and his stories have appeared in dozens of
journals. He recently published a collection of 100word stories, Fissures, and a book of his essays on
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Blueprint,” Page 34) is a ghostwriter, book coach and
journalist. He has authored 12 books, and has written for The New York Times, Bloomberg, Reuters and
Today.com, where he is a frequent contributor. He
regularly speaks to writers about ghostwriting, as well
as how to create a sustainable business as a professional writer. Peragine’s book 6ix Kick-A$$ Strategies
of the Million-Dollar Freelance Writer will be released
in Spring 2017. Visit him online at johnpwriter.com.
BARRY SPARKS (“The Road Already Taken,”
Page 10) is the author of two biographies, Frank
“Home Run” Baker: Hall of Famer and World Series
Hero and Rick Riordan. He has sold more than
800 articles to 65 regional and national publications, including The Wall Street Journal, The
Philadelphia Inquirer, The Baltimore Sun, Baseball
Digest, Chesapeake Bay Magazine, Army, Studio
Photography, Off Duty and many others.
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08_wd1216_Contributors.indd 8
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TELL YOUR
STORIES
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Master the art of storytelling, whether on the big
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Writing can be a lonely profession, filled with blind stumbles,
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Progress offers practical and thoughtful advice to help you reach
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Author in Progress features essays by bestselling authors,
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08_wd1216_Contributors.indd 9
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The Road Already Taken
With the right approach, even well-tread subjects can lead to compelling new
books or articles.
BY BARRY SPARKS
W
want to hurt those closest to him,
Hilburn says.
“One of the first things I learned
about Johnny is that I had to doublecheck everything he said,” Hilburn told
the Los Angeles Times. “He wasn’t one
to let facts interfere with a good story.
He wasn’t so much trying to mislead
people as make stories more colorful.”
Johnny Cash: The Life is a classic
example of why nonfiction authors
should not shy away from subjects
that have been previously covered.
When new or untapped interview
sources or documents are revealed, or
an opportunity to correct erroneous
information or offer a new perspective presents itself, a well-tread subject
might just warrant a fresh approach.
CUT THROUGH THE VENEER.
Eddie Rickenbacker, World War I
flying ace, had been the subject of
two ghostwritten autobiographies
and three major biographies before
author John F. Ross tackled his life
story in 2014’s Enduring Courage:
Ace Pilot Eddie Rickenbacker and the
Dawn of the Age of Speed.
To his earlier biographers, relaying facts took a back seat to creating
the image of an all-American hero
ILLUSTRATION © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM: BETELGEJZE
hen former Los
Angeles Times
music critic Robert
Hilburn was contemplating writing a biography of
Johnny Cash in 2009, he asked Lou
Robin, who had managed Cash for
more than 30 years, how much of
Cash’s story had been told. Robin
thought for a moment and replied,
“About 20 percent.”
That was a dumbfounding answer
considering Cash had written two
autobiographies, personal accounts
had been written about him by both
his first wife and one of his founding band members, and several other
biographies on the iconic country
musician had made their way onto
bookshelves over the years.
Hilburn started working on Cash’s
biography the next day. After four
years of writing and research, including interviews with nearly 100 people,
Johnny Cash: The Life was published
to rave reviews in 2013.
Although Cash insisted he wanted
people to know his entire story, he’d
failed to embrace such candor in his
autobiographies because he didn’t
10_wd1216_Inkwell.indd 10
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who led a charmed life. For example,
Ross was surprised when he discovered Rickenbacker’s father was
actually killed by a laborer in selfdefense after provoking a fight, not in
a “construction accident” as stated in
Rickenbacker’s autobiography. “The veneer of untouchable hero
covers nearly every incident as
thickly as the fiberglass protecting a boat’s hull,” writes Ross in the
book’s Note to the Reader. Cutting
through the hero worship to find
the real man was one of his greatest challenges. Ross relied on largely
neglected primary sources to paint a
more accurate portrait.
GET PEOPLE TALKING.
Fiery New York Yankees manager
Billy Martin had been dead for nearly
25 years when author Bill Pennington
considered writing his biography.
Although Martin was already the subject of at least four books, Pennington
felt their characterizations of Martin
hadn’t told the whole story.
“I thought the last 20 years or so
that there has been a caricature of
him as a dirt-kicking lunatic who got
hired and fired a lot. … Those things
are all true. But he is much more than
that. He has been reduced to a foursecond highlight clip on ESPN. That’s
all people under 40 know about him,”
Pennington says.
In crafting his approach to Billy
Martin: Baseball’s Flawed Genius,
published in 2015, Pennington
believed the passage of time would
allow for more candid and honest
comments from those who knew
Martin. He was able to get Martin’s
only son, Billy Joe, as well as his
widow, Jill—who had yet to be
quoted—to agree to interviews. In
the course of researching the book,
Pennington spoke with more than
225 people, including all four of
Martin’s wives, his childhood friends,
teammates and rivals.
surviving contemporaries of JFK,
political aides, Ethel Kennedy and her
son Max.
UTILIZE NEW DOCUMENTS.
Author Tim Weiner has long been
fascinated by President Richard
Nixon. Declassified government documents released from 2007 to 2014
form the foundation of his 2015 book,
One Man Against the World: The
Tragedy of Richard Nixon.
Weiner had unprecedented access
to thousands of files from the White
ADD FRESH PERSPECTIVE.
More than a dozen books have been
published about what happened to the
game of baseball during World War
II, but author John Klima identified
an opportunity for further discussion:
The writers with expertise in baseball
knew little about the war, and those
well versed in WWII didn’t know
much about baseball.
When an opportunity to correct erroneous information
or offer a new perspective presents itself, a welltread subject might just warrant a fresh approach.
House, the State Department, the
Pentagon, the Joint Chiefs of Staff,
National Security Council, the FBI,
the CIA, Nixon Chief of Staff H.R.
Haldeman’s diary entries, and hundreds of hours of Nixon’s tapes.
“I felt like an archaeologist unearthing the palace of a lost regime,” Weiner
wrote in the book’s Author’s Note.
Likewise, several books about the
PT-109 incident involving President
John F. Kennedy, dating back to Robert
J. Donovan’s 1961 bestseller PT 109,
had been published before William
Doyle’s PT 109: An American Epic of
War, Survival, and the Destiny of John
F. Kennedy was released in 2015. But
Doyle boosted his account with declassified documents, JFK’s long-lost 1946
firsthand account, materials from the
John F. Kennedy Presidential Library
and Museum, archives from Japan, the
Solomon Islands and Australia—much
of which had been unavailable to previous authors.
He also interviewed the PT boat
commander who served with JFK,
Klima, however, had grown up
in a household where WWII and
baseball were both familiar topics.
He possessed a rare combination
of knowledge and perspective. His
book The Game Must Go On: Hank
Greenberg, Pete Gray and the Great
Days of Baseball on the Home Front
in WWII, published in 2015, does
justice to both subjects.
Rickenbacker’s biographer, John
Ross, says he considers writing a
book a voyage of discovery: “The
best writing, I think, reflects that
sense of discovery to the reader. The
writer, like the reader, is sharing a
new story, turning the page to see
what’s next.”
That voyage can be different for
every writer—even when documenting a seemingly tired subject—who
takes a savvy approach to uncover
something new along the way.
Barry Sparks of York, Pa., is the author
of the biographies Frank “Home Run”
Baker: Hall of Famer and World Series Hero
and Rick Riordan.
9/6/16 9:59 AM
5 -MINUTE MEMOIR
My Mother’s House
BY PAT CONROY
“I’d like
to ask you a
favor in the
new book, Pat.
Don’t write
about me like
this. Make
me beautiful.
Make me beautiful again.”
I knelt beside my mother’s bed
and said in a voice that I barely recognized, “I’ll make you so beautiful,
Mama. You made me a writer and I’m
going to lift you out of this bed and
set you singing and dancing across
the pages of my book forever.”
“And after you write about my
death,” my mother said with a smile,
“I’d like Meryl Streep to play the role
in the movie.”
My mother was like a whole civilization of women wrapped up in a single
comely package. She was complicated,
maddening, irreplaceable. I will never
be good enough to write about her. In
part The Prince of Tides is a love letter
to the dark side of my mother.
I don’t think you’d like the portrait,
Mama, but wherever you are, I made
you beautiful.
Excerpted from A Lowcountry Heart © 2016 by
Pat Conroy, published in October. Reprinted
with permission by Nan A. Talese, an imprint
of the Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group, a
division of Penguin Random House LLC. Learn
more at patconroyliterarycenter.org.
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS: Submit your own 600-word essay reflection on the writing life by emailing it to wdsubmissions@fwcommunity.com
with “5-Minute Memoir” in the subject line.
CONROY PHOTO © JOHN WOLLWERTH
M
y mother, Southern to the bone, once told me, “All Southern literature
can be summed up in these words: ‘On the night the hogs ate Willie,
Mama died when she heard what Daddy did to Sister.’” She raised
me up to be a Southern writer, but it wasn’t easy. The Marine Corps
moved us almost every year of my childhood, and always to Southern towns close
to swamps and the sea. I always came as a visitor; I never spent a single day in a
hometown. The children of warriors in our country learn the grace and caution
that come from a permanent sense of estrangement. I grew up in 20 versions of the
South and was part of none of them. At an early age I began to collect the stories
that give the native-born a sense of rootedness and place.
My mother thought of my father as half barbarian and half blunt instrument, and she isolated him from his children. When he returned home from
work my sister would yell, “Godzilla’s home,” and the seven children would
melt into the secret places of whatever house we happened to be living in at
the time. He was no match for my mother’s Byzantine and remarkable powers
of intrigue. Neither were her children. It took me 30 years to realize that I had
grown up in my mother’s house and not my father’s. Like him, I had missed
the power source.
In 1984, when I was in the middle of writing The Prince of Tides, I drove down
to spend two weeks with my mother in a hospital in Augusta, Ga. She was receiving chemotherapy treatments for the leukemia that would kill her. My mother’s
favorite character in a book was Scarlett O’Hara and her favorite actress was
Vivien Leigh playing Scarlett O’Hara. I grew up thinking that my mother was
every bit as pretty as Vivien Leigh and that Scarlett on her best day wouldn’t have
been a match for my mother. But chemotherapy is not kind to beauty.
One moon-filled night I stayed in my mother’s room, to help her through
the terrible hours, and she wanted to talk about The Prince of Tides. “I’m in your
new book, aren’t I, Pat?” she asked.
“No,” I said.
“Liar. When you wrote The Great
Santini you weren’t good enough to
write about me. I was far more powerful than your father ever was. You just
didn’t see it.”
“I saw it, Mama,” I said. “But you’re
right—I wasn’t good enough to write
about it.”
9/1/16 9:36 AM
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9/1/16 9:36 AM
No matter what you write, a bit of poetic license can be a
valuable asset to any writer’s arsenal.
BY ROBERT LEE BREWER
P OE T IC FO R M : O V ILLEJ O
The ovillejo is an old Spanish form popularized by Don Quixote author Miguel
de Cervantes in the 16th century. This 10-liner is composed of three rhyming
couplets (two-line stanzas) and a quatrain (four-line stanza).
The first line of each couplet is eight syllables long and presents a question or
statement, to which the second line responds in three to four syllables—either
as an answer or an echo.
The concluding quatrain is also referred to as a redondilla, a quatrain written in trochaic tetrameter, with an abba rhyme scheme. The first three lines are
eight syllables long, and the final line combines lines two, four and six.
Here is an example by a Poetic Asides reader.
“Painting the Lake,” by Taylor Graham
How to paint the spectrum of light?
a An egret’s flight.
a
She seeks a landscape in her brush—
b a sort of hush.
b
c
c
No answer but blue, flake by flake,
ripples the lake.
And still she paints for painting’s sake—
d not perspective, the eye’s blind reach,
d but light, and what the shadows teach.
c An egret’s flight. A sort of hush ripples the lake.
c
The first line should offer
eight syllables and a question,
followed by a concise answer
or echo in the second.
Keep in mind that the
second line of each couplet will form the final
line of the poem.
The overall rhyme
scheme for an ovillejo
is aabbcccddc.
POETIC PROMPT
Write a reset poem. Every year, nature resets itself with the seasons. After
arguments or conflicts, people often have to reset their relationships. Video
games can be reset, as well as timers. Write a poem in which something or
Robert Lee Brewer is the editor of Poet’s Market and Writer’s Market (both WD Books) and
the author of the poetry collection Solving the World’s Problems.
SHARE YOUR POETIC VOICE: If you’d like to see your own poem in the pages of
Writer’s Digest, check out the Poetic Asides blog (writersdigest.com/editor-blogs/
poetic-asides) and search for the most recent WD Poetic Form Challenge.
BREWER ILLUSTRATION © TONY CAPURRO
someone is reset.
9/1/16 9:36 AM
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EARLY-BIRD DEADLINE: APRIL 3, 2017
9/1/16 9:36 AM
Creatures of Habit
Bestseller and happiness guru Gretchen Rubin shares 4 simple (and not unpleasant)
tips for turning your best tendencies into even better routines.
BY DEBBIE HARMSEN
T
alent, craft and the perfect
plotline will take you only
so far as a writer. To truly
excel, you need strong habits. “Habits help us make consistent
progress,” says Gretchen Rubin, New
York Times bestselling author of The
Happiness Project and host of the
popular “Happier With Gretchen
Rubin” podcast.
For her latest book, Better Than
Before, Rubin conducted extensive
research to understand how habits—what she calls the “architecture
of everyday life”—can bring about
changes in the way we live, and how
we can shape them to our benefit.
“Keeping a habit, in the smallest way,
protects and strengthens it,” she tells
WD. “I write every day, even just a
sentence, to keep my habit of daily
writing strong.”
One of the biggest lessons she
emphasizes is that there’s no onesize-fits-all approach. We must know
ourselves. “I would overwhelmingly
say, the key question for anyone is:
What is true for you?”
Rubin shares four strategies to help
you make your best writing habits
become second nature.
1. FIND YOUR PEAK TIME
OF DAY.
In order to discover a writing routine
that really works—on a consistent
basis—you must land upon a point in
your day that syncs with your creative
self and your personality.
“You shouldn’t believe that there’s
some best way—that there’s a best
practice and that you have to get up
at 7 a.m. and work for two hours
because that’s when [people are allegedly] freshest,” she says. Although
Rubin herself is an early bird, “Night
people are most productive and creative much, much later in the day.
… [What] works for some people
doesn’t work for everybody.”
Experiment until you’ve pinpointed
the time of day you feel most mentally stimulated. Then focus on how to
make that time frame work for you.
RUBIN PHOTO © ELENA SEIBERT
2. SCHEDULE IT AND WRITE
CONSISTENTLY.
Be proactive in designating your
prime hours and using them as much
as possible for writing. Put that time
on your calendar. “You can answer
your email 24/7 and never be caught
up,” Rubin says. “When you put
something on the schedule and are
very specific about it, that helps you
stick with it.”
Scheduling your actual writing
time allows you to choose writing as
a priority over something else, even
if it’s writing-related work such as
researching, formatting your manuscript or organizing your office—all
tempting tasks when the words aren’t
flowing freely. Don’t give in. Know
what you want to get done—whether
it’s an hour of writing or 1,000 new
words or a chapter revision—and stay
dedicated to that objective.
Consistency day after day, in any
quantity, is a more sustainable longterm strategy than penning big blocks
only now and then. Rubin says that
when she’s working on a book, she
writes at least three hours per day,
though not necessarily all at once.
Gertrude Stein, on the other hand,
wrote for only 30 minutes a day—and
had a wonderful career to show for it.
3. ASSESS YOUR WEAKNESSES AND ADJUST.
Rubin categorizes people into two
common work styles: openers and
finishers. “Finishers are people like me.
If we start something, it’s very important to know that we can finish,” she
says. “Openers love to [kick off new
projects]. They’ve got a lot of ideas.”
Again, neither is right or wrong—the
key is to understand how you tend to
9/1/16 9:36 AM
approach your best projects, and then
take the proper precautions to prevent
your own working style from undermining your goals.
For instance, if you’re an opener,
you likely are full of ideas and thus
might take on too many at once—or
you may struggle to get going at all
because you have so many choices
before you. Do you second-guess
yourself when starting that mystery
novel means holding off on that great
children’s book idea? To prevent
indecision from leading to paralysis,
Rubin suggests finding someone you
trust to help you sift through your
concepts, evaluating their strengths,
so you can choose the best one to
tackle first. Then channel all your
enthusiasm into that project.
Finishers, on the other hand, are
often too conservative, Rubin notes,
“because they don’t like to start something unless they know they can
finish it.” Rubin edges into the “cold
swimming pool” of a new writing
project by taking meticulous notes and
then retyping them into a document.
Because they’re so focused on
the final result, finishers may also
have a tendency to rush at the end
or cut corners along the way. If this
sounds like you, focus on proceeding
at a steady pace, making sure to give
every element of the story or book
project the attention it deserves.
4. BUILD YOUR TEAM.
What type of people should you surround yourself with to maximize
your writing success? The type of
team you require is another extension
of your personality.
Some writers work best when they
are held strictly accountable. “[Such
writers] must have someone to answer
to, whether that is an editor or an
agent, a writing group, writing coach
MAKING THE LEAP
Rubin shares how to ditch the day job
and embrace life as a full-time writer at
writersdigest.com/dec-16.
or friend,” Rubin says. If you are the
type of person who needs to be held
to a task, make sure there is someone
in your life who is willing to regularly check in on your progress. “They
don’t even have to be writers,” Rubin
explains, “just people who can say,
‘You said you were going to write that
outline. How’s that coming along?’
[or] ‘You said you were going to send
out 10 query letters. Did you?’”
Most writers, including those who
are more self-motivated, will benefit
most from people who offer encouragement and can “talk shop.” For
Rubin, her team includes a writer’s
strategy group that meets every six
weeks for two hours. The group primarily functions as a forum for lending
support as needed and discussing writing and the publishing industry.
Another crucial advocate is her
agent. “She’s a huge—huge—partner
for me and what I do,” Rubin says. If
you are looking for an agent, Rubin
recommends being very thorough
and discriminating in the selection
process. It might take awhile, but
finding the right person is well worth
it. “I always tell people, this is the key
relationship ... You really need to feel
like your agent gets you. If they don’t
get you, they can’t represent you and
help you.”
Finding and committing to an
effective writing routine is, in essence,
a process of self-discovery. Just as
Rubin says, there is no one right
approach, so long as you stay focused
and keep writing.
Debbie Harmsen (@DebbieHarmsen) is a
writer and editor based in Dallas.
9/1/16 9:36 AM
GET
DIGITALLY!
You’re Saying It Right
BANAL
[buh-NAL] (also [buh-NAHL], [BAY-null])
so lacking in originality as to be obvious and boring
In a recent survey, many people said
they were afraid to use banal in conversation because they were afraid
they were pronouncing it incorrectly.
They shouldn’t have worried. Chances
are that however they were pronouncing it was fine: Dictionaries in the
U.S. commonly list not one but three
acceptable pronunciations.
That said, we’d say go for pronouncing banal as loosely rhyming
with canal—first, because most people already do (this pronunciation
was preferred by 58 percent of the
Usage Panel of the American Heritage
Dictionary in its 2001 major language survey) and second, because when the word originated, the late Romans
pronounced it with an accent or emphasis on the second a. (We say banal. The
Romans said bannalis; which is what common folk did, and so eventually bannalis, with the “is” chopped off, just came to mean “commonplace or trite.”)
Excerpted from You’re Saying It Wrong © 2016 by Ross Petras and Kathryn Petras, from
Ten Speed Press.
ON THE (PERSEVERANCE) RECORD
“A wise man will make more opportunities than he finds.”
—Francis Bacon
“The best way out is always through.”
—Robert Frost
“Never confuse a single defeat with a final defeat.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald
“If you fell down yesterday, stand up today.”
—H.G. Wells
9/1/16 9:36 AM
#CompleteThisTweet
We asked, and @WritersDigest followers on Twitter answered.
How would you #InspireAWriterIn5Words?
You might be onto something.
You can help many souls.
Live dangerously on the pages.
@kateo
@JamesMartinSJ
@EsraaNas914
Write for love not money.
@Lisa_See
Subject: bidding war
Never, ever, ever give up.
PHOTO © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM: MASSON
What would Neil Gaiman say?
From: agent
Read everything like you’re starving.
@damonayoung
@Arika_E_89
@WW2HistoryGal
Writing makes the voices stop.
I exist because I write.
@VMO_Mac
@TBlackford3
Don’t be afraid of failure.
@valerietejeda
@halberdrayne
Write to contain the monsters.
@Ocrane99
Hold fast to your vision.
Color the world with words.
@Saddleback
@GwenFlaskamp
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9/1/16 9:36 AM
HOLI
D AY G
IFT
GUID
E
A smattering of
our favorite literary
miscellanea these days.
BY TYLER MOSS
Word Wrapped
Let words bring you warmth—literally.
These infinity scarves from Storiarts
wrap you in passages from classics
such as Jane Eyre, Les Miserables
and The Secret Garden, making
them the perfect present for
any fashion-forward book aficionado. $42–48, storiarts.com/
collections/scarves
Picture This
Stuff your favorite kid’s stocking with
a touch of writerly inspiration this
year. In the illustrated, authorized
biography Some Writer! The Story of
E.B. White, two-time Caldecott honoree Melissa Sweet combines White’s
personal letters, photos and family
ephemera with her own drawings
to tell the Charlotte’s Web author’s
story—a treat that’s sure to delight
itsy-bitsy bookworms. $18.99,
available at most bookstores Oct. 4
Stout of Heart
’Tis the season for holiday parties
and festive group gatherings. Forgo
the mulled wine or spiked cider and
go Rogue: Surprise your host with a
Shakespeare Oatmeal Stout. Adorned
with an image of the Bard brandishing a beer, this thick, chocolaty ale
shall put you in the perfect mood to
deck the halls. $6.99, buy.rogue.com/
shakespeare-stout
Scratch & Read
Why hide your reading list on a notepad or app when you can show off
your lit savvy right on your wall?
Decorated with the covers of 100
contemporary favorites and literary classics, from Blood Meridian
to Middlemarch and Mrs. Dalloway,
simply scratch off the gold-flaked
veneer to indicate which novels you’ve
read—and to remind you which ones
are still collecting dust on your shelf.
$35, popchartlab.com/products/100essential-novels-scratch-off-chart
Barrel-Aged Book Writing
Ernest Hemingway once said,
“When you work hard all day with your
head and know you must work again the
next day, what else can change your ideas
and make them run on a different plane like
whiskey?” Drinking while writing may not be for
everyone, but these pens fashioned from used bourbon barrels are your next best bet. With a wide range of
designs to choose from, add your favorite to your holiday wish list so you can channel Papa—or have one custom
engraved for your own granddad. $49–170, bourbonpens.com
9/1/16 9:36 AM
MEET THEAGENT
BY KARA GEBHART UHL
Paul Lucas
JANKLOW & NESBIT ASSOCIATES
P
aul Lucas came to Janklow & Nesbit in 2007 not as an
agent, but as a paralegal who’d been working in the
corporate division of a large law firm. A longtime book
lover, he soon gave up legal texts for queried manuscripts,
Wallace King,
author of
Edenland
(Lake Union
Publishing, 2016)
Edward Ashton,
author of Three
Days in April
(Harper Voyager
Impulse, 2015)
Katherine
Arden, author
of The Bear and
the Nightingale
(Del Ray, 2017)
officially donning the agent hat at Janklow in 2011. “I love
projects that incorporate fantasy or make the fantastic seem
possible, like Karen Russell’s Swamplandia!,” Lucas says.
CLIENTS
“[Another favorite is] Ian McGuire’s book The North Water,
which is about the whaling industry, insurance fraud and
sociopathy. I adore any project that makes my pulse beat
faster, which happens both with fiction and nonfiction.”
Find him online at janklowandnesbit.com/people/paullucas and on Twitter @canonizer.
WHY HE DOES
WHAT HE DOES
“In an ideal world, I make a
living from reading books.
The world’s not always ideal,
so I also read and write a lot
of emails, talk on the phone
and have a lot of administrative tasks. But at its core my
job lets me read books, and
that is pretty cool.”
“Son, brother, friend.”
“I ride a motorcycle,
cook a lot and work
at a standing desk.”
LIFE IN A
NUTSHELL
FUN FACTS
POETRY COLLECTION:
“A rye
Manhattan, served
up in a tumbler”
DRINK:
Tin Roof
by Michael Ondaatje
BOOK-RELATED BLOG:
SEEKING
FAVORITE
Read to Write Stories
(readtowritestories.com)
“The beach on
Fire Island in the summer;
Sugarbush in the winter”
PLACE:
“Never put off until
tomorrow what you can do
the day after tomorrow.”
—attributed to Oscar Wilde,
Mark Twain and others
QUOTE:
?
QUERY PET
PEEVES
WRITING TIPS
“Understand that
patience is an
important virtue
in the publishing
world.”
“Always get feedback from
unrelated third parties, like
writing groups or professional writers, rather than
close friends or family.”
PITCH TIP
“I would love more
nonfiction, especially a
transformative history
or biography (but not
memoir!). I’m always
looking for a wide
range of fiction. If the
writing is wonderful and
the book tells a story, it
could be for me.”
“My true pet peeves are the
obvious ones—misspelling
my name, misidentifying
my gender, cc’ing me with
other agents, sending
projects that I do not or, in
the case of screenwriting,
cannot represent.”
“Practice! It’s frustrating to [have to]
learn different styles of pitching, but
you need to tailor the pitch to the
medium. If it’s an email, keep the
agent’s esoteric wish list/criterion in
mind. In person, have a one-, three- or
five-minute version ready, depending
on the conference or opportunity.”
Kara Gebhart Uhl (pleiadesbee.com) writes and edits from Fort Thomas, Ky.
21_wd1216_MTA.indd 21
9/1/16 9:36 AM
BREAKINGIN
Debut authors: How they did it, what they learned and why you can do it, too.
BY CHUCK SAMBUCHINO
Helen Sedgwick
The Comet
Seekers (literary fiction, October, Harper)
“Two strangers meet in
Antarctica as a comet
fractures overhead. Looping back
over a thousand years, readers
discover what led them both to
this point.”
The Scottish Highlands.
I wrote several short
stories about science. While writing
them I got the idea for The Comet
Seekers. Several of the stories were
published in anthologies and magazines, and I received a Scottish Book
Trust New Writers Award, so it was
encouraging to feel I was making
progress. TIME FRAME: It took a year
to write the first draft, and then
another year editing it after [getting]
feedback. Unfortunately, even after
all the edits, my then-agent didn’t
feel she was the right person to sell
the book, so we parted ways. Three
years [spent] writing and thinking
about this novel, and I seemed to
have nothing—but I was lucky to
find a new agent a month later, and
from that point things happened
very quickly. ENTER THE AGENT: I
had been in a writing group. One
of the other writers [had] recently
signed a book deal through her
agent, Cathryn Summerhayes of
WRITES FROM:
PRE-COMET:
William Morris Endeavor, and
offered to recommend me. Within
days, [Summerhayes] had read my
novel and offered to represent me.
WHAT I DID RIGHT: I tried to support
others in various ways: as an editor,
hosting live events, and by tweeting and talking about other people’s
work. Instead of worrying about my
own writing career all the time, I felt
part of a community that did have
some good news—and that gave
me hope. WHAT I WOULD’VE DONE
DIFFERENT: I would try to feel less
urgency to get published. I pressured myself to get a book deal, but
that was stifling. ADVICE FOR WRITERS: Just write. And if you have days
when you feel you can’t write, then
read or go for long walks instead.
NEXT UP: A new novel, and [I’m] also
adding some pieces to my short story
collection. WEBSITE: helensedgwick.
com.
Christopher Steinsvold
The Book of
Ralph (science fiction,
August, Medallion Press)
“When a strange message appears on the
moon, it’s up to one eccentric
extraterrestrial to save the world.”
Brooklyn, N.Y. PREI wrote fiction intensively
in my teens, won a creative writing award in high school, but then
stopped in college. I hadn’t written fiction for two decades before
this novel. I always wanted to write
a novel, but felt I needed a story
interesting enough to be worth
writing. TIME FRAME: It took about
a year for the first draft, and a second year for [revisions]. ENTER THE
AGENT: My agent is Mark Gottlieb
at Trident Media Group. He was
the 42nd (and last) agent I queried.
WHAT I LEARNED: You must take a
break at some point from the writing, let it sit, and then come back to
it [with an enhanced perspective].
Eventually I did take a break, but I
should have done it sooner. I was
too enthusiastic and didn’t want
to lose momentum, but this was a
mistake. WHAT I DID RIGHT: I waited
until I had an idea for a novel that
I completely loved, and then wrote
it. My enthusiasm is what helped
me get through the whole process—
including finding an agent. NEXT
WRITES FROM:
RALPH:
22_wd1216_BreakingIn.indd 22
9/1/16 9:36 AM
I have an idea for a sequel, and
another novel, and recently finished
a short story.
UP:
John Keyse-Walker
Sun, Sand,
Murder (mystery,
September, Minotaur
Books) “Constable
Teddy Creque, the only
police presence on the crime-free
island of Anegada in the British
Virgin Islands, must investigate the
island’s first murder since 1681.”
Pine Island, Fla.
I retired from the practice
of law after 30 years in 2012. I had
not written any fiction since high
school. This book was my first effort
at writing fiction in over 40 years,
and I was fortunate enough to win
the Mystery Writers of America First
WRITES FROM:
PRE-SUN:
Crime Novel Competition with the
manuscript. TIME FRAME: I had no
intention of writing when I retired,
but I found my planned retirement
hobbies and volunteer work did not
fill my days, so I started writing in
spare moments. I completed the
manuscript over two years. ENTER
THE AGENT: The publishing contract
was part of the prize for winning the
MWA competition, and I had no
agent at that time. Since then, I have
signed with Danielle Burby of HSG
Agency. I found her with the help
of my editor at Minotaur, Elizabeth
Lacks. BIGGEST SURPRISE: How many
people are involved in the process.
There are editors, publicists, marketing people, copy editors, designers,
proofreaders and probably many
others who I am not even aware of.
It takes a village to produce a book.
FIND FERTILE GROUND
Sedgwick shares how lessons learned
in the garden can help our writing
flourish at bit.ly/WDBreakingIn.
I wrote about a
place and a way of life that are not
known to many people. It had the
attractiveness of being something
new to the editors and, hopefully, the
reader. ADVICE FOR WRITERS: There
is no substitute for life experience
as a preparation for writing. NEXT
UP: A second book in the Teddy
Creque series. Also, a stand-alone
mystery. WEBSITE: johnkeyse-walker.
com. WD
WHAT I DID RIGHT:
Chuck Sambuchino is the editor of Guide
to Literary Agents and Children’s Writer’s
& Illustrator’s Market (both WD Books). His
most recent book is When Clowns Attack.
22_wd1216_BreakingIn.indd 23
9/1/16 9:36 AM
WRITER FOR HIRE
8 WAYS
TO MAKE
MONEY
FROM YOUR
WEBSITE
f you have a website or blog that enjoys
reliable traffic week after week, then it’s
possible to monetize that traffic, even
if it’s a modest amount. Mostly what it
takes is a bit of imagination, combined with a compelling
offer or interesting content for your visitors. It also helps,
of course, to know what tools and services are out there
(commonly known as e-commerce tools) to help you in
your efforts—both to facilitate the logistics and to spark
ideas for engaging or appealing to readers.
This roundup features some of the best approaches and
tools, progressing from easiest to most complex. (Note:
Unless you have a business or entrepreneurial background,
it’s smart to start with a few small experiments before you
advance to more involved offerings.)
I
1. READER SUPPORT
Have you ever seen a tip jar on a blog? They’re easy to
implement if you have a PayPal account, which allows
you to create a PayPal “Donate” button to embed on
your site. PayPal fees are 2.2–2.9 percent plus 30 cents of
every transaction.
There are also WordPress plug-ins that help make
calls for one-time donations look more engaging and
attractive, such as tinyCoffee [wordpress.org/plugins/
tinycoffee], a fun slider that allows people to figuratively
buy you a coffee (or two). Small acts of generosity from
your readers can add up.
If you can get people to donate once, then there’s a
good chance you can get them to do it every year, as in a
Public Broadcasting Service or NPR pledge drive, provided that you are delivering quality content consistently. This is the idea that underpins Patreon [patreon.
com]: People commit to a recurring donation of their
choosing, and you can offer patrons special rewards that
non-patrons don’t receive. Patreon takes 5 percent of the
money you raise.
To solicit recurring donations without the expectation
of a reward, you can once again use PayPal—it works for
one-time or recurring donations.
2. AFFILIATE
MARKETING
One of the first ways bloggers typically make money is
through affiliate marketing: You market and promote
someone else’s product or service, then receive a reward
(typically money) when your efforts lead to a sale.
BY JANE FRIEDMAN
24_wd1216_Friedman_MoneyBlog.indd 24
9/1/16 9:36 AM
The Amazon Associates Affiliate Program is one of the
most comprehensive [affiliate-program.amazon.com]. The
wide range of Amazon’s products increases your opportunities to earn—plus, when people end up at Amazon,
they tend to buy more than what they initially intended,
and you earn a commission on everything they purchase
during a specific time frame, not just the product you
link to.
Amazon is a natural affiliate partner if you’re actively
discussing or recommending books online. Other online
bookstores also offer affiliate programs, however, and
you don’t have to be exclusive to any single retailer.
Be aware, too, that Amazon affiliate marketing is not
allowed in all states and may not represent the best possible earning potential for you.
Many, many other companies, organizations and
individuals are willing to share a portion of the revenue
when you send customers their way, sometimes as much
as 50 percent. Web hosting companies and other tech
companies commonly offer affiliate programs, as do
entrepreneurs who run online courses. Wherever you
find high price tags, usually more generous payouts
follow. If you’re wondering whether an affiliate program
is available for your favorite online store or product, just
do an online search for “[name of store/product] +
affiliate.” (You can find WD’s program, for example, at
writersdigestshop.com/wds-affiliate.)
The Federal Trade Commission requires that you
clearly disclose affiliate marketing relationships, but that
shouldn’t scare you away from being an affiliate marketer.
Study how the most professional bloggers disclose their
affiliations to learn how, or read online articles that detail
what disclosure should look like.
3. ADVERTISING
& SPONSORSHIPS
You might wonder why advertising isn’t at the top of this
list as the easiest way to monetize a site. Two reasons:
(1) Being able to accept advertising generally requires
that your site be self-hosted, and (2) It takes considerable site traffic to generate revenue this way, unless you’re
reaching an exclusive, premium audience that’s attractive
to advertisers.
The most common way to accept advertising is to
sign up for Google AdSense [google.com/adsense]. You
determine where, when and how these ads show up
on your site, as well as their format (text-based, display,
PROCESSING PAYMENTS
Most of the tools listed in this article do not require you to accept payments directly; instead, the
transaction happens through a third party. As you
become more experienced, you may want to handle
transactions yourself. This requires two things:
1. A SECURE WEBSITE:
Before you accept credit
cards, you need to secure your site to safely accept
the information and process the transactions. You
can tell that you’re on a secure site by looking at the
URL: It uses https instead of http. Making your site
secure isn’t difficult; simply contact your website
host and purchase an SSL certificate. It usually costs
around $75 per year, per site.
2. PAYMENT PROCESSOR.
You’ll need to create an
account that allows you to accept credit card payments. Two of the most recognized processors are
PayPal and Stripe. Both receive fees from each transaction, usually around 2.9 percent of the price plus
30 cents.
By handling payments on your own site, you keep
more of your profits and avoid paying additional fees
to a middleman. However, you also increase time
spent on customer service, such as when credit cards
get rejected, customers report your transactions as
fraudulent, or you have to process refunds. multimedia, etc.). If you’re using WordPress, Google
offers a plug-in that makes setup easy.
There are many variables that affect what you can earn
from Google ads, but a common earnings expectation
is $1–$1.50 per 1,000 visitors to your site per day. One
challenge, however, is the growing prevalence of adblocking software, which can effectively erase a quarter
(or more!) of your traffic.
If you do have sufficient traffic, you may be able to
get accepted into a more targeted ad network, such as
LitBreaker [litbreaker.com]—for literary, bookish sites—
or you can reach out to potential advertisers yourself.
Sponsorships are an alternative to advertising and work
great for niche and smaller-traffic websites, podcasts and
email newsletters. A company typically pays to be the sole
sponsor for a set period of time, in exchange for recurring mentions or placement. It basically functions the way
9/6/16 10:00 AM
WRITER FOR HIRE
UNDERSTANDING
TAX IMPLICATIONS
Once you begin earning money from your site, you’ll
quickly run into two big questions:
1. HOW IS THIS INCOME REPORTED TO THE IRS?
Some services (such as PayPal) report your income for
you if it reaches a certain level; you’ll receive a 1099
form during tax season. If you’ve ever received a book
advance or freelance income from a publisher, the
income is reported in a similar way. The payment you
receive is untaxed, and you must determine whether
quarterly tax contributions are necessary. Some companies will not report your income to the IRS at all,
but of course you still have to report it. I recommend
using free accounting software such as ZipBooks or
Wave to begin keeping records if you’re not already.
2. DO I NEED TO CHARGE SALES TA X ON DIGITAL
PRODUCTS AND SERVICES THAT I SELL?
site that is, at a glance, indistinguishable from your usual
content. Such content is typically disclosed as “sponsored
content” (Federal Communications Commission regulations have been changing; check for the latest guidelines),
but otherwise you as the site owner treat it just as you
would your own content. When done well, native advertising helps companies get visibility and recognition by
offering content that is somehow useful or entertaining
to your visitors.
This can occur outside the realm of the click-bait
you’ve seen on news sites. For example, during a series
of several posts, Barnes & Noble’s NOOK Press paid
me to run how-to articles on janefriedman.com (which
has steady, targeted industry traffic) by bestselling indie
authors who use NOOK as a distribution platform.
The articles didn’t promote NOOK specifically, but the
posts were clearly labeled as sponsored by NOOK Press.
Native advertising is also common on social media, particularly on Instagram.
Tax law dra-
matically varies depending on what state you live in,
what product/service you are selling, and even where
5. DIGITAL
PRODUCT SALES
the customer lives. The good news: Some third-party
services will apply the correct taxes on your behalf
(and possibly even remit them), and well-developed
e-commerce plug-ins, such as WooCommerce, will
calculate correct product taxes for you and help you
stay on the right side of the law. But fair warning: This
can be an enormous headache depending on your
state, and if you do need to collect taxes, you have to
secure a license before you begin selling. To research
tax laws in your state, visit taxjar.com/states.
ONE MORE NOTE:
The EU requires you to pay taxes
to them if you sell certain digital goods to EU residents; you may want to avoid selling to EU customers
if you’re not prepared to navigate that quagmire.
advertising does, but the sponsorship payment isn’t tied
directly to site traffic or performance, and the ad placement is more like a dignified notice.
4. NATIVE ADVERTISING
Primarily an option for well-regarded online publications, “native advertising” is when a company or an
individual pays you to place or produce content on your
If you’re a published author, then you probably already
have digital titles available for sale through online retailers. While it’s certainly possible to sell those e-books
through your site, it’s often more effective to send visitors to retailers they already frequent, such as Amazon.
That said, there is a fine line between “e-books” (which
may sell for very cheap and be loaded onto e-readers)
and “informational products” (which may carry a higher
price point and be delivered as a downloadable PDF).
When you look to monetize your site for more impact,
think of the latter.
Digital product sales may comprise any type of content that you create or commission and then package and
sell yourself, with the help of e-commerce tools. Once
people pay for the product, they get immediate access or
a link to download the content.
Gumroad [gumroad.com] allows you to bundle together
many different types of digital files and easily sell them in
a single transaction. (It’s popular among musicians offering album downloads.) This method doesn’t require you
to increase your website’s functionality or set up payment
processing; all payment and download transactions happen through Gumroad’s interface. You pay Gumroad $10
per month, plus 3.5 percent + 30 cents per transaction. If
9/1/16 9:36 AM
that service doesn’t suit you for some reason, take a look at
competitor E-junkie [ejunkie.com].
For writers with a bit of tech savvy, it’s possible to
avoid middleman fees by facilitating payments and automating digital downloads on your own site, especially if
you’re using WordPress. See the sidebar on Page 25 for
more information.
6. CONSULTING
OR COACHING
Some freelancers and authors supplement their writing
income by offering coaching or consulting services to
others who are less experienced or established. This can
work especially well if you’ve written an authoritative
book—or even a long blog post—on a topic that compels
readers to contact you afterward in search of answers to
more specific questions.
Acuity Scheduling [acuityscheduling.com] allows
potential clients to schedule themselves on your calendar (based on predetermined rules you set), and you can
require payment at the time of booking. The administration of the appointments is completely automated
(notifications, reminders, cancellations, etc.), greatly
reducing email or phone back-and-forth. Acuity offers a
free starter plan, but premium features cost $10/month.
To accept payments through Acuity, you’ll need to set
up your own account with a payment processor such as
PayPal or Stripe. If Acuity isn’t right for you, take a look at
Coach [withcoach.com] as an alternative.
7. ONLINE COURSES
Digital-age entrepreneurs love offering online courses
because they’re scalable—you earn more money as
your enrollment increases, but the work required often
remains the same. They also tend to carry higher price
points and be more profitable than digital products. That
said, the secret is out, and the landscape is starting to
become glutted with online courses. To compete, you
have to offer something that’s benefit-oriented and finely
tuned to the needs of your audience.
Online courses can be run live (students log on at a
particular time and place), as a self-study (students go at
their own pace), or a mix. The most feature-filled platform
for self-study courses is Teachable [teachable.com], which
has several tiers of service. BigMarker [bigmarker.com] is a
webinar-style platform that allows you to run live sessions.
MODELING SUCCESS
To see these strategies in action, visit writersdigest.com/dec-16.
Neither requires you to add functionality to your site; you
use their hosted, all-in-one solutions.
If you’d rather build functionality into your own
WordPress site and not have a middleman, take a look
at Zippy Courses [zippycoursesplugin.com] for self-study
courses and GoToWebinar [gotomeeting.com/webinar]
for live webinars. Zoom [zoom.us] can also facilitate live
sessions for courses with limited enrollment.
8. DIGITAL
SUBSCRIPTIONS
Subscriptions have been around since the dawn of newspapers and magazines, but they’re complex to manage
because they require recurring payments (monthly or
annual fees) and a system for tracking subscriber data.
You might offer digital subscriptions for access to a
private community or content tiers, or delivery of an
email newsletter or magazine. A big question you’ll face
initially is how subscribers will get access to the product
on a recurring basis. Will you require a site login? Will
you send new content via email or some other method?
The more automated this system is, the less frustration
you (and your customers) will encounter.
WordPress users can opt for membership plug-ins
that automate and streamline account setup, renewal
reminders and so on. WooCommerce [woocommerce.com/
woothemes] is one of the most well-known; Easy Digital
Downloads [easydigitaldownloads.com] is another option.
For all types of sites, Chargebee [chargebee.com]
is a full-featured solution for subscriber management,
invoicing and renewals, and customer care. But it’s a more
complex tool that may require you to hire a site developer.
Starting from scratch? Rainmaker [rainmakerplatform.
com] is an all-in-one site building and hosting solution
made with subscriptions (and e-commerce) in mind.
Just about every site or blog has the potential to be monetized; start by listing what you know about who visits your
site and why, and brainstorm how to turn your strengths
and expertise into something salable—which, you’ll be
glad to discover, isn’t that different from writing a marketable article or book. WD
Jane Friedman is the editor and publisher of The Hot Sheet
(hotsheetpub.com), the essential industry newsletter for authors.
9/1/16 9:36 AM
WRITER FOR HIRE
JUST SAY YES
If you have your eye on a freelance writing career but are
intimidated by your prospects, take note: Sometimes the shortest
distance between two points really is a straight line.
BY JEFF SOMERS
A
TIP: KNOW THE DIFFERENCE.
Conventional wisdom
is that every writer should be compensated for his work,
and that there can be various interpretations of what
kind of “compensation” is fair. The rules bend here
when the aim of your freelance writing is essentially to
use your byline to promote books or other products you
have for sale. Writing a freebie blog post because you
hope it sells some books on the long tail isn’t freelance
writing as a career—it’s a Loss Leader book promotion
strategy. The whole point of launching a freelance writing career is to make a living writing. That’s what we’re
discussing for the purposes of this article.
THE YEAR OF YES
When I started thinking about freelance writing as a
real-life way of earning money, I had The Look embedded in my head. I knew I couldn’t take a decade to
slowly build something that resembled a full-time job.
Filled with the terror that only a spouse can inspire, I
made a fateful decision: For the first year I would literally never say no.
I would take every freelance writing assignment
that paid. No job would be too small, no fee too small,
and no subject matter or convoluted Search Engine
Optimization (SEO) scheme too soul-draining.
And it was the best decision I could have made.
The Theory
I had no contacts in the freelance world and no resume
of prior work. I needed to make those things happen—
and fast. While many people build those connections
before leaving a full-time position elsewhere (not a bad
idea, I might add—it certainly removes the panic from
this equation, among its other benefits), that was not my
situation. I had to earn a living right away.
I found that there is actually a lot of really awful writing
work out there. The work might be awful for different
reasons—low pay, boring subject matter, restrictive and
maddening rules, or often all three simultaneously—but
the point is, it’s there. And you know how the saying about
dirty jobs goes. Without any experience or contacts, you
few years ago when I told my wife I
wanted to leave my day job—and its steady
if unglamorous paycheck—she gave me
what spouses everywhere will recognize
as The Look. The Look is dangerous, and it means, loosely
translated: You’d better know what you’re doing.
Of course, like Jon Snow, I knew nothing—except that I
wanted to make my living doing the one thing I love: writing. I was already moonlighting as a modestly published
novelist, and thought this skill might take a different form
in my daylight hours. So, I did my research. There’s a lot of
advice out there for aspiring freelance writers, from where
to find assignments to how to write a pitch. It boiled down
to a couple of simple rules: Don’t work for peanuts, and
don’t take low-quality assignments. Good, sound advice.
Which I ignored.
28_wd1216_Somers_JustSayYes.indd 28
9/1/16 9:36 AM
can begin writing for money today, if you’re willing to start
in the trenches.
on a hamster wheel constantly grinding out material.
When Saying Yes, keep a watchful eye on your time
The Practice
Firmly committed to my decision to Say Yes, I did a few
things right away:
1. I set up a freelancing website to be my professional
face on the internet.
2. I reached out to past employers and everyone I knew
and announced I was looking for writing work.
3. I answered ads on internet job sites (such as jobs.
problogger.net and writersjobboard.com).
TIP: AVOID SCAMS.
Saying Yes doesn’t mean chuck-
ing common sense. Don’t write free “samples” for
sketchy employers, or take ethically (and legally) dubious jobs such as writing Amazon reviews. You’re better
(and smarter) than that.
The Payoff
Within a few days, I had my first job offers: one writing for
a wedding-related blog paying me the princely sum of $5
per post, and one from a limousine company paying
me a little more for blog posts about, you guessed it, limousines. A past employer responded to my outreach and
asked me about writing chapters in a book with a very
technical subject matter. The chapters would require some
research, and the rate was 8 cents a word. Despite the
glaze that came over my eyes whenever I read about the
topic, I said Yes to four chapters.
Over the next few months, my Yes to Everything
strategy soon had me very busy. I was writing about the
strangest mix of topics you can imagine: sex toys, the boy
band One Direction (yes, really), moving houses and adoption law. None of it was all that interesting to me personally,
and none of it paid all that well, but I was learning a lot
about the mechanics of freelance writing. And I was
earning enough of those tiny paychecks not to match my
previous salary, but to (mostly, barely) keep The Look at bay.
TIP: DON’T GET TRAPPED.
When writing for a low
word count rate, you’ll be tempted to make up for
it with volume. Setting an exhausting pace just to
earn a respectable amount of money can trap you
and energy.
My approach of Saying Yes didn’t always start with
writing assignments—but it often ended up that way. For
example, during this period, I was invited to give a presentation at the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference. Following
my new strategy, I cleared my schedule for that weekend,
then came up with the idea for a session drawn from my
novel-writing methods: “Take Off Your Pants and Write:
Plotting vs. Pantsing.” This led directly to the article you’re
reading right now (one of a handful I’ve written for this
publication in the past year), because the editor was in the
audience and liked my presentation enough to invite me
to query her. You never know how one opportunity might
lead to another.
When I’d built my bio and my portfolio enough that
Barnes & Noble, WD and About.com offered me writing
gigs, I did what I’d been doing for more than a year at that
point: I said Yes. And finally I’d said it enough that I could
start saying no when I wanted to.
THE TAKEAWAYS
What I learned from my Year of Yes was simple:
1. If you don’t have any idea how to start a freelance
writing career, it’s worth a try to just start.
2. There is no permanent record following you around.
Taking a low-paying job doesn’t doom you to perpetually working for pennies.
3. Every job has something to offer beyond money,
whether it’s a networking connection or experience
(but there should be some kind of money, too).
4. Jobs lead to more jobs, and each step on that ladder
can lead to a pay-rate bump.
Remember, you’re in charge of your career and your time.
That means you can sell it for less than it might be worth
if there’s a benefit to be had—but it also means you ultimately get to decide what it’s really worth.
For me, the Year of Yes gave me the experience and
skill set to really make this freelance writing thing work.
Better still, I haven’t seen The Look in a long time—
at least, not because of my career prospects. WD
in a vicious cycle, because you won’t have time or
energy to find better-paying jobs, and you’ll wind up
Jeff Somers (jeffreysomers.com) is the author of the Avery Cates
novels, as well as Chum and We Are Not Good People.
28_wd1216_Somers_JustSayYes.indd 29
9/6/16 10:00 AM
WRITER FOR HIRE
HIRE YOURSELF
The best marketing support you can get often comes
directly from the source (you!). Here’s how to promote like the pros—
even on a tight budget.
BY NICK COURAGE
T
CREATING A
CONVINCING ARGUMENT
FOR YOUR BOOK
You get only one chance at a first impression, so before
you start thinking about creating a budget to market
yourself online, I highly recommend taking an honest, objective look at your website and any other online
presences you may have established (Twitter profiles,
Facebook Pages, Goodreads Author pages, Amazon
Author Pages, etc.).
Take a few minutes right now and pretend you’re a
stranger coming across these pages for the first time.
• Do they clearly communicate who you are as an
author and what your book is about?
• Do they make you want to open your wallet and buy
your book?
• If they do make you want to buy, how easy is it to
make the purchase?
Let’s take a look at how you can maximize each platform.
Your Author Website
It’s amazing how many authors don’t have websites—or
have websites that look and function like an afterthought.
Apart from an eye-catching book jacket, your online presence is your most important sales tool; your website is
who you are to the online world at large. If you’re trying
to persuade people who don’t know you to spend money
on your books, it helps to lead with your best foot.
(Note: Even if you’re querying and haven’t landed
an agent yet, creating a professional website can’t hurt.
The first thing an agent is going to do if she likes your
oday, it’s easier than it’s ever been for
authors to connect their books with
a large potential readership—an ideal
readership. When I talk about this at
conferences—even from my varied perspective as a novelist, former “Big Five” marketing staffer and independent
publishing consultant—attendees noticeably shift in
their chairs. They’ve spent a great deal of time attempting to build platforms online—and for most, their efforts
haven’t moved the needle much. When I talk about
reaching readers, though, I’m not just talking about
being active on social media. I’m talking about marketing, broadly defined as paid promotion.
Just saying the word marketing is enough to send a
chill through most literary audiences. Every author I’ve
worked with would rather focus on writing. I would, too!
Unfortunately, authors can’t rely solely on traditional
publicity outlets to support their books in today’s media
landscape. The silver lining? In this brave new world, we
now have the ability to make our own publicity.
30_wd1216_Courage_HireYourself.indd 30
9/1/16 9:36 AM
manuscript is Google you. In most cases, it’s entirely
within your power to make sure she likes what she sees.)
Design is important.
And given that a significant percentage of web traffic
is mobile these days, your visitors’ experience on smartphones and tablets is equally important. (If this sounds
overwhelming, visit bit.ly/author-websiteWD for WD’s
most recent comprehensive article on creating author
websites.) A website doesn’t have to be expensive to look
professional, and if you need help, you can find a tutorial
for just about anything online—or hire a pro.
Your writing is your business. Treat it like one!
Amazon, Goodreads & Beyond
When it comes to your Amazon Author Page, prioritize
the good stuff through Amazon Author Central. (Whether
self- or traditionally published, if your books are available on Amazon, you can access and optimize your book
pages through this portal. If you have a publisher, check
with your publicity team before making edits, but at the
end of the day, these are your pages and you’ll be the most
invested in keeping them up to date.) Don’t be shy: If you
have a blurb from a recognizable author or publicity outlet,
put it in bold and at the top of your copy.
Do the same with your Goodreads pages—accessible
through the Goodreads Author Dashboard—and any
other places your book may be featured. This way, when
potential readers hear about you and search for more
information, they’ll find the most convincing argument
for your book no matter what they click on.
Social Media
I’m often asked whether authors have to be on Twitter,
or Instagram, or Pinterest—and the answer is no. I
agree that time is precious, and I wouldn’t want writers to feel they’ve wasted it. What I do recommend
is setting up basic profiles or accounts on the social
platforms you think your audience is most likely to
use. Different platforms attract different demographics. Almost every agent and editor I know is on Twitter:
not a bad place for aspirational authors to get involved.
Conversely, the last I checked, there weren’t many older
historians on Snapchat.
Don’t overextend, but make sure you’re set up so
that the readers most likely to love your books are able
to find and follow you online. It would be a letdown to
find out a fan had tried to find you and couldn’t.
The first step to book-marketing success is that simple:
Let people like you.
FINDING
POTENTIAL FANS
Once you’re confident you’ve created a convincing argument for your book, you’re almost ready for outreach!
First, though, an exercise: Go to a bookstore and,
being completely honest with yourself, try to find where
your book would fit on the shelves.
For a long time, I thought I was writing a young adult
novel—until I walked through 10 rows of YA at a Barnes
& Noble and I realized I’d actually written middle-grade
(an entirely different genre). Soon afterward, manuscript
re-edited and query revised, I signed with my first agent.
Traditional publishing houses focus on an intended
audience at every stage of a book, from editorial to
marketing. The reality is that even the most beautifully
written novel, without a clear market, is going to be a
tough sell at every level: to publishers, to bookstores
and to readers. So from the day an agent pitches a project to editors, publishers ask themselves: Who is going
to buy this book?
As an author, you should be asking yourself the
same question.
When marketing, you’re going to be more effective—
and more economical—if you’re realistic about what
you’ve written and where it fits. Not every book is “for
everyone”—the least helpful description a publicist can
hear. Countless genres and preferences can be guideposts
in targeting conceivable audiences. Once you’ve identified
these guideposts, you can start narrowing the demographics you’ll be targeting with campaigns—not organic “soft
sells,” but paid social media advertising—that will give you
the most bang for even a very limited buck.
DON’T WASTE YOUR MONEY
• DON’T HIRE SOMEONE TO TWEET FOR YOU. Use
your authentic voice. Readers can spot a fake.
• SKIP THE BOOK TRAILER. YouTube is brimming
with trailers that have fewer than 100 views—and
those are the good ones!
• BE SELECTIVE WITH BLOG TOURS. Make sure someone will be reading what you’re writing, and that
you’ll be in good company posting there.
9/1/16 9:36 AM
WRITER FOR HIRE
Targeted Audiences
Social networks collect all sorts of data about their users:
age, location, interests. As an author, you can leverage
that information to promote your book to an audience
as specific as, say, “female readers of Writer’s Digest,” or
“Stephen King fans within 10 miles of New Orleans.”
To experiment with targeting demographics on
Facebook, click the “Boost Post” button in the lower
right-hand corner of any post on your Page. (Note: This
targeting is available only when posting to your public
Pages, not personal profiles.)
Select “Create New Audience,” and you’ll be presented
with an array of options: location, age, gender and interests. Looking at the first post shown in the sidebar on
Page 33, I would first try to target fans of VOYA Magazine,
School Library Journal and other Facebook users for
whom VOYA’s endorsement would be most meaningful.
Because I’ve been lucky enough to get some press in
Pittsburgh, where I live, I might also target Facebook
users who have the above interests and live in Pittsburgh.
These users are most likely to have heard about The
Loudness through local coverage, and if I continue to raise
awareness with them, I have a good chance of converting
UP THE VALUE OF YOUR DOLLAR
• NARROW YOUR AUDIENCE. The more specific you
are about your potential readership, the less it usually costs to reach them.
• START WITH MICROBUDGETS. If a promotion that
cost only a few dollars takes off, you can always
increase your spend.
• UNDERSTAND YOU GET WHAT YOU PAY FOR. Your
nephew’s free design skills may cost you in the long
run. Check sites such as Reedsy.com and Pronoun.
com for listings of vetted industry professionals.
• MAKE AN INFORMED DECISION ABOUT HIRING
MARKETING HELP.
The best time to approach a
freelance publicist is when you have a specific goal
in mind for your finished project. Consider reaching
out to these professionals even if you have a
them into readers and maybe even creating new offline
opportunities, such as school visits and workshops.
Twitter’s ad platform functions similarly. To create a
campaign, log in to ads.twitter.com and choose the Twitter
accounts whose fans you’d like to target, and the tweet
you’d like them to see. Finally, set a “total budget” for your
campaign so the promotion doesn’t roll on indefinitely.
Strategic Thinking
The more specific you are with the potential readership
you’re trying to reach—that is, the smaller the target
audience—the more affordable it is to reach it … and the
more likely that audience is to interact with your promotion. So really think about who might be most likely to
love your book. I work primarily with “microbudgets”:
$1 to $20 ad spends that I use to blanket the most
focused readerships I can come up with for my clients.
I find I reach more readers per dollar on Facebook,
so I tend to focus on Facebook campaigns … but if you
spend most of your time on Twitter, you may want to
experiment with reaching potential readers there.
After you select your targets and budget, Facebook
displays the percentage of the target audience you’ll be
able to reach with the dollar amount you’ve allocated.
Expanding on the above example, there are fewer than
100 fans of School Library Journal living within 25 miles
of Pittsburgh. That might not seem like much, but these
are the opinion leaders I most want to reach, and for $3
I can ensure that my promotion reaches all of them multiple times. The name of the game is quality, not quantity.
Focus first and most on fans of book-related media.
It’s tempting to target fans of TV shows and movies, but
you’ll end up spending a lot of money reaching people
who may or may not be readers. If I’m not too worried
about my budget, I might also try boosting the aforementioned post to U.S. fans of Divergent and The Hunger
Games—a much larger target audience (roughly 5 million, according to Facebook). I won’t be able to reach a
significant percentage of this target with $3, and the fans
I do reach are likely to be more casual readers … so it’s
not ideal, but because I’m not committed to a huge ad
spend, there’s not much risk in testing the waters.
publisher—debut or midlist authors may not get
powerhouse marketing support in-house. Let your
editor know you’d like to contribute to the publication effort, and ask whether she has any suggestions
of whom you can involve.
CREATING YOUR
OWN PUBLICITY
Now all you need is something interesting to reach out to
your future fans with. Many authors assume they have to
9/1/16 9:36 AM
GIVE YOUR BOOK A BOOST
These are examples of paid posts that proved effective in
promoting my own debut novel.
create something new: an app, a quiz, an animation. But
more often than not, you already have something interesting you can use to promote your books.
Before you undertake some new promotional project that you’d view as a chore or a time suck, take an
unblinking look at yourself and ask: What are my assets?
Because you can’t count on publicity attempts turning
out to be time well-spent, it’s important to identify every
part of the publishing buffalo you can use in your promotional campaigns. Make a list of any pre-existing bookrelated “content” that might be of interest to the reading
public. When in doubt, default to an excerpt—often
underutilized, but ideal for outreach. If you post the first
chapter of your book on a professional website, complete
with buy links, you have the perfect asset to promote to
likely readers—and all you did was copy and paste.
The idea is to come up with compelling reasons to
reach out to new audiences through paid Facebook and
Twitter marketing. The more you’re able to come up with,
and the further you can get from simple announcements
that your book is available, the better.
Imagine yourself as a target for a sponsored post.
What would make you want to click? If you’re traditionally published, this may be a conversation you have
with the marketer assigned to your book—but even so,
the bulk of this legwork will likely fall to you. You may
elect to write essays, listicles and guest blog posts—or
just pose your new puppy next to a copy of your novel.
All are fresh opportunities to spark interest and build
momentum with audiences online.
If you have even one extra print copy of your book, set
up a Goodreads Giveaway (coordinating with your publisher, if you have one). It’s a low-effort, high-interest way
to promote across your social platforms—and if you run
the giveaway before your book is published, Goodreads
will alert all entrants when your publication day arrives!
When you land coverage for your book, amplify
those publicity hits online. You had to work for them, so
why not budget a few dollars to make sure they reach
your intended readership on the social platform of your
choice? Even if the publicity doesn’t move the needle on
its own, your amplification might.
As you continue to raise awareness about your books,
your platform will grow. Before long, with any luck,
you’ll become the author whose fans other authors are
targeting to raise awareness about their books. WD
Nick Courage (nickcourage.com) is an author and publishing
consultant whose writing has recently appeared in The Paris Review
Daily, Story and Full Stop. Find him on Twitter @nickcourage.
9/1/16 9:36 AM
WRITER FOR HIRE
YOUR
(GHOSTWRITING)
BUSINESS
BLUEPRINT
There’s a big difference between landing one or two
gigs and making a career of ghostwriting—or any kind of
writing, for that matter. Use this plan for long-term,
full-time success.
ll professional writers share the challenge of creating a profitable business
around their passion. Ghostwriters
often have the added challenge of not
being able to discuss or share the work they have done
for their clients because of the terms of nondisclosure
agreements. (Which is probably why you never hear
about any conferences for ghostwriters—what could
anyone talk about?)
I had started out well enough. I’d written a number
of my own books, but it was hard making a living that
way, and so I began freelancing on Elance.com (now
called Upwork) as an editor and ghostwriter. I started
small and built a solid reputation among the clients
using the site, but it was hard to gain traction elsewhere.
Like many ghostwriters, for years I had no portfolio, no
A
leads, no presence and no plan. I felt as though I was
chasing money all the time just to keep my lights on.
I spent hours tweaking my website, but it was like
building a shopping mall in the middle of some random
prairie in Montana. Then, I had a stroke of luck when
one of my long-term clients, Dawnna St. Louis, asked me
to help write her newest book, 6ix Kick-A$$ Strategies
of the Million-Dollar Entrepreneur. In working over the
content, the solution to my dry spell became obvious.
Ghostwriters, like other savvy entrepreneurs, can
build solvency into their careers simply by restructuring daily tasks and priorities. To start, this requires a
change in how you think about your work. The key is to
view yourself not as a contractor—always at the mercy
of the next job—but as a business … in control of how
you operate.
N PERAGINE
BY JOH
34_wd1216_Peragine_GhostWriting.indd 34
9/6/16 11:26 AM
YOUR BUSINESS BUILDERS
BLUEPRINT
• EXPERTISE
• TARGET MARKET
• OFFERINGS
O
M
E
S
N
O
FU
TU
O
RE
What challenges does your target
market have and how do your writing services solve
those challenges? Is your marketing congruent with
your expertise?
MARKETING:
C
Income Quadrant
To determine how you communicate your writing services to your target market, how those communications
translate into opportunities, and how those opportunities become sales, address these key areas:
•
• MARKETING
• LEADS
• SALES
IN
As ghostwriters, our expertise is that we can write
books and, more important, we can write other people’s
books. I identified my target within that framework as
professionals who want a book to leverage their business or brand but do not have the time or skill to write
and publish alone.
Until then, I’d been writing books for anyone who
would hire me. While that strategy might work for those
just trying to start building a bio, it was not a good longterm approach: My target was too wide and vast. I was
relying too heavily on referrals, which were sporadic
at best. To secure the future of my business, I had to
decide what that future would be. I had to decide what
kinds of books I wanted to be hired to write.
RA
TI
EXPERTISE: What one thing do you know at an
expert level that others could benefit from? Keep it
simple and succinct: Aim for three to five words.
• TARGET MARKET: Who wants and will benefit from
your expertise? Focus on potential clients who you
could naturally convey your value to, rather than
having to convince them of it.
• OFFERINGS: How would you deliver your expertise
to your target market? How do your offerings solve
the challenges of your target market?
PE
•
Without truly targeting your market, your efforts can be
ineffective. In my case, I could not market to every businessperson on the planet in hopes that something might
stick. Picking a niche gives you the greatest chance for
securing more consistent work.
Think of it like fishing. If you’re a shrimp fisherman,
you wouldn’t throw a wide net into the middle of the
ocean—instead, you’d find out where the shrimp are,
and be strategic about where to steer your boat. Without
choosing a target market for your writing services, landing a client has more to do with good fortune than with
business savvy.
I figured out that I most loved ghostwriting about
wine, and focused my efforts on business people in that
industry. I was growing my own expertise with my experience, and I knew my market better with each project.
Once you figure out specifically who you want to offer
your ghostwriting services to, then you can determine
how best to connect with them. Answers might range
from cold-calling to buying email lists, writing blogs on
the subject, or becoming involved in conversations about
that industry either online or at events.
RE
Core Quadrant
In an effort to define the core of your writing business,
answer these key questions:
LEADS: Where can you find your target market? How
can you connect and communicate with them? How
do they typically take advantage of opportunities? • SALES: Have you competitively priced your services
to meet the budgetary constraints of your market?
O
St. Louis’ book provides a Business Builders Blueprint
(shown at bottom right) that I found to be filled with
lightbulb moments for struggling professional writers.
Using this tool, you can pinpoint the blind spots in your
business strategy. Let’s break it down.
•
C
BLUEPRINT FOR
SUCCESS
• VISION
• MISSION
• GOALS
• PEOPLE
• PROCESSES
• TECHNOLOGY
BLUEPRINT COURTESY OF DAWNNA ST. LOUIS AND HER BOOK 6IX KICK-A$$ STRATEGIES OF THE MILLIONDOLLAR ENTREPRENEUR
9/1/16 9:36 AM
WRITER FOR HIRE
Knowing your market means knowing what your
market can bear to pay for your services. This is a delicate dance, because you want to be paid what you are
worth (and don’t want to send the wrong message about
the quality of your services by underbidding), while not
pricing yourself out of work.
When you are beginning, you may take lower-paying
writing gigs, but if you’re not careful you can get stuck
there. An influx of smaller jobs can cause burnout, and
if you’re growing your portfolio through referrals, having clients coming to you knowing what others have paid
can prevent you from increasing your rates incrementally. The goal for successful ghostwriters (and perhaps
all writers mindful of the bottom line) is this: work less,
make more. Your eventual goal is to increase your prices
to reduce the number of clients you need to keep salient.
Success is a funny thing. If you aren’t prepared for it,
it can overwhelm you quickly. There are only so many
working hours in a week. The next quadrant addresses
operations of your business. For the purposes of this
article, these are the activities not directly related to actually sitting and writing a book.
Operations Quadrant
It’s time to identify the people, processes and technologies required to deliver the best experience to your clients
while streamlining operations within your business. These
questions help define operations at a high level.
• PEOPLE: Who (aside from you) is critical to the suc-
cess of your writing business?
What processes do you use? TECHNOLOGY: What technology can you leverage
to automate some of those processes and improve
connections with your contacts?
• PROCESSES:
•
For those just starting out as a one-person show, operations may not seem important—but the foundations you
lay early will help you grow and scale your work.
Eventually, it was no longer the best use of my time
or resources to figure out how to create a better website or do my own accounting. It was better business to
outsource those needs. Ghostwriters might also employ
sales/marketing assistance and even legal counsel. You
have to decide who is critical for not only maintaining
the day-to-day operations of your business, but growing
it to where you want to be.
Today, in my ghostwriting business as it stands, this is
my process of acquiring a new client:
My hired salesperson sends me a hot lead to discuss
my services and assess the potential project.
2. I send a proposal for the work.
3. Once the client agrees to the proposal, I draft a contract
from my template and pass it to my attorney to make
sure everything is in order.
4. The person in charge of finances sends out an invoice
for the deposit and makes sure it is paid.
1.
This kind of outsourcing might not make financial sense
for you at first—but when the day comes that it does, use
it. Technology helps, too, with services such as:
• Adobe Sign for the sending and signing of contracts.
• PayPal for invoicing and payments.
•
•
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) program to keep up with leads and clients.
A project management program such as Google Drive
or Scrivener to interface with the client and the book.
Future Quadrant
The final piece is the vision, mission and goals of your
business. For this quadrant, consider the following:
What do you want to be/do for your clients?
Your mission defines the people you work
with and what services you plan to provide them.
GOALS: What are your objectives for the coming
year? Where do you want to be in five years?
• VISION:
• MISSION:
•
It is never too early in any kind of writing career to
begin to think about your future, because it pushes
what you do day to day. Knowing what you and your
business are about is important. It is what sets you
apart from other writers and appeals most strongly to
your clients.
It’s good practice to list long-term goals, quarterly
or annually, for both your writing (improving on a
technical level, for instance) and your business (which,
as I hope we’ve established by now, is an entirely different thing).
DAILY PRACTICE
To implement this blueprint for success, set short-term
goals at the beginning of every week (yes, every week).
Examples might include:
I want to close a deal on a magazine article.
I want to develop new leads for my editing services.
3. I want to connect with three authors in my market.
1.
2.
9/6/16 10:00 AM
With those goals in your mind, you can structure your
workweek around this six-step success strategy (adapted
from what St. Louis refers to as her “6ix”). Each day, you
do two activities in each of three categories:
Income Producing
Relationship Building
3. Professional Development
1.
2.
Set a time limit for each task, aiming for a 45- to
60-minute window. (I follow St. Louis’ recommendation
of 48 minutes, an odd but memorable number that you’ll
be more likely to actually stick to.) Resist any urge to
push yourself further—just as with a workout at the gym,
you don’t want to end up being so sore the next day that
you just give up. A task is complete when either your set
time has elapsed or you have accomplished your goal.
Here’s how it breaks down:
“If you’re not making money, you’re not in business,” St. Louis advises. “The
first thing you should do every day is be in business. So
start with income production first.” In other words, rather
than starting your day by catching up on emails, prioritize tasks that relate to converting an opportunity to a sale.
Think: Networking with potential clients, sending queries
or proposals, introducing yourself to a new market.
The concept that you have to do this every day might
seem far-fetched or overwhelming, especially when
you’re embroiled in a current ghostwriting project. But
many of us support our work with our own bylines (this
article, for instance). I’ve found that never letting up on
your pursuit of these opportunities is the best way to
ensure that you are always adding new clients and work
to your pipeline and to avoid the dreaded dry spells.
are working on and answer questions about what I do.
These networking efforts have been hugely lucrative
and cannot be understated. After the event, I reach out
directly and continue the conversation.
A lot of your relationship building will likely happen online. You can become a regular on social media
or popular blogs that fellow writers or potential clients
frequent by regularly commenting or otherwise responding to others’ posts.
Success is a funny thing. If you
aren’t prepared for it, it can
overwhelm you quickly. There
are only so many hours in a week.
• 2 INCOME-PRODUCTION TASKS:
Good business
hinges on good relationships. Essential relationshipbuilding tasks might include going to conferences, commenting on blogs and hanging out in wine bars. (Well,
my niche is wine, so I can justify that last one.)
The time you set aside for these tasks should be
focused on outreach and the strengthening of current
relationships. Do not try to sell during this time. Instead,
lay a natural groundwork for relationships that could
eventually turn into writing gigs in the future.
At conferences, I don’t spend time outside of sessions
sightseeing or checking email. I attend social mixers and
dinners, or even just make a point of meeting people at
the lounge. There, I connect with others about what they
• 2 RELATIONSHIP-BUILDING TASKS:
Don’t overlook old-fashioned etiquette: Send a card to
contacts on special occasions. People love real mail.
Aim to
learn or share two new things every day. These tasks might
include any work directly related to educating yourself
about your subject matter or offerings (sitting in on a webinar, going to a writing group or book club meeting, doing
topical research) as well as business development (sharing
information about your offerings with your target audience). If you think every day is too often to read up on your
industry or subject, think again. Especially in publishing,
the landscape can change quickly. You need to keep up.
• 2 PROFESSIONAL-DEVELOPMENT TASKS:
To grow your writing business, you have to be ruthless
in your pursuit. Every night, make a plan of what you’re
going to do the next day in reference to the above six
activities. Put them on your calendar. Even if this starts to
seem repetitious day after day, ask yourself: Is it working?
You should be witnessing results within a few weeks.
If you are not closing deals and getting assignments or
ghostwriting jobs, something is wrong with your process.
You need to go back to your quadrants to discover what
it is and then adjust your daily activities accordingly.
Building a business takes time. But thinking of yourself as just that—a business owner in addition to being a
writer—can put you on a more direct track to satisfying,
long-lasting results. WD
John Peragine is a ghostwriter, book coach and freelance journalist.
9/1/16 10:17 AM
Robert Crais
FIRED UP
This master of crime writing
makes modern classics the
old-fashioned way—with a
heartfelt passion, a fine-tuned
process and, naturally, a twist.
PHOTO © EXLEY PHOTO INC.
BY JESSICA STRAWSER
38_wd1216_WDInterview.indd 38
9/1/16 9:36 AM
W
rite what you love to read: The advice, oft
touted, sounds simple enough. But few
embody this approach as successfully as
Robert Crais, whose slickly plotted, toughtalking, wisecracking crime novels continue to prove worthy
of comparison to the hard-boiled classics he cut his teeth
on—while showcasing a style that still manages to be his own.
An Emmy Award–nominated writer for “Hill Street
Blues,” “Cagney & Lacey” and “Miami Vice,” in the mid-’80s
Crais traded in his lucrative TV credits for his dream of having a spot on bookshelves. He put his own team on the case,
and Los Angeles private eye Elvis Cole and his partner, Joe
Pike, have been collecting fans since their introduction in
The Monkey’s Raincoat, which won the 1988 Anthony and
Macavity awards and was nominated for an Edgar. They’ve
starred in 16 of Crais’ 20 novels to date, making their author
a No. 1 New York Times bestseller and Mystery Writers
of America Grand Master. His latest, The Promise, new in
paperback earlier this year, pairs Pike and Cole with the stars
of his 2013 bestseller Suspect, LAPD cop Scott James and his
K-9 partner. A 17th in the series is slated for early 2017.
How his writing has evolved along the way—and what
we can all learn from it—is, like many things in the writing
life, best described by the author.
You’ve talked about your 1999 hit L.A. Requiem as a
turning point in your career. What in your approach
and perspective changed at that point?
I grew up as a crime-fiction junkie. I write in this field
because I grew up reading in this field …
You grew up in a family of law enforcement, too, correct?
In my family there are I think now five generations of police
officers. That may not be in reality how it sounds—it’s not
like growing up in a TV show—but the true benefit for me,
I think, was in seeing police officers as human beings, and
understanding who they are in real life. That gave me an
appreciation for the nuance of their characters in detail that
hopefully I’ve brought to the characters of my novels.
So I grew up reading this stuff and loving it; my favorite
writers in those days were the classic American detective
fiction writers: Raymond Chandler, Dashiell Hammett,
Robert B. Parker. So when I created Elvis Cole and set
about writing my books, that was coming from a place of
enthusiasm, I was a fan. And the first seven books were
written in the style of the traditional American detective novel: first-person point of view of the detective,
everything is seen through the detective’s eyes, because I
thought that’s what you’re supposed to do.
But as I wrote them, I began to feel constrained by that
limitation. I wanted to tell stories that were broader than
one could tell frozen in that traditional pattern. So by the
time I got to No. 8, which was L.A. Requiem, I just decided
to take out the jams and combine all the different types of
crime fiction and thriller fiction that I like to read.
It wasn’t an easy decision. I’d had this traditional approach
[that was] proving to be pretty popular. Part of me was
saying, You’re about to shoot yourself in the foot. But I felt
strongly that I could tell the stories I wanted to tell if I
expanded the canvas. I brought in points of view of other
characters, cut from good guys to bad guys, did the flashback
thing, and was still so unsure that when I sent it to my agent,
I told him, “If the publisher hates it, I’ll give the money back.”
Luckily, it worked out. I’ve had this saying I’ve used forever as a self-motivator, a little sign in my office that says,
Trust the talent. What that means to me is, when you’re at
your darkest moments and you think you’re writing the
worst thing that’s ever been written, and it’s going to be a failure, you just want to give up and go to Madrid, the best thing
you can do is simply give yourself over to your instincts.
So you still have those dark moments sometimes?
Of course. After 20 books people must say, “He must knock
this stuff out now.” But most of the writers I know don’t
escape the effort that goes into writing. In fact, I think if
you’re doing the job correctly it gets more difficult, because
each time you go back to the well, you have to dig deeper.
When you begin, no writer knows where you’re going
to end up—and I’m not talking about the plot. I plot things
out—I know where the story’s going—but what I never
know is: Can I pull this one off ? Can this all add up to be
what I want it to be? Is it true, is it real, is it strong, does it
have the right energy? You face those questions every day.
And especially when it’s damn hard, and the words aren’t
coming, and you really have to bash your head into the
wall, you do have those dark moments.
9/1/16 9:36 AM
Robert Crais
“What I never know is: Can I pull this one off ? Can
this all add up to be what I want it to be? Is it true, is
it real, is it strong, does it have the right energy?”
The only difference between me today and me then is
that I’ve now been through it 20-plus times, so I have a
greater level of confidence that I’ll be able find my way
out of the darkness. At the beginning I didn’t know, and
that was really scary. Now I have more faith that even
though I’m lost right now in this moment, history shows
I can probably figure my way out of this. Just keep pushing, just keep typing, just keep writing.
So what is your process? You said you plot things out.
I have to figure it out before I write. Otherwise, I’m just
lost. Maybe that comes from my TV days where there’s
this fairly rigid professional process: You think up the
story, you have to pitch the story to someone, a bunch of
people sit in a room and talk out the story, you come up
with an outline, all the themes are broken down, there it
all is before you ever write the screenplay.
I actually wrote a couple of manuscripts, prior to my
first published novel, with the high-minded idea that an
artist would never, ever plot out a story in advance. If you
were a true artist, you simply started typing. It was like
magic: You know, your eyes rolled back in your head, and
the story came to you and you were just glowing with inspiration, and days or weeks later you came out of your trance
and had this beautiful novel. Well, I tried that twice, and
they were just terrible. One had a 500-page beginning and
a 50-page ending and there was no middle. I mean, these
things were so bad I never even submitted them—even I
knew they were bad, why inflict them on anyone else?
So when it came time to write the next book, I said,
Listen, you’ve failed twice in a row, why don’t you do it the
way you’re comfortable with? And what makes sense to
me is to figure stuff out in advance.
With a lot of writers, we’re not talking about the same
thing when we say we outline. Many people believe outlining is an intellectual process: Chapter 1: Elvis walks into
a room and a woman wants to hire him. Chapter 2 … And
you come up with 40 or 50 of those and there’s your book.
But it isn’t that at all. I’ll spend three or four months
figuring a story out before I ever begin to write it. And
it’s never sequential for me. In the beginning the ideas or
thoughts come to me sort of globally. I always start with a
character—character is what motivates me, what interests
me. There’s some human aspect to the nature of a particular character that has to get its hooks in me. Thereafter I
just sort of free-flow scenes with that person or with that
person’s problem, with general situations that interest
me, and I end up with sort of this mass of random scenes,
but little by little some of them begin to connect, because
I find them the most interesting or the most relevant.
After many weeks of this stuff, 80 percent of those
random scenes and notions I’ve come up with are in
the garbage, but I begin to see a story arc there, and the
story arc comes together. All those scene notes, character
notes, I put on little notecards and pushpin them up on
black boards in my office. I’m very visual; I like to see it
laid out in front of me. After three or four months I have
something that actually works as a story. I don’t need 100
percent of everything figured out, but I typically need
75 or 80 percent. I have to see the beginning, the middle
and the ending I want to reach: This is what I’m trying to
do with this particular story and these characters. When
I’m confident in that, I’ll begin to write. …
[All told it typically takes] around 10 months, give or
take a little bit. I usually don’t write all the chapters or all
the scenes sequentially. As I’m figuring everything out,
getting closer and closer to the process, I’ll write scenes
that end up [coming much later in the story].
Voice is important with recurring characters especially.
When developing a new character, what are some
techniques you use to make him sound distinctive?
Always it begins with an emotion. Sometimes that emotion’s not definable at the beginning. I’ll see an image
or imagine the character doing something that I don’t
understand but that fascinates me.
To give you an example, the first novel where Joe Pike
is the main character was The Watchman, and the very
first notion that eventually became that book was this
image I had of a young woman in a convertible. Her hair
is flying because she’s driving really, really fast, hands on
the wheel at 10 and 2, knuckles white, wind is screaming past her, she’s pretty and her eyes are clenched closed.
That’s all I saw, but what grabbed me was that her eyes
were closed, and I was hooked. I thought, There’s something about this woman—I want to know why her eyes are
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closed, I want to know how she came to this place. Who is
she? It’s always like that, with all the characters.
From something like that, I’ll begin to think about a
character, and if need be I’ll research a character. One of my
(now continuing) characters is former Delta [Force] operator/now mercenary Jon Stone, and it was the same sort of
genesis for him, though because of the nature of his work, I
ended up doing an enormous amount of research on private military contractors. … Contrary to the stereotypic
image of muscle-bound, professional warriors, you find
people who are Rhodes scholars. You find people who are
voracious readers who read and write poetry. You find all
these fascinating things. And brick by brick the character
becomes real to you—you use your imagination to connect
the stilts of reality that you found through research. You
can hear the way he sounds, you can see the way he walks.
And pretty soon they come to life. I mean, I’m not
saying when I’m off my meds they come to life, but they
become the kinds of characters you want to read about.
I’m going to give that book a year of my life, and thought
about that way, you want to spend it with people you
find interesting and care about and have grown to love.
You do a lot of hands-on research with the LAPD,
FBI, bomb squads and the like. How much do those
experiences change the course of what you plan to
write, versus informing the plots you have in mind?
Constantly. First of all: Research is the best. Research is
more fun than writing. Research, you get to go outside!
Do you find it’s best to do it while outlining or writing,
or do you finish research before the story starts?
I begin researching a particular subject or character when
I’m first conceiving it. If I need to know something about
police K-9 dogs, or private military corporations, or how
to make a bomb, whatever it is, I’ll begin researching, and
the more real-world research I can do, I pick up a ton of
small stuff that adds enormously to the writing.
I do that research in the beginning, but you find that
as things develop over the course of creating the book,
you need to find out other things. Again and again, you
trip over a pothole where you think, I don’t know that, or,
How do they do this? When I’m in the heat of the writing,
I’ll make crap up, because I want to keep going. But that’s
never good enough, and I’m always bothered by that, so
in the coming days or weeks, I’ll retro-research it, and
then if I have to revise or add things, I can do it.
Research is never finished—not until the project is
over. It simply goes on throughout.
MIND OVER MATTER
Read more from Crais about why the best writing comes from
passion, not for the market, at writersdigest.com/dec-16.
Some newer writers are intimidated by the idea of
that kind of research, especially not knowing if the
book will ever be published. They worry about not
getting access, or not being taken seriously. What
would you tell writers who are feeling that way?
I was once the person who didn’t have 20 novels published, so what I learned firsthand is that if you present
yourself professionally and respectfully, you’ll be treated
professionally and respectfully.
But the notion that, I don’t want to spend a lot of time
researching this because someone might not buy it, I think
is a recipe for failure and is also disrespectful to your own
work. Why write it if you’re not going to try to make it
the strongest, most powerful, most alive thing you can?
You’ve got to throw yourself into it. If you’re writing about
a world in which you need to do research to learn about it,
then feel passionate about it. If you’re not passionate about
what you’re writing, you’re writing the wrong thing.
I cannot stress how much I believe that. I don’t know
how other people feel, but writing, whatever I’m writing, is an emotional event for me. The intellectual part of
it comes later, as almost the mechanical part of getting
the emotional stuff right, getting it all typed up and ready
to go. Successful writing is all about passion, to create a
world that’s full and complete and engrosses the reader.
And remember, first and foremost the reader is you.
Why write about anything if you’re not going to write
about something you’re passionate about, characters
who you’re fascinated by, a world in which you want to
be in, even if it’s only for a short period of time? That
passion is the engine that has to fire the whole thing,
drive the whole experience. Every one of the books I’ve
written—hell, all the TV scripts I’ve written—at some
place in the genesis of those things I found something
that I was really hungry to write—because I wanted it
there. I wanted to create it and see it and have it in front
of me. And I think it’s a mistake for anyone to somehow
disassociate themselves from that passion, to think that
the creation of a compelling piece of fiction can be had
simply on intellectual terms. It becomes cold, and I don’t
think you want cold. You want heat, you want fire. That’s
what we gather around and warm our hands with. WD
Jessica Strawser (jessicastrawser.com) is the editorial director of
Writer’s Digest. Her novel Almost Missed You is due out in March.
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HOW A MONTH OF
NaNoWriMo
CAN LEAD TO A LIFETIME
OF BETTER WRITING
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BY GRANT FAULKNER
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LOGO © NATIONAL NOVEL WRITING MONTH
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W
hen I first became a writer, I marveled at the magical worlds my
favorite authors created—their lyrical prose, their riveting plots, their
piercing characterizations. They
wrote with such grace, such ease, that it seemed as if
they’d been born to it, blessed with a talent and anointed
by a higher power. They were masters, and I was a simple
novice, a bystander who wanted in but was improperly
dressed for the fancy dinner party they attended.
Their prose shimmered like diamonds, but what I
didn’t realize was that they hadn’t just plucked those
gems from an endless supply and dropped them onto the
page. Each precious stone was hard-earned, burnished
by the unsexy and often uncelebrated traits of diligence
and discipline. When we praise the fine craftsmanship
of a novel, we gloss over the toughest but perhaps
most important roles in its creation: time management,
accountability, work.
Every writer who becomes a master goes through a
training ground, whether formal or self-imposed. The
boot camp of choice for me—and hundreds of thousands
of others like me—is the rollicking, spirited grind of
National Novel Writing Month each November. With
the heady goal of writing 50,000 words in just 30 days,
participants at nanowrimo.org learn valuable approaches
to the creative process alongside critical habits to becoming
a successful novelist.
Here’s how a month of NaNoWriMo can improve
your writing for a lifetime.
THE 10,000-HOUR RULE
There’s a concept popularized by Malcolm Gladwell’s
book Outliers that it takes roughly 10,000 hours of
practice to reach mastery, whether in chess, writing or
brain surgery. What Gladwell calls “the magic number of greatness” comes from the research of K. Anders
Ericsson, who studied the practice time that leads to elite
performance and found the average was 10,000 hours
(about 90 minutes per day for about 19 years).
Gladwell gives such examples as Ericsson’s study at
Berlin’s Academy of Music tracking the practice habits of
violinists—the results of which revealed elite performers
amassing more than 10,000 hours of playing time—and
Bill Gates, who gained access to a high school computer
in 1968, before desktops were commonplace, and spent as
many hours programming before he became a doyen of
computer code.
While your brain doesn’t truly tally your “practice”
minutes and magically deem you a master at the 10,000hour mark, it’s the concept that’s important. Most writers
write several hundred thousand throwaway words before
they begin to produce their best work. Ray Bradbury
wrote 1,000 words a day when he first committed himself
to writing: “For 10 years I wrote at least one short story a
week, somehow guessing that a day would finally come
when I truly got out of the way and let it happen.”
NaNoWriMo encourages a similar process: To write
50,000 words in 30 days, you have to write 1,667 words a
day. That means banishing your inner editor and showing up to write on good days and bad days, on hard days
at work, on lazy and uninspired days, maybe even on
sick days. Your goal beckons you. Your daily word count
needles you. In this determined practice, you learn how
a novel is built not by the grand gusting winds of inspiration, but by the inglorious increments of constancy.
Participants are cheered along by “pep talks” from
bestselling authors sent to their inboxes throughout the
month. “It astounds me every time, but the books get
done,” Lev Grossman wrote in one such pep talk. “How?
It’s not about having some triumphant breakthrough
moment. Being a novelist is a matter of keeping at it, day
after day, just putting words after other words. It’s a war
of inches, where the hardest part is keeping your nerve.
The No. 1 reason why people who want to write novels
don’t is that they lose their nerve and quit.”
A WRINKLE IN TIME
The reaction I most often hear from writers who decline
to participate in NaNoWriMo is, “Sounds nice, but I
don’t have the time.” And really, who does have the time
to write 50,000 words in a month?
But great writers have wrangled with time constraints
for eons. “Time is short, my strength is limited, the
office is a horror, the apartment is noisy, and if a pleasant,
straightforward life is not possible then one must try to
wriggle through by subtle maneuvers,” Franz Kafka wrote.
There’s an old saying that if you argue for your limitations, you get to keep them. NaNoWriMo is a crash
course in time management—an exercise in discovering
those “subtle maneuvers” to work around obstacles.
To write 50,000 words in a harried life, you have to
closely evaluate how you spend your time. Each October, I
9/1/16 9:36 AM
go on a “time hunt.” I track how I spend each day, tallying minutes spent on social media, how many TV shows I
watch, how long it takes me to shower and make breakfast—everything. It’s always a revelation to see what I fritter
away, despite thinking I have no time to spare. Each year
I find ways to open up nooks and crannies to hit my daily
goals, whether it’s sneaking in five minutes of writing during my son’s soccer game or waking up an hour earlier.
One of the many paradoxes
of creativity is that it seems
to benefit from pressures
and boundaries.
In her book Overwhelmed: Work, Love and Play When
No One Has The Time, journalist Brigid Schulte claims that
for many working parents, free time comes in bits of “time
confetti”—a few minutes here and there. Bradbury wrote
Fahrenheit 451 in 30-minute increments using a rented
typewriter. Toni Morrison wrote her first novel in the few
spare minutes she could scrounge up each day as a working mother. Those small but consistent maneuvers add up.
NaNoWriMo also teaches one of the most undervalued time management skills, one rarely discussed in a
writing how-to book: learning to say no.
Saying no takes practice. I start by turning away
from my email and social media until I’ve written my
daily words. Then I practice saying no to an after-work
gathering, a brunch on Sunday, an invitation to watch
a basketball game. I don’t want to make life a narrow
affair where writing is more important than being with
friends and family, but I need to make sure that my
creative time isn’t crowded out—and to find the time
to write a novel in a month, something has to give.
I still dream of a time when I’ll have vast swaths of
space to write, but NaNoWriMo has helped me realize
that limitations aren’t all bad. One’s imagination doesn’t
necessarily flourish in the luxury of total freedom. One
of the many paradoxes of creativity is that it seems to
benefit from the pressures and boundaries of our daily
lives. A time restriction of writing a novel in 30 days
takes away choices that can cause one to dally and maybe
not start at all. Constraints also keep perfectionist
notions from eating away at you: You dive in and just
start writing because you have to.
“The ticking clock is our friend if it gets us moving
with urgency and passion,” Twyla Tharp says.
THE HEROIC ROLE OF HABIT
There’s a misguided notion that artists are freewheeling
creatures more inclined to follow the fancies of their imaginations than the rigidities of a schedule. Doesn’t routine
subvert creativity? Quite the opposite. “Excellence … is
not an act but a habit,” Aristotle proclaimed.
Not only does a routine help move your novel forward, but it provides a safe and stable place for your
imagination to roam, dance, somersault and leap. But
the writing habit isn’t an easy one to form. A habit, after
all, is something we do almost without thinking. It’s
automatic, like making coffee first thing in the morning.
NaNoWriMo helps you establish such a routine by
demonstrating how it can be successfully implemented
in such a short span of time. Nearly 90 percent of people
fail to keep their New Year’s resolutions, largely because
when they lapse, they quit.
One way to hold yourself accountable is to announce
your plans. When you tell friends and family about your
goals and join the larger NaNoWriMo community in
cheering one another online and in person, you’re reinforcing your commitment. When your NaNo buddy or
next-door neighbor asks, “What’s your word count?” you
won’t want to disappoint her—or yourself. It’s all about
“choice architecture”—designing your life and goals
around the things you want to achieve, instead of sinking into the powerful claws of more impulsive needs. We
tend to be myopic creatures, preferring positive results
in the present at the expense of future outcomes. But our
“present self ” often does a disservice to our “future self,”
who will scream back into the dark hallows of the past:
“Why didn’t you work on our novel?” NaNoWriMo helps
you focus on longer-term goals.
With the first 30 days under your belt, you’ve established the creative momentum to go further. Over
time, your discipline will become a habit, a necessity, as
instinctual as brewing that coffee upon waking.
IT’S GOOD TO HAVE GOALS
If National Novel Writing Month teaches just one thing,
it’s the power of setting a goal and having a deadline to
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keep yourself accountable. The words goal and deadline
might not ring with any poetic allure, but in the artistic life these two words should rank right up there with
inspiration and imagination.
As Yogi Berra said, “If you don’t know where you are
going, you’ll end up someplace else.”
Wharton professor Katherine Milkman and her colleagues found that we’re most likely to set new goals
around “temporal landmarks”: a birthday, a holiday,
the start of a new semester—or a new month, such as
National Novel Writing Month. These milestones create
a new “mental accounting period” (past lapses are forgiven, and we have a clean slate ahead of us) and prompt
us to turn our gaze toward a better vision of what we
want for ourselves and how we can achieve it.
Many accomplished writers apply this NaNoWriMo–
style concept to be productive year-round.
“I now treat every novel as if it’s a NaNo novel,” said
bestselling novelist Marissa Meyer, who has been participating in NaNoWriMo since 2008. “Of course it’s most
fun to be drafting during November, because then you
get the rush of being in a community, and of being part
of something bigger than just you and your novel, but
sometimes the timing with publication and deadlines
doesn’t work out. So whenever I am writing that first
draft, I aim to have it done in 30 days or less.”
THE JOY OF FAILURE
None of that is to say that creativity itself doesn’t play an
enormous role in NaNoWriMo, which in fact teaches
many lessons about the creative process. One of the
most important is that novels are essentially constructed
through a series of experiments, many of which fail. You’re
dropped into a dark forest, and have to walk down paths
that might not lead anywhere. You’re a tracker, following
the scents of your story. You have to trust your instincts,
read the signs in the sky, and try things … because something has to happen next. Standing still is not an option.
“Piecing a novel together over a year or more, one paragraph at a time, with days and weeks off in between, does
not produce the same quality for me as writing full-bore,”
bestselling author Hugh Howey says, who has participated
in NaNoWriMo since 2009. “I want to write as breathlessly
as readers consume the work. I want to live in my book and
not leave until it’s done. [That’s] the essence of NaNoWriMo.”
NaNoWriMo invites you to generate many new
ideas—to rip through failures, learn from them and
Visit NaNoWriMo.org …
To sign up, connect and uncover a wealth of resources:
• Word-Count Helpers • Forums • Pep Talks From
Bestselling Novelists • Online Word Sprints • “Write-In”
Events in Your Area • Inspiration * And More!
build on them. “The real measure of success,” Thomas
Edison said, “is the number of experiments that can be
crowded into 24 hours.” In the case of NaNoWriMo, it’s
how many experiments can be crowded into 30 days.
“I like to think of NaNo-ing as excavating. You
uncover different things at the 30,000-word mark than
you do at 10,000,” says Erin Morgenstern, who wrote the
rough draft of her acclaimed novel The Night Circus during NaNoWriMo. “Things that felt like desperate, random
nonsense on Page 72 (the abandoned broken pocket
watch, a partially obscured tattoo, that taxidermied marmot on the mantelpiece) are suddenly important and
meaningful on Page 187. Everything could hinge on the
fate of that marmot. Or the marmot may be a red herring.
Or perhaps the marmot is just a marmot. You have to
keep writing to find out.”
That sense of playful wonder is important for writing
mastery, and NaNoWriMo teaches you to trust the gambols of your imagination, to test your ideas on the page.
When you stop demanding perfection of yourself, the
blank page becomes a spacious place, a playground. So
what if the plot has gotten away from you? So what if your
novel feels a bit sloppy? It’s just a first draft. Masters learn
to be patient with their uncertainty, to tolerate moments
of doubt and let their stories develop embryonically.
NaNoWriMo gives you the opportunity to reflect on
your writing, to understand what creative approaches
work for you, and to develop the grit, resilience and can-do
gusto of a true master. NaNoWriMo is an occasion to
fill your writer toolbox with as many tools as you can.
You can prepare by outlining or filling out a character
questionnaire—or you can just jump in. You can write
alone—or attend write-ins with others. You can try a
little from Column A and a little from Column B. The
main thing, though, is that you write. Make it a part of
your day, your life, and every day you write will be one
day closer to mastery. WD
Grant Faulkner is the executive director of National Novel Writing
Month and the co-founder of 100 Word Story. Follow him on
Twitter @grantfaulkner.
9/1/16 9:36 AM
DEtOuR
THE WINNER OF THE 85TH ANNUAL WRITER’S DIGEST WRITING COMPETITION SHOWS THAT
DIVERGING FROM YOUR PATH MIGHT JUST LEAD YOU WHERE YOU WANT TO GO.
M
any writers arrive at a moment when putting
pen to paper becomes less of a creative outlet
and more of a hand-wringing act. Drafts pile up
alongside rejections, and you begin to wonder if
it’s all worth it.
For Sabrina Hicks, that moment led her to walk
away—for several years. But after gradually finding the
resolve to return to writing, she discovered a difficult
truth: Although her love for the craft was intact, the flow
of words didn’t come back naturally.
“My father originally inspired me to write,” Hicks
says. “After reading some of my work, he talked me out
of pursuing a law degree and convinced me to pursue a
creative writing degree [from the University of Arizona].
My first job was in publishing in New York City.” But
following years of struggle with her own works-inprogress, and frustrated by her lack of personal success
in the writing world, Hicks turned away from the written
word. When she and her husband started a family, she
decided to leave her career to focus on being a full-time
mom. As priorities changed, she allowed her writing to
take a back seat to motherhood—and for the most part
fade away.
Years later, after moving back to Phoenix, Hicks
decided to give it another shot—but learned those mental muscles reserved for writing had atrophied. Over the
course of five years and four drafts she toiled to piece
together a novel, but became stuck in a self-editing rut.
“My mother suggested I take a much-needed break
and write a short story to recharge my batteries,” Hicks
says. “I woke up one morning with the phrase: It all
began with a staring competition.”
Three drafts later, 44-year-old Hicks had turned this
one-line flash of inspiration into a 1,900-word story,
which she entered into the Children’s/Young Adult
category of the 85th Annual Writer’s Digest Writing
Competition. Her story bested more than 6,100 other
entries to win the grand prize, earning Hicks $5,000 and
a trip to the Writer’s Digest Annual Conference in New
York City, where she’ll have the opportunity to meet faceto-face with agents and/or editors.
Titled “Blink,” Hicks’ tale is from the perspective of
young June Walker, the neighborhood staring contest
champion, whose friends challenge her to go eye-to-eye
with new eighth-grader Koaty Taylor. But as June and
Koaty lock corneas, what begins as a simple competition
is refracted into a deeper exploration of self—testing the
depths of compassion we allow ourselves when viewed
with a careful eye.
Writing such a short story was a new test for Hicks—
ultimately a reinvigorating one. “I think the biggest challenge of writing short stories is making every sentence
YOU COULD BE NEXT! Your work could be a winner! Visit writersdigest.com/competitions/writers-digest-annual-competition to
enter the 86th annual competition. To buy a collection of all 10 first-place winners from this year’s awards, visit writersdigestshop.com.
DETOUR PHOTO © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM: MARIE MAERZ
BY CRIS FREESE
46_wd1215_Freese_Competitions.indd 46
9/1/16 9:36 AM
WINNER’S SPOTLIGHT: SABRINA HICKS
WHAT DRIVES YOU
TO WRITE?
I write for many reasons: to make sense of people and
places, to express myself creatively, to make connections in life and understand them in a meaningful
way. Sometimes I think the only way I can effectively
communicate is through writing.
HICKS PHOTO © MARLO HICKS
WHAT DO YOU CONSIDER TO BE YOUR
STRENGTHS AS A WRITER? HOW DID
YOU DEVELOP THEM?
Descriptive writing and setting is my strength. I
can write about the desert much easier than I can
[about] feelings. Sometimes I need a lot of time to
think about how a character would feel and react
and take myself out of the equation. I am largely
inspired by nature, so going on hikes helps loosen
my mind and develop these qualities, in addition to
reading great books.
count,” Hicks says. “When you’re used to novel writing,
you can get away with wordiness. The concise nature of
short story writing benefits my editorial skills, eliminating
unnecessary details and learning how to tighten my prose.”
Her strength in the short form wasn’t the only surprise—
Hicks has been stunned by her proclivity toward the young
adult genre.
“Generally, I’m not a YA reader,” she says. “I prefer
literary fiction. However, every time I open my laptop, a
younger voice comes out.”
Her instincts—deciding to write again, chasing a
story from a singular phrase and following her natural voice—haven’t steered her wrong. This is just the
DESCRIBE YOUR DAILY WRITING ROUTINE.
I’d like to say I have a very structured and disciplined writing routine, but the reality is, I go in
spurts where I’m a madwoman, unable to tear myself
away from my story, while laundry piles up and dinner becomes breadsticks. However, between the ups
and downs, I aim for 500 words a day, and morning
is always my prime time.
WHAT IS THE BEST PIECE OF WRITING
ADVICE YOU’VE EVER BEEN GIVEN?
I have found the most basic writing advice is the best—
write every day. It teaches you that writing is work. It is
a discipline. It isn’t this romantic endeavor you think it
is when you first get started. It isn’t about looking the
part—that notion is a first draft of a very bad novel.
Just write. And write. And write. And cry. And write.
And repeat. And don’t forget to eat real food somewhere in the middle.
beginning for Hicks, who is newly committed to finishing those edits on her book. Her ultimate goal is still to
become a published novelist.
Until that day comes, winning WD’s competition is
a welcome breath of fresh air. “My proudest moment is
[this honor]. We tell ourselves [as writers] we don’t need
validation, but when it comes, it’s pure oxygen.”
For a complete list of all 100 winners across the 10
categories, turn the page.
To read “Blink” and an expanded Q&A with Hicks,
visit writersdigest.com/dec-16.
9/1/16 9:36 AM
WInNeRs
THE 85TH ANNUAL
WRITER’S DIGEST
WRITING COMPETITION
CHILDREN’S/YOUNG ADULT FICTION
“Summer Rain”
1. PATRICIA NESBITT,
“Tai Gong’s Celebration”
2. MARIE TANG,
3. KATIE MILLS GIORGIO,
4. STEPHANIE WARD,
“BEST. GIFT. EVER.”
5. BOKERAH BRUMLEY,
“Sixth Grade Superhero”
“Losing Harp”
6. MATT KUVAKOS,
7. JUNE SENGPIEHL,
“Mother Goose and the Pirates”
8. BROOKE HARTMAN,
9. KAT ST. CLAIRE,
“Millicent Won’t Pretend”
“Mommy Drives a Monster Truck”
“Singing up the Sun”
10. BROOKE HARTMAN,
“A Kraken Called Clyde”
JUDGE: Holly Alder has taught writing since 1973 and is currently
an instructor with WD University. Winner of a National Society of
Arts and Letters honor award, she is the author of two North Light
Books and a collector of children’s literature (more than 6,000 titles
and counting!).
1. VICKEY MALONE KENNEDY,
“Colonists in Space”
“A Tale of Ice and Fire”
4. JOE WALKER,
5. RENE AHN,
“Guardian”
“Ashella’s Heart”
3. THOMAS ROGGENBUCK,
“The Son of Hephaestus”
6. DARLENE ENGELHOVEN,
7. G.A. NOGGLE,
8. ERIN BAUER,
“Delicious Indecision”
“Showdown at Red Road”
“Christmas Belles”
9. CONNER J.B. JONES II,
10. APRIL MYERS,
8. RAY KHAN,
“Eclipse”
“Aftershock”
JUDGE: Debby Mayne has published more than 40 novels and
“Not My Will”
“Why Should I Pray for Her?”
7. CARLENE BROWN,
“Silver Halos”
9. DELORES LANGSETH,
“Christmas Giving”
10. JAMISEN LYN CARNEY,
“Wasps, Kids, Venison, Seizures
and Freaking Chicken Breasts”
JUDGE: Tamela Hancock Murray (tamelahancockmurray.com) is a
literary agent with The Steve Laube Agency. Her experience as an
award-winning, bestselling author helps her understand writing in
today’s market. Murray and her husband live in Virginia with their
two daughters.
MAGAZINE FEATURE ARTICLE
1. CHERYL KATZ,
“Manoomin Reclaims Its Roots”
2. JULI R. BRANSON,
“Sgt. William Carney: Old Glory
Never Touched the Ground”
3. ANGELA WALDRON,
GENRE SHORT STORY
2. ANDRA MARQUARDT,
6. COLLEEN PEDERSEN,
“A Pilgrimage to the Holy City of
Lhasa, Tibet”
4. AMY HORTON,
“Trichotillomania: A Lifelong Struggle”
5. CHANDLER MONK,
“An Open Letter to the 18-Wheeler
That Hit and Ran”
“300 Years of History: The Oldest
6. TAMRA BOLTON,
Town in Texas”
7. LINDA ROLLER,
“The Giving Trees”
8. RICHELLE PUTNAM,
9. EILEEN MERWIN,
10. JOHN MOIR,
“Tally-Ho”
“Subway Superman”
“The Chameleon”
JUDGE: Susan Reynolds is the editor of GRAND magazine. She
novellas. Her most recent books are Trouble in Paradise, One Foot
Out the Door and Can’t Fool Me Twice. Her book For the Love of
Pete was a finalist in the 2015 Christian Retailing’s Best awards.
has authored or edited more than 45 fiction and nonfiction books,
including Woodstock Revisited (Adams Media). Her latest release is
Fire Up Your Writing Brain (WD Books).
INSPIRATIONAL WRITING
MAINSTREAM/LITERARY SHORT STORY
1. LORI NORDT,
“A Pocketful of Acorns”
2. ANDREA HAYES,
“The Princess Who Forgot
4. KRISTI IVANOFF,
“The Face of Grace”
“Faith Like a Child”
5. PAMELA HASKIN,
2. KENDALL KLYM,
“Our Mother”
“A Professional Male Ballet Dancer in
12 Steps”
She Was a Princess”
3. MURRAY G. MORRIS,
1. JENNIFER DUPREE,
“Just in Case I’m Cute”
3. KEITH CHARLES,
“In the Crawfordville Train Station”
4. SARAH CUSTEN,
“Marbles”
5. MARY ELIZABETH RAINES,
“Easter Breakfast at Denny’s”
9/1/16 9:36 AM
“The Definition of
6. JENNIFER OWENS,
Life Revealed”
Unconditional Love”
“The Young Man”
7. SEAN CROWELL,
8. ELSA NIERENBERG,
9. JAMES CORPORA,
“The Day She Went Away”
“ALT+F4”
JUDGE: Nate Pritts is the founder of H_NGM_N, an independent
literary publishing house. He is the author of eight books of poetry,
including the forthcoming Decoherence (2017) and the recent
Post Human (2016), which Publishers Weekly says “leads readers
through a poetic dystopia that reveals the fragility of the human
relationship with technology.”
MEMOIRS/PERSONAL ESSAY
“The Fallacy of Closure”
“Watermelons and Rita Gram”
2. REBECCA BROWDER,
3. SARAH VAN GOETHEM,
4. CHRIS LEWIS,
a Bird in Flight”
This Poem”
7. VICTORIA MARY FACH,
“The Black Refrigerator”
6. CAREN GALLIMORE,
“Short Railings and Long Island
Ice Teas”
“New Arrivals”
“The Perils of Wanting”
10. DEMERRIS RANAHAN,
“Earworm”
8. KIMBERLY BERKLEY,
“marriage”
9. MICHAEL MILLER,
“Storm’s Wake”
JUDGE: Nancy Susanna Breen is a poet, freelance writer and editor.
She has edited seven editions of the annual Poet’s Market, and her
chapbooks include Rites & Observances and How Time Got Away.
Find her at nudged2write.com and accomplishedwithwords.com.
1. ALEX RUBIN,
“The Apocalypse Plays”
2. ROBERT GILBERT,
“Trans Tasmin”
3. SARAH LAWRENCE,
“The Fig-Tree Race”
9. ROBERT REISCHL,
“The Weaver”
STAGE PLAY
5. FLORENCE TANNEN,
8. RAMEN BENYAMIN,
“A Machine Couldn’t Write
6. ALISON LUTERMAN,
“In Your Eyes”
“The Choice”
7. REBECCA BEYER,
“The Graph of Infinity Resembles
5. MARLA ALUPOAICEI,
10. ANNE KAWAMURA,
1. DUKE SOUTHARD,
“A Few Miles From the Keleti
4. SUELLEN WEDMORE,
Railway Station”
“Blood”
10. VALERIE CAMPBELL,
“George Clooney’s Sex
3. MELISSA CANNON,
“Scenes From the Trenches”
4. GINA MUSTO,
“Bibo and Bertie”
“Chiaroscuro”
5. KYLE LINKOUS,
“Who Keeps the Chair?”
6. TITA ANNTARES,
“Embers of Tent City”
7. ELISABETH FRANKEL,
8. MICHAEL REIMANN,
travel expert based in Atlanta. A former WD “Breakout Author
of the Year,” Gillespie writes for pastemagazine.com and is a
commentator on NPR’s “All Things Considered.”
9. PATRICIA A. POWELL,
10. NELSON BLISH,
“The German Party”
“Nut House”
JUDGE: Hollis Gillespie (hollisgillespie.com) is an author and NBC
“The Penalty Phase”
“Pandora’s Conceit”
JUDGE: Joe Stollenwerk is the author of Today in History: Musicals.
NON-RHYMING POETRY
1. SUELLEN WEDMORE,
2. TATUM MCNEIL,
“Round Pond, Virginia”
“Inventing the Hourglass (Figure)”
3. MAUREEN ASH,
“Farm Truck”
4. JILL MELCHOIR,
“Comes Now Spring”
5. TRACY ANN JOHNSON,
“Combing Her Hair”
6. ADELAIDE WEIDKNECHT,
7. FRANCIS KLEIN,
“Beyond the Woods”
“Ostrocons”
9. CAROL DESPEAUX FAWCETT,
TELEVISION/MOVIE SCRIPT
1. NANCY FROESCHLE,
“The Restoration”
2. STANLEY MUNSLOW,
“Timeframe”
3. CHASE KROLL,
4. R.J. LEWIS,
“Carolina Boys”
8. THOMAS DUKES,
“You teach me
how to walk”
10. JAYNE JENNER,
His stage adaptation of Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale
has had four professional productions. His other produced plays
include Catalina and Excuse My Dust: The Wit of Dorothy Parker.
“Leap”
“Dummy”
5. KATHRYN O’SULLIVAN AND PAUL AWAD,
“The Coldest End”
6. ELIZABETH PRESTON,
“Mad in a Way”
7. BLAIR DONAHUE,
JUDGE: John Philip Drury is the author of four full-length poetry
8. DARLENE INKSTER,
collections, including Sea Level Rising, and two nonfiction books:
The Poetry Dictionary and Creating Poetry (both WD Books).
9. TYLER VOSS,
RHYMING POETRY
1. CAROLYN FILES,
“July Heat”
2. MELISSA CANNON,
“Pandora Bearing Gifts”
“My Superhero Brother”
“Jack Pot”
“Winchester 13”
“The Shadow District”
10. LELAND FRANKEL,
“West of Sunset”
JUDGE: Jessica Dercks began as a script reader, crossed over into
casting and worked her way up to script and story development.
Currently, she is working in programming and creative development for TV series, both reality and scripted. WD
9/1/16 9:37 AM
FUNNY YOU
SHOULDASK
A literary agent’s mostly serious answers to your mostly serious questions.
BY BARBARA POELLE
Dear Not Personal,
My husband has spent a lot of time
hauling me through museums the
way one hauls a stubborn Saint
Bernard to the vet. On one particular
excursion to a modern art show, I
spent the initial 20 minutes wandering
through muttering, “I don’t get it,”
and, “This is just a pile of mannequin
legs.” Then, I stumbled upon an
installation that consisted of what
appeared to be a door in the wall.
Piped in from behind it was the sound
of dishes clanking, the sizzle and
spit of a stovetop, men’s voices above
tinny music—and, as if I’d fallen
through a wormhole, I was immediately in the back kitchen of every
restaurant I’ve ever worked in. The
cackle of a knife against the chopping
board, the frustratingly slippery nonslip floor pads, the whoosh of steam
from the dishwasher.
I beckoned madly to my husband
and, literally bouncing with joy, said,
“This one is awesome! It’s like a time
machine to my 20s! I totally get it! I
totally get modern art!”
After a beat where I presume a lot
happened for him internally, he said,
“That’s actually a door to the kitchen.”
[Insert sad trombone noise.]
But you know what? If the resonance of art lies solely in the eye
of the beholder, then for me, that
kitchen door was art. And I still
remember the way it felt to stand
outside the door, head cocked, being
transported to an “else”—someplace
else, someone else, something else.
That is what we are all hoping for
as readers. And just as one woman’s
kitchen door is another woman’s
van Gogh, there isn’t going to be a
uniform response to your writing.
I’d venture if you were to ask five
people their five favorite books of
all time, you’d find little overlap.
Subjectivity plays a huge part in
acquisitions, and I guarantee that
even some of the books topping The
New York Times list right now had
folks who couldn’t finish the read, as
it was just not to their tastes.
That being said, if you get 25–30
of these types of responses, it may
be time to take a closer look at your
project for these three telltale “not
for me” offenders:
DERIVATIVE WORKS: You often hear
agents say to include “comp titles”
in your query—books already on
the shelves that are comparable to
your work—but there’s a fine line
between comparable and derivative. For example, a futuristic young
adult novel featuring teens pitted
against one another, fighting to the
death, is ground that’s pretty well
tread. Whether there’s room for
one more footprint will depend
on whether anything that uniquely
resonates can be found in the rest of
the narrative.
You have a
bang-up opening, but that middle
section is a meandering mess that’s
just keeping the word count up
before you get to the fabulous ending.
Your B-story line must be as highstakes as your A-story line, and there
should never be a sizable section
where your writing tries to sustain
us without furthering the plot.
SECOND-ACT SLUMPS:
I love a
good murder mystery, no matter
the genre or style. But when there is
gratuitous violence (and especially
adult perpetrators against kids),
it takes a lot of careful handling in
terms of execution, originality
and plot necessity for me to be
able to get fully behind that kind
of narrative.
QUESTIONABLE CONTENT:
Dear FYSA,
My novel received a couple
of rejections with recurring comments
ASK FUNNY YOU SHOULD ASK! Submit your own questions on the writing life, publishing or anything in between to writers.digest@
fwcommunity.com with “Funny You Should Ask” in the subject line. Select questions (which may be edited for space or clarity) will be
answered in future columns, and may appear on WritersDigest.com and in other WD publications.
PHOTO © TRAVIS POELLE
Dear FYSA,
I’ve queried several agents
representing my genre, and the rejections have been kind, but seem to say
the same thing: It isn’t for them, the
industry is very subjective, or it just
doesn’t fit their personal taste. Are
they just being nice, or is it literally
just that?
Sincerely, It’s Not Personal
50_wd1216_FYSA.indd 50
9/1/16 9:37 AM
Just as one woman’s
kitchen door is
another woman’s
van Gogh, there
isn’t going to be a
uniform response to
your writing.
about it being “too quiet.” That was
my intent, though. I want the book to
feel like an afternoon at the park, not
like a fistfight. Am I just soliciting the
wrong people for my type of story, or
do I really need to add more drama
and conflict to make it publishable?
Yours, Peaceful Pam
Dear Peaceful,
OK, not to completely expose how
wildly I leveled up in my life-partner
choice, but on the day the modern
art museum excursion took place,
the only reason I agreed to go see
the pile o’ mannequin limbs was so
my husband would owe me an
evening at the big screen seeing Live
Free or Die Hard.
Reader, he married it.
But explosions and Bruce Willis
beating up a fighter plane are not
necessarily the kinds of drama and
conflict your novel needs in order
to avoid the “quiet” label. What that
generally speaks to are the stakes
involved for the characters moving
through the story. There should be
a resonance from the reader to the
characters, a subconscious identification with the conflict pushing
against the protagonist getting what
she wants. If it is too esoteric or
doesn’t have a large enough impact
on the character arc, beautiful writing won’t be enough to keep the narrative’s neck above still waters.
But also, to totally contradict
everything I just said: Sometimes
quiet is OK! We’ve all read books
that were deeply satisfying because
they felt like a canoe trip on a glasssurfaced lake during a languid
sunset. There is space for quiet on
the shelves … but it would be misleading if I didn’t admit that it’s a
narrower space than the book that
marries higher-stakes conflict with
accessible prose. WD
Barbara Poelle is vice president at Irene
Goodman Literary Agency (irenegoodman.
com), where she specializes in adult and
young adult fiction.
EXPLORE YOUR MOTIVATIONS.
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50_wd1216_FYSA.indd 51
9/1/16 9:37 AM
YOURSTORY
CONTEST #74
First Things First
THE CHALLENGE:
Write the opening sentence to a story based on the photo prompt below.
One thing I learned about marrying a sign painter: Once things go
dry, they stay that way.
—Arlene Syverson
Andrea avoided eye contact with
her ex’s handiwork as she uncapped
the paint can, preparing to add a
fresh layer of “Khaki Cafe.”
—Anthony Spangler
The game started with a parkbench note and ended with a
proposal stamped on a wall—and
she still didn’t know his name.
—Karyn Patterson
Kenneth Ve slipped the diamond
on Edie Lo’s finger, and breathlessly
said, “When we wed, let’s drop the
hyphen.”
—Michael McCarty
In the shadows of the home
we once shared, the greatest lie you
ever told remains in blurred black
paint on a long-forgotten wall.
—Kourtney Heintz
The words painted on the rock
at the top of the mountain were the
last written by the couple found at
—Diane Hess
the bottom.
They fell in love at the Annual
International Graffiti Competition,
but were quickly disqualified for
using a crappy stencil and poor
grammar. —John Granville Leonard
The message on the wall read like
an expression of love, except to me.
—George Christophiades
I ran to hide in the abandoned
mine shaft, where I found the evidence of his terrifying fixation
painted on the wall, waiting for me.
—Frances Lee Meyer
GRAFFITI PHOTO © TYLER MOSS
Out of more than 900 entries, Writer’s Digest editors and forum members selected the
following 10 story openers.
What is it, exactly, that induces
so many public restroom patrons to
wax romantic while taking care of
business?
—Carisa Showden
52_wd1216_YourStory.indd 52
9/1/16 9:37 AM
ENTERYOURSTORY
THE CHALLENGE: Write the opening sentence (one sentence only, 25 words or fewer) to a story based on the prompt below. You can be
funny, poignant, witty, etc.; it is, after all, your story.
TO ENTER: Send your sentence via the
CONTEST #78
PHOTO © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM: PE3K
78
online submission form at writersdigest.
com/your-story-competition or via email
to yourstorycontest@fwcommunity.com
(entries must be pasted directly into the
body of the email; attachments will not
be opened).
NOTE: WD editors select the top
entries and post them on our website
(writersdigest.com/your-story-competition).
Join us online in late November, when readers will vote for their favorite to help rank
the top 10!
The winners will be published in a future issue of Writer’s Digest.
DON’T FORGET: Your name and mailing address. One entry per person.
DEADLINE: November 21, 2016
GET
DIGITALLY!
52_wd1216_YourStory.indd 53
9/1/16 9:37 AM
WR I TE R ’ S
EXERCISES AND TIPS FOR HONING SPECIFIC ASPECTS OF YOUR WRITING
R & Le Sto
LOVE GONE WRONG:
5 COMMON FLAWS IN ROMANCE NOVELS
BY LE I GH M I CH A E LS
I
f you sense that something is wrong with your
romance work-in-progress, you can likely blame one
of the five following problems: (1) inadequate conflict,
(2) unrealistic or unsympathetic characters, (3) unclear
relationship motivation, (4) straying focus or, simply,
(5) lackluster writing. As an award-winning romance
novelist who continues to lead writing workshops in the
genre, I have encountered one or more of these issues in
every unsuccessful romance novel I’ve ever read. Here
is how to diagnose—and treat—these ailments in your
own manuscript.
1. INADEQUATE CONFLICT
A story about two people who are doing little more than
fighting against their overwhelming attraction to each
other is unlikely to bear the weight of a 250-page novel.
Real conflict involves important issues. What’s at
stake? What do both characters want that only one of
them can have? Or what do they both want so badly that
they must work together to get it?
Authentic conflict has at least two realistic, believable,
sympathetic sides—positions that reasonable human
beings could logically take. If you (and your readers)
can’t convincingly argue from either point of view, then
your conflict is likely one-sided and flat.
When you have genuine conflict, your characters will
have plenty to talk about. When you don’t, they may
argue until doomsday, but their conversations will be
superficial and won’t lead anywhere.
Symptoms of inadequate conflict include:
• CHARACTERS WHO ARGUE BUT DON’T TALK TO EACH
•
•
•
OTHER. If simply explaining their positions would
have solved the problem in the very first chapter,
then the couple is only having a misunderstanding,
not a true conflict.
ONE-SIDED CONFLICTS. If one of your characters is
trying to save the rainforest and the other takes glee
in burning it to the ground, it’s hard to be sympathetic to the latter character.
CIRCULAR ARGUMENTS. The characters argue the
same points again and again without making progress toward a solution. If the conflict is genuine, a
real discussion will develop and the characters will
gradually modify their points of view as they explain
their positions.
LOW STAKES . The issue doesn’t seem important
enough to warrant a story. A difference of opinion
between two teachers about how to run a classroom,
or a quarrel between parents about whether their
daughter should wear short shorts, isn’t likely to keep
readers up at night.
2. UNREALISTIC OR UNSYMPATHETIC
CHARACTERS
If during their first meeting your hero and heroine act
as if they’ve hated each other for years, then they’re
not believable. If they behave badly toward each other
throughout the novel without clearly justifiable reason,
then they’re not sympathetic. If they show nothing but
distaste for each other throughout the entire book but
54_wd1216_WKBK.indd 54
9/1/16 9:37 AM
R & Le Sto
fall into each other’s arms on the last page, then their
chances of lasting happiness are unconvincing.
Symptoms of unrealistic or unsympathetic characters
may include:
• A HEROINE YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO BEFRIEND. If she
isn’t someone you’d want to hang out with, odds are
your readers won’t either. You may know that deep
down your heroine is a sweetheart—but if she spends
all of Chapter 1 shrieking at her mother, readers will
see only her unpleasant side.
P Le to Tt
Use these probing questions to spot areas in your
own romance novel-in-progress where you’ve lost
the thread of your story, revealed too much too soon
or left out crucial information or steps in the development of the plot or relationship.
•
by the end of Chapter 1? What do readers not
know but want to? What unnecessary information
• A HERO YOU WOULDN’T WANT TO BE MARRIED TO.
•
•
•
•
Your main man has to be more than a handsome,
sexy shell to have lasting appeal. If he’s angry, can
readers empathize with his emotions? Does the bad
boy have a secret sensitive side, or is he so dangerous
that a sensible woman would run?
CHARACTERS WHO ARE OUT OF BALANCE. If the hero
is aggressive and the heroine is weak, or if the heroine is pushy and the hero is passive, the story is apt to
trail off. In a good pairing, the hero and heroine will
be roughly equal in strength and assertiveness.
TOO MUCH TELLING. If the characters are not realistic
or relatable, it will be difficult to bring them to life—
and thus make you more susceptible to just writing
about them rather than showing them interact.
UNMOTIVATED OPPOSITION. The hero should not try
to prevent the heroine from getting what she wants (or
vice versa) simply to be nasty. Readers will find both
characters more sympathetic if there is a good reason
for their opposition.
TOO MUCH INTERNALIZING. This occurs when readers
hear all about a character’s thoughts—more than they
want to—but don’t have any reason to care.
What do readers know about the main character
can you cut?
•
What forces the hero and heroine to stay in the
situation? If being around each other makes them
unhappy, why doesn’t one of them just leave?
•
What keeps the hero and heroine apart? Could
their disagreement be solved if they sat down for
a heart-to-heart?
•
Is the conflict personal? Sympathetic? Important
to the characters and readers? Can readers picture themselves or someone they love caught up
in a similar difficulty?
•
Is the disagreement between the main characters
strong enough to keep them apart despite their
obvious attraction?
•
Do readers get to savor the excitement? Listen
to the arguments? Watch the action? Or is the
dramatic potential of the story summarized?
•
Does each scene and each chapter end at a point
of interest, where readers will find it difficult to
stop reading?
•
Of the total number of pages in the manuscript,
how many show the hero and heroine interacting together? How many show them in the same
room but not interacting?
3. UNCLEAR RELATIONSHIP MOTIVATION
This particular problem occurs when there isn’t any
major factor keeping the main characters in the current
relationship situation. For instance, if a man dislikes a
woman (even though he thinks she has a great body) and
she detests him (even though he’s quite a hunk), there
isn’t anything preventing either character from walking
away. What makes it necessary for them to stay in contact long enough to discover that their attraction to each
other is really love? If you can’t state in one sentence the
reason your hero and heroine need each other, that reason needs redefining.
•
What is the longest time (in page count) that the
hero and heroine are separated?
•
Do readers see a relationship developing
between the hero and heroine? How much time
do they spend kissing, flirting, making love?
Fighting? Just talking? Do the hero and heroine
get cozy too quickly?
•
Is sexual tension maintained throughout the
story? When do the readers see attraction
between the characters? Is the sexual tension
diminished or increased by the love scenes?
9/1/16 9:37 AM
WRITER’S WORKBOOK
Symptoms of unclear motivation include:
• A HERO AND HEROINE WHO HAVE LITTLE TO SAY TO
EACH OTHER. If their conversations contain no substance, maybe they need more reasons to talk in the
first place.
• CHARACTERS WHO ARE MOTIVATED TO OPPOSE EACH
OTHER BY PETTY IRRITATION RATHER THAN REAL DIS-
Are they just sniping at each other
instead of discussing a substantial problem? If so,
there may be no reason for them to be together.
AGREEMENT.
• A HERO AND HEROINE WHO ARE OFTEN SEPARATED
PHYSICALLY. When they’re not together, there’s no
interaction—perhaps because they don’t have enough
reason to spend time with each other.
4. STRAYING FOCUS
If the romance isn’t at the heart of the book, your
readers in this genre will be disappointed. The other
parts of the novel—the mystery of the missing money,
the child in need, the subplot involving secondary
characters—are sometimes more fun and are often
easier to write than the immediate interaction between
the main characters.
But readers want to see a developing relationship—
fondness, trust, attraction—between the hero and heroine. The rest of the story, important though it is, should
serve as the background for the romance.
Symptoms of straying focus include:
• EXCESS OF PLOTS. Too many events or subplots
means less time for the developing relationship.
• TOO MANY PEOPLE ONSTAGE. If the hero and heroine aren’t alone together, it’s more difficult for their
feelings to develop. Even in a packed auditorium you
can isolate your two main characters. Move them off
to a corner, or let them carry on a whispered private
exchange while surrounded by other people.
• SCENES THAT VEER OFF TRACK. Side issues become
more important than the main story, and everybody—author, characters and readers—forgets the
point of the scene. Or the backstory of secondary
characters distracts readers from the main story.
• INTERFERENCE BY OTHER CHARACTERS. Whether the
interference is intended to create trouble between the
hero and heroine or to bring them together, it takes
the focus off the main relationship. The hero and
heroine should solve their own problems.
5. LACKLUSTER WRITING
You haven’t put words on the page in a spellbinding way.
Perhaps you’re summarizing the story instead of showing
the complete narrative arc. Or sentences may be unclear,
forcing readers to deduce or interpret what you mean.
You may depict the action in the wrong order, confusing
readers. Or maybe you’re showing only part of the scene,
leaving out details necessary for readers’ understanding.
Symptoms of lackluster writing include:
• SLOW STARTS. Chapter 1 might consist of the heroine
reflecting on her past and what has brought her
to this stage in her life. If you start with action
instead, you give readers a reason to care about
the character; then they’ll sit still to hear about the
roots of the problem.
• PEACEFUL ENDINGS. Chapters or scenes that end with
the heroine drifting off to sleep without a care are
wonderful places for readers to do the same.
• RUSHED DRAMATIC ACTION. Watch out for words and
phrases such as later, after a few hours, when she’d had
time to think it over, and other indications that readers
are being told rather than shown what happened.
• LOW EMOTIONAL LEVELS. When the story events and
characters are not emotionally compelling, readers
find it difficult to care whether the hero and heroine
get what they want.
• WANDERING VIEWPOINTS. The point of view shifts
back and forth for no good reason, or it’s difficult to
even figure out who the viewpoint character is.
• FILLER DIALOGUE. Instead of relaying important
information, the dialogue focuses on everyday
detail—lots of instances of hello and goodbye and
How do you like your coffee?
• POOR GRAMMAR, SPELLING, WORD USAGE OR
MECHANICS. Anything that takes readers’ attention off
the story and forces them to figure out what the author
meant makes it easier for them to put the book down.
You owe it to yourself—and your readers—to make your
novel the best it can be. By sharpening the conflict, crafting
realistic characters and relationships, honing the focus of
your narrative and adhering to the tenets of strong storytelling, you give yourself a fighting chance to earn a place
on your readers’ “favorites” shelf.
Excerpted from On Writing Romance © 2007 by Leigh Michaels,
with permission from Writer’s Digest Books.
9/1/16 9:37 AM
SWEET TALK: TIPS FOR ROMANTIC DIALOGUE
BY LE I GH M I CH A E LS
R
omance novels are personal stories because they
focus on the development of an intimate relationship between two people. Dialogue between romantic
partners is a particularly important tool for drawing in
readers and making them feel involved with the characters. When readers listen to what the characters say
to each other—when the characters banter, when they
argue, when they’re whispering sweet nothings—readers become wrapped up in the world you’ve created. In a
sense, dialogue helps the reader become the heroine and
fall in love with the hero, because she’s right in the midst
of those private conversations.
When writing a romance novel, your task is twofold:
First, consider the various roles dialogue plays within
your story so you can wield it effectively, and, second,
create authentic interplay in the conversations between
your hero and heroine.
THE PURPOSES OF DIALOGUE
As in any other genre of novels, in romance every line of
dialogue should advance the plot or develop the character. Ideally, it should do both. In its many functions,
dialogue can:
Dialogue can make readers feel as
though they are present, watching the action. There’s
a big difference between summarizing that “Sarah told
John how hurt she felt,” and sharing the actual exchange
in which Sarah blasts John with the details of how she
feels and why.
ADD IMMEDIACY.
HELP CHARACTERIZE. What a character says can indicate
his mood, disposition or mentality more convincingly
than any amount of description. Let’s say you have a
character who says, “It’s a tough break that your mother
is dying of brain cancer. I hope it doesn’t drag on too
long—there’s a really wonderful restaurant downtown
I’ve been wanting to take you to.”
In just a few words, he’s shown readers that he’s an
arrogant, heartless and self-centered jerk. Furthermore,
because you’ve allowed readers to make that judgment
(rather than simply telling them the guy’s a jerk), you’ve
drawn them further into the story.
EXPLAIN ACTION THAT READERS DON’T ACTUALLY SEE
HAPPENING. For instance, dialogue might mention
events that are not important enough to show in their
entirety but that readers need to know about.
DESCRIBE A PERSON, PLACE OR THING. One character telling another about what she’s observed is the most natural
way to share this information.
PROVIDE SMOOTH TRANSITIONS. Having characters come
and go in a particular setting, with each combination of
characters talking about different matters, is an effective
way to glide from one segment of a scene into the next.
Telling readers about characters’
disagreements is less effective than letting the characters
talk it out—explaining the logic and reasoning behind the
particular standpoint each has assumed. As they listen to
others’ suggestions, perhaps they modify their opinions,
clarify what they’re thinking, come to a new understanding
of their own feelings or become even angrier.
In her medical romance The Doctor’s Rescue Mission,
Marion Lennox pits her heroine, the only resident doctor on a tsunami-ravaged island, against the hero, who
has come to tell her the island will be deserted rather
than rebuilt:
INTENSIFY CONFLICT.
“Why would I ever want to be somewhere other than
here?” she told him, her anger suddenly threatening almost to overwhelm her. “… I like having dated
the island’s only two eligible men—and deciding they
weren’t eligible after all. … I like being on call 24
hours a day, seven days a week and 52 weeks of the
year. … I like it that I’ll be stuck here forever. …” Her
voice broke.
“So if the island is declared unfit for habitation,”
Grady said cautiously into the stillness, “you won’t be
too upset?”…
“What the hell are you talking about?”
“The infrastructure’s been smashed. … It’d be much
cheaper for the government to pay for resettlement on
the mainland. … You don’t want to be here.”
“I didn’t say that.”
“I think you just did.”
9/1/16 9:37 AM
WRITER’S WORKBOOK
“Well, I didn’t! … I said I missed things. I do. … But if
I truly wanted to leave, you wouldn’t see me for dust. …
It’s not going to happen. We won’t all leave.”
In this brief conversation, the heroine goes from complaining in a sarcastic manner about the isolation of her
island home to defending it and swearing she won’t leave,
because of the announcement the hero made.
De ben a
ul t tool s ! "# $m %& '()
*+ $ ,-.s.
Having a character talk about the significant events in his past is more effective than simply telling readers what his life has been like. Not only is dialogue
more interesting than straightforward telling, there’s an
additional layer of emotion and suspense when the character shares events as he sees them. When you, as the author,
tell readers something, readers assume you’re sharing
everything of significance, so they take the report at face
value. But when the character reveals something through
dialogue, readers are left to judge whether he’s telling them
everything, whether he’s being straightforward and truthful, or whether he might even be deluding himself.
SHARE BACKSTORY.
GENDER-SPECIFIC SPEECH
Like it or not, men and women often conform to more
gender-specific styles of talking. Men tend to talk about
things, while women focus more on feelings. Men tend to
speak in shorter bursts and clipped sentences. Women
often ask more questions and are more likely to pursue an
uncomfortable conversation, while men are more likely to
avoid difficult topics. While not all men and women may
follow these conversational patterns, the fact that many do
means you can draw upon them for authenticity.
Because so much of a romance novel involves interaction between a man and a woman (unless you’re writing
an LGBT romance, of course), a large percentage of the
book portrays the two main characters talking to each
other. If your romantic hero sounds like one of your heroine’s girlfriends instead of like a man, your readers will be
dissatisfied even if they can’t quite diagnose the reason
they don’t buy him as a character.
It can be difficult to create natural-sounding dialogue
for a character of the opposite sex. You’ll need to think
about the main ways in which real men and women can
differ when they talk—and how to portray those differences in your characters’ dialogue.
Men traditionally approach conversation with an eye
toward maintaining status and independence, reporting
or obtaining information and solving problems. Women
tend to seek to establish intimacy and rapport, share feelings and build relationships.
Women ask questions to encourage interaction; men
usually ask questions to get specific information. Men tend
to make more statements while women ask more questions.
Men say “I’m sorry” as an apology for a wrong they’ve
committed; women say “I’m sorry” to indicate regret
or sympathy or concern over a situation, whether or
not they played any part in causing it. Men rarely say “I
don’t know,” and seldom phrase ideas as questions, as in:
“Have you thought of …?”
Often men tend to make decisions, while women
try to create consensus. Men will make demands, but
women more commonly express preferences, and
women are more likely to volunteer their reasons for
those preferences.
Men talk about actions or things; women talk about
feelings. Men make declarations; women, even when they
make a statement, tend to follow it up with a question, such
as, “Pizza is the best food on earth, don’t you think?”
Women tend to use euphemisms; men seldom do.
A woman might say, “I’m not at all pleased.” A man is
more likely to say, “I’m mad as hell.” Women are likely
to express sympathy directly; men often joke or use
playful put-downs.
In this example from her novel The Marriage Lesson,
Victoria Alexander shows her hero getting sympathy and
advice from his friends:
“I am in love with her.” His voice held a touch of awe.
“It’s about time you realized it.” Rand grinned.
“And more to the point,” Pennington said, “she’s in
love with you.”
“I’m in love with her,” Thomas murmured. “And she’s
in love with me.” The truth struck him like a slap across
the face. “Bloody hell.” He bolted upright and clapped
his hand to his forehead. “That’s what she wanted to
hear, wasn’t it? When she kept asking why I wanted to
marry her? She wanted me to tell her I loved her.”
9/6/16 10:01 AM
R & Le Sto
“I believe you said fate, at that moment,” Rand said
Pennington chuckled. “Lord Witless does seem more
and more appropriate.”
Thomas groaned. “I have made a mess of it all.”
“It’s probably not too late to fix things.” Pennington
sipped his drink. “She might well be amenable to listen-
Men tend to avoid euphemisms, understatements, comparisons and metaphors.
Phrase your hero’s dialogue in concrete terms.
CHECK FOR APPROVAL-SEEKING BEHAVIOR. Male characters tend to be direct rather than ask for validation
or approval. Can you make your hero’s comments
less dependent upon the other person’s reaction?
• CHECK FOR ABSTRACTIONS.
wryly.
•
ing to your abject apologies—”
“And declaration of love,” Rand said.
WRITING FEMALE DIALOGUE
“And don’t forget groveling,” Berkley threw in.
Here is how to do the same with the dialogue of your
female protagonist:
• CHECK FOR ADVICE. Women tend to sympathize and
share experiences rather than give advice. Can you
add empathy to your character’s reactions and have
her talk about similar things that happened to her
rather than tell someone what he should do?
• CHECK FOR BRAGGING. Female characters tend to
talk about their accomplishments and themselves in
a self-deprecating fashion rather than a boastful one.
Can you phrase her comments in order to make her
laugh at herself?
• CHECK FOR AGGRESSIVENESS. Women tend to be
indirect and sometimes manipulative; even an assertive woman usually considers the effect her statement
will likely have before she makes it. Can you add
questions to her dialogue, or add comments and suggestions that masquerade as questions?
• CHECK FOR DETAILS. Women notice styles, and have
the vocabulary to properly describe fashions, colors
and designs.
• CHECK FOR EMOTIONS. In romance, women tend to
bubble over with emotion, but are generally hesitant to
express anger and tend to do so in a passive or euphemistic manner. If you need your heroine to be angry,
can you give her a good motivation?
• CHECK FOR OBLIVIOUSNESS. Women notice and interpret facial expressions and body language, and they
maintain eye contact. If you need your female character to overlook how others are acting, can you give
her a good reason for being detached?
“Women love groveling.”
“In the morning,” Pennington continued. “After she’s
had a chance to sleep on it. Life always looks better at
the start of a new day.”
If the situation were reversed, the heroine’s friends
might well make the same suggestions, but they’d probably do so in a warmer and more empathetic manner.
Although it can be difficult for a writer to create convincing dialogue for a character of the opposite gender, you can make your conversations more realistic
by checking your dialogue against a list of the ways in
which most writers stumble.
WRITING MALE DIALOGUE
Here’s how to make a male protagonist’s dialogue more
true to the gender expectations of the genre:
• CHECK FOR QUESTIONS. Men tend to request specific
information rather than ask rhetorical questions. If
your hero’s questions can’t be answered with a brief
response, can you rephrase them? Instead of asking
questions at all, can he make statements?
• CHECK FOR EXPLANATIONS. Male characters tend to
resist explaining; they generally don’t volunteer justification for what they do. If you need him to explain,
can you show why he must?
• CHECK FOR FEELINGS. Men in romance novels tend
to share feelings only if stressed or forced; they are
more likely to show anger than any other emotion. If
you need your hero to state how he is feeling, consider making it more painful for him to not talk than
to share his heavy emotions.
• CHECK FOR DETAILS. Men don’t tend to pay close
attention to details; they don’t usually notice expressions or body language; they stick to basics when
describing colors and styles. Can you scale back the
level of detail from his point of view?
By considering how every conversation in your
novel plays a role in the overall narrative, you’ll reward
your readers with dialogue that moves the story forward,
meets their expectations and rings true with every word.
Excerpted from On Writing Romance © 2007 by Leigh Michaels,
with permission from Writer’s Digest Books.
9/1/16 9:37 AM
BETWEEN THE SHEETS:
HOW TO WRITE COMPELLING LOVE SCENES
BY D E BO R A H H A LVE R SO N
W
riting a sex scene that’s truly sensual and emotionally satisfying for readers requires just as much
attention to craft as any other scene in your story. But
before you start writing about your characters’ romps in
the sheets, you should ask yourself how explicit you want
your story to be. What are you comfortable reading and
writing? You might feel that you have to go into explicit
detail in order to satisfy your audience, but that’s simply
not the case (unless you’re writing strict erotica). If a PG-13
rating is more your style, there are plenty of readers for you,
and there are plenty of ways for you to tell a sensuous story
that pleases readers without making anyone uncomfortable.
At least for women, sexual satisfaction depends a lot
on what goes on inside their heads. As long as you keep
the romance factor high, your sensual tension taut and
your focus on the immediate emotions, you don’t have
to describe the act in intimate detail. Forcing yourself to
write beyond your comfort zone is just asking for hamhandedness—you’ll likely drop in stock phrases and
move through the scene quickly rather than linger as the
lovers explore each others’ bodies and emotions. Your
discomfort will show.
If you’re comfortable writing more explicit content—
and if your chosen romance subgenre aligns with readers’ expectations—proceed boldly, even as you challenge
yourself to think creatively about describing the action.
Even explicit content needs nuance and elements particular to your characters so that it doesn’t feel as if you
could pull the scene out of this book and drop it into
another without anyone noticing the seams.
You also need to consider the novel as a whole. Does
explicit detail fit the tone of the rest of the story? Will it
feel like an organic part of this story line, or will it feel
out of step with the rest of the narrative or with the characters themselves? For example, if you are describing a
character’s first time being intimate, it would make sense
to include a plethora of physical details and sensations
as the character focuses on each new touch. In contrast,
if your characters are bold about expressing themselves,
they’re going to be bold in bed, so stronger words and
descriptions would feel organic to that cast. Let your
story, circumstances and character personalities help you
reach your decision regarding explicitness.
Once you have a feel for the degree of detail you want
in any given love scene, use the following strategies for
writing a satisfying tryst that feels as though it could be in
only your specific story, featuring your specific characters:
LAY THE FOUNDATION. Great buildup begets great sex.
Suddenly throwing in a sex scene without proper lead-in
puts too much burden on the scene to rev itself up from
nothing, making it feel forced, unearned and schlocky.
Adhere to the mantra, “Story first, then sex.” If you build
your characters’ relationship and desires, then the love
scene will come along organically.
BE SENSUAL, NOT MECHANICAL. Instead of focusing solely
on actions, write about things that trigger readers’ senses
and make them feel as if they’re in that moment of passion. Write about the setting, the crackle of the fire in the
hearth or the thrum of the waves on the sand. Write about
the scent of the character’s hair, the amorous lick of the cool
breeze on her skin. Write about the curtained room with
just that one shaft of moonlight penetrating the darkness.
Sensory detail offers you opportunities to work in
contraception, since many writers want to address that
but don’t want it to break the mood. Write the sound of
a drawer opening, the flash of a wrapper, the nod of her
head. No awkward “Did you bring protection?” dialogue
needed. You have the power to suggest things by invoking
sounds, scents, sensations and textures. Mine that power.
There’s certainly a time and place for direct, deliberate
actions like thrusting and kissing, but surround those with
sensual elements that put readers in that moment.
BRING THEIR ISSUES TO BED. Write about what’s going
on in the point-of-view character’s head. Does she have
trust issues? Write about her desire to drop the wall with
this man in bed. Consider how this moment of intimacy
fulfills her needs at this time—or doesn’t. Also, it’s easy
to see how issues from childhood or previous interactions with members of the opposite sex can play into
one’s comfort between the sheets—but remember that
9/1/16 9:37 AM
R & Le Sto
anything can come to bed with us. Is stress about a big
decision weighing on your character? She’ll bring that
tenseness to the scene. Is he distracted by problems with
co-workers? Is she jazzed about scoring a coveted internship or vanquishing some kind of mortal enemy? That’ll
be a part of the sexual dynamic, too. If it can stir up your
character’s brain or heart, it can hinder or help her libido.
Wt’s De?
Because a romantic relationship is so different from a
friendship, it calls for a different mindset on your part.
You will need to focus on your lovers’ differences, on
their distinct contributions to the relationship, and
on the reasons you’ve romantically linked them in the
Even fast and furious intimacy should
be indulged on the page. Readers want satisfaction from
the scene, not to see you tick off a box, so give the moment
its full pay. If you feel an urge to rush through it, that may
be your red flag that you’re just hitting a plot marker, not
building deep characters and working on the internal arc.
Use these strategies to make the love scene fun for you to
write, and possibly even discover things about your character’s relationship you never knew, sparking your excitement
about the scene. Make the scene be about more than the
lovemaking so that you’ll invest as much importance in it
as you do any scene that you know is actively pushing your
protagonist through her arc.
TAKE YOUR TIME.
USE YOUR WRITER’S TOOLBOX, NOT YOUR THESAURUS.
Writing an interesting scene is not about switching up the
lingo to avoid repeating the same word, or using words
that feel vulgar or awkward to you because you want the
scene to be “hot.” Consulting a thesaurus for every variation of an action or a body part will result in awkwardness
that won’t do anything to enrich the scene. Your love scene
deserves the same careful crafting and variety that you give
to any other scene. Avoid cliche phrasing and predictable
similes. Respect your audience’s ability to hear strong and
precise words rather than get cutesy with euphemisms.
“Her secret garden” is the stuff of cliche legend—leave it
there. If your character is one who would be comfortable
talking dirty in bed, then by all means let the banter fly. If
that doesn’t suit your characters, don’t be afraid to leave out
the strong words. Have your characters reassure the other
person with gentle words and sentiments that deliver an
emotional wallop: “It was always you.”
Alternatively, you can have them talk in playful teases
or try to talk but be unable in the face of their desire:
first place.
Here’s the scenario: Your couple is having a fight
about a canceled date. Each character must make
an accusation, and each character must concede
something; that way, we get the full breadth of an
argument, from accusation to resolution. This fight
should be about more than the cancellation—use
subtext to convey the underlying conflict.
Use these three phrases:
•
“You always …”
•
“You don’t understand …”
•
“I didn’t know that.”
When you’re done, consider what you learned
about each character’s needs in this fight. How can
you incorporate these insights into the most intimate
moments between these characters?
That example uses teasing dialogue—it concentrates
on a shirt rather than a body part, and it isn’t likely to
punch anyone’s vulgarity buttons. By using a prop to
focus readers on very precise details and anatomical
regions, it manages to lead the mind toward other very
specific actions and regions without saying so explicitly.
And it lingers, building sexual tension.
When writing your love scene, combine these strategies to create a rich reader experience that evokes all
the senses. Include opinions and judgments that show
emotions are being engaged and baggage is being dealt
with or denied. Remember that the scene is about your
characters and their feelings and thoughts—not just the
action and the dialogue. WD
“That blouse …” He groans as she slowly unbuttons her
shirt, her fingers pausing halfway to gently push away his
reaching hand.
She shakes her head. “Patience.” Her fingers move to
the next button.
Excerpted from Writing New Adult Fiction © 2014 by Deborah
Halverson, with permission from Writer’s Digest Books. Visit
writersdigestshop.com and enter the code “Workbook” for a 10
percent WD reader discount on this and other books to help you
hone your craft.
9/1/16 9:37 AM
STANDOUTMARKETS
An exclusive look inside the markets that can help you make your mark.
BY CRIS FREESE
FOR YOUR POETRY & RELATED PROSE:
Poetry
MISSION:
“As our founding editor Harriet Monroe put it over a century ago:
‘The open door will be the policy of this magazine—may the great poet we are
looking for never find it shut, or half-shut, against his ample genius! To this end
the editors … desire to print the best English verse which is being written today,
regardless of where, by whom or under what theory of art it is written.’”
WHAT STANDS OUT & WHY:
Well-read, well-paying poetry
markets can be few and far between.
Poetry is the cream of the crop,
boasting competitive pay rates, a
large targeted audience and three
National Magazine Awards in the last
six years. Poetry also has earned the
Community of Literary Magazines
and Presses’ Firecracker Award, a
distinction marking it the best poetry
magazine in the U.S. Contributors
have been recognized with every
imaginable honor, from Nobel and
Pulitzer prizes to first-book awards.
But the magazine isn’t just for established poets—in recent years, more
than a third of the writers published
have been previously unknown.
FOUNDED: 1912. PUBLISHES: 11
times/year. FOCUS: “Our readers
want to know what’s going on in the
world of contemporary poetry, [and
are] poets themselves.” CIRCULATION:
30,000. PAYMENT: $10/line, with a
minimum payment of $300. $150/
page of prose. KEY TO BREAKING IN:
“There’s no particular secret, beyond
sending us your very best work.”
KEY TO SUCCESSFUL SUBMISSIONS:
Unique poems that are surprising.
Receives about 120,000 poems/year,
so work should be distinctive and
fresh. Poetry also welcomes book
reviews and other poetry-related
prose. PAST NOTABLE CONTRIBUTORS:
Poetry established its reputation
by publishing the early important
poems of T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound,
Marianne Moore, Wallace Stevens,
Hilda Doolittle, William Carlos
Williams, Carl Sandburg, Langston
Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks and
countless other now-classic writers.
HOW TO SUBMIT: Accepts submissions only through Submittable:
poetry.submittable.com. DETAILED
GUIDELINES: poetryfoundation.org/
poetrymagazine/submissions.
What makes a submission stand
out? A poem we didn’t know we
were looking for feels like a real
discovery. If a poem succeeds on its
own terms, sticks with us as its first
readers, and doesn’t seem imitative
or derivative, it will stand out. If we
find ourselves rereading a piece, and
thinking about it all the time, we
know our readers will appreciate
seeing it in our pages.
What would you like to see more
of? Work by poets of color and
women, and from communities
or places whose poetry has not yet
found a large readership. Also, visual
poems. And well-written essays, not
from the usual suspects, that are
more than just dull book reviews.
What should writers know about
your selection process? There
are no readers or interns at Poetry.
Consulting editor Christina Pugh
and I read every single submission, and we read submissions very
carefully. That is why it may take
awhile for people to hear back from
us. Nobody here ever uses the term
“slush pile”—all submissions are
treated with respect and generosity.
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FOR YOUR NONFICTION BOOKS:
The New Press
ABOUT:
The New Press publishes books that promote and
enrich public discussion and understanding of issues vital to
The New Press selects books
our democracy and to a more equitable world. Underlying
with an emphasis on contemporary
the editorial program are three aims: to broaden the audi-
social issues, while also taking a
ence for serious intellectual work, to bring out the work of
leading role in publishing work
traditionally underrepresented voices, and to address the
problems of a society in transition.
1992. PUBLISHES: 50 titles/year. AUTHORS:
Alice Walker, Bill Moyers, Noam Chomsky, John W.
Dower, Martin Duberman. ADVANCE: Varies. HOW TO
SUBMIT: Submit a proposal, outline or table of contents,
and no more than the first two chapters of your manuscript, through the online form at the URL below, or
mail to: Acquisitions Editor, The New Press, 120 Wall St.,
31st Floor, New York, NY 10005. DETAILED GUIDELINES:
thenewpress.com/submissions.
FOUNDED:
from minority groups. The diversity
and quality off New Press works have garnered recognition
from The New York Times, The Nation, Education Week,
The Guardian and others. Among its titles’ accolades are
the 2000 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction (John W.
Dower’s Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World
War II), the 2015 Silver Gavel Award (Nell Bernstein’s
Burning Down the House) and the 2015 Stonewall Book
Award Honor (Martin Duberman’s Hold Tight Gently).
FOR YOUR FREELANCE WRITING:
Lucky Peach
ABOUT:
“Lucky Peach uses food as a filter to tell stories
about people, places, traditions, flavors, shared experi-
Dubbed “a masterpiece of
ences and cultural identities. Smart, thoughtful writing
modern-food culture” by TIME
and influential design have made Lucky Peach’s quarterly
magazine and “a reminder of print’s
magazine one of the world’s most trusted and fiercely
loved culinary resources.”
2011. PUBLISHES: Quarterly. CIRCULATION:
100,000. PAYMENT: Pays $.25–.67/word, depending on
type of article and reporting. LENGTH: “Up to you.” Only
reads complete articles, not pitches or vague ideas.
Accepts personal essays, taste tests, rants, recipes, photo
essays and some fiction. HOW TO SUBMIT: Email completed manuscripts to submissions@lky.ph or submit via
the form at the URL below. DETAILED GUIDELINES:
luckypeach.submittable.com/submit.
FOUNDED:
true
wingspan” by The New York
t
Times, Lucky Peach has made waves in the culinary community. Each issue fills a beefy 140-plus pages, allowing for
20–25 feature articles covering a variety of culinary-related
topics. In 2016, Lucky Peach earned a James Beard Award
for Publication of the Year and a National Magazine Award
for General Excellence in Service and Lifestyle. For freelancers, the opportunity to break in doesn’t stop at each issue:
In 2015, Lucky Peach expanded its mission with an awardwinning website, cookbooks and live events.
Cris Freese is an associate editor for WD Books and the Writer’s Market series.
62_wd1216_StandoutMkts.indd 63
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CONFERENCESCENE
Events to advance your craft, connections and career.
BY DON VAUGHAN
Key West Literary
Seminar Writers’
Workshop Program
WHEN: Jan. 16–20, 2017. WHERE:
Various venues throughout Key
West, Fla. PRICE: $550. Applications
accepted on rolling basis until workshops are full. WHAT MAKES THE
CONFERENCE UNIQUE: Sponsored by
the Key West Literary Seminar, the
program pairs top-notch instruction
with a storied locale once inhabited
by greats such as Ernest Hemingway
and Tennessee Williams. “We try
not to overschedule the program so
participants have free time to see and
explore Key West,” program coordinator Freya Hendrickson says. “We
aim for the right balance of rigorous
classroom-style activity with fun
and lively social events.” WHO IT’S
PERFECT FOR: Writers of all levels
eager to bolster their skills in an
intimate, focused and nurturing
environment. HOW MANY ATTEND:
120. Each of the 10 workshops
accepts a maximum of 12 students.
FACULTY: Novelists Jennine Capo
Crucet (Make Your Home Among
Strangers) and Kristen-Paige
Madonia (Invisible Fault Lines);
novelist/essayist Marie Myung-Ok
Lee (Somebody’s Daughter); poet
Billy Collins (Aimless Love);
journalist Daniel Menaker (The
African Svelte); memoirist Dani
Shapiro (Devotion); and more.
HIGHLIGHTS: Workshop topics
include “Writing in the Vernacular,”
“Revision From the Ground Up,”
“Screenwriting 101” and “How to
Write Funny.” “We also offer a ‘Craft
Talks’ program featuring lectures
and presentations by faculty members, open readings for workshop
participants, opportunities to go
sailing [for an additional fee], a
dinner at the Ernest Hemingway
Home & Museum, and a final reception,” Hendrickson says. IF YOU GO:
Hemingway notoriously frequented
Key West watering holes, but which
bar served as his regular haunt is
up for debate: Both Sloppy Joe’s Bar
and Captain Tony’s Saloon tout the
claim to fame. Split the difference
and visit both joints to raise your
glass in Papa’s honor. FOR MORE
INFO: kwls.org/workshops.
Writer’s Block Festival
Perfect your craft with the help of
well-published pros at this artinspired conference in the heart
of Kentucky.
WHEN: Nov. 5, 2016. WHERE: The
Tim Faulkner Gallery, Louisville,
Ky. PRICE: The festival is free, but
craft workshops are $30 each. See
website for details. WHAT MAKES
THE CONFERENCE UNIQUE: The
Tim Faulkner Gallery, located in an
up-and-coming historic Louisville
arts neighborhood, is an open space
where paintings and sculptures surround conference attendees. “This
space encourages community, with
plenty of room and time to mingle,”
JUNOT DÍAZ AT KEY WEST SEMINAR PHOTO © NICK DOLL; LOUISVILLE PHOTO © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM: THOMAS KELLEY; ESCAPE CRUISE PHOTO © LANE HEYMONT AND NICOLE RESCINITI
Take a break from winter to hone
your craft in the southernmost city
in the U.S.
64_wd1216_ConfScene.indd 64
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14ʖʊ Sʃʐ Fʔʃʐʅʋʕʅʑ
Wʔʋʖʇʔʕ Cʑʐʈʇʔʇʐʅʇ
A Celebration of Craft, Commerce & Community
administrative coordinator Amy
Miller says. WHO IT’S PERFECT FOR:
Writers interested in honing their
abilities, being inspired by published
authors, and meeting and networking
with other wordsmiths. “The festival
is a great resource for writers who
are not sure whether to commit to
[a Master of Fine Arts] program, as
well as for writers who have earned
an MFA and need a push towards
publication,” Miller says. HOW MANY
ATTEND: 250–300. FACULTY: Novelists Lauren Groff (Fates and Furies)
and Bethany Griffin (The Fall); poet
Maggie Smith (The Well Speaks of
Its Own Poison); playwright/novelist Angela Jackson-Brown (It Is Well);
and more. HIGHLIGHTS: Craft workshops cover genres that include
fiction, poetry, creative nonfiction,
playwriting and young adult. This
year’s conference will also feature a
spoken word/poetry slam workshop,
as well as a discussion of 2015
National Book Award Finalist Fates
and Furies with its author, Groff. IF
YOU GO: Place a wager at Churchill
Downs, profiled by native son
Hunter S. Thompson, or stop by
The Southern Baptist Theological
Seminary to view its collection of
C.S. Lewis’ books and letters. FOR
MORE INFO: louisvilleliteraryarts.
org/#!writers-block-festival/c12k5.
Writer’s Winter
Escape Cruise
Learn the finer points of getting
published at this fun-filled conference aboard a cruise ship.
Feb. 26–March 3, 2017.
Royal Caribbean’s Navigator
of the Seas, which departs out of
Miami. PRICE: Conference fee is
$195. Cruise fares range from $467
to $698 per person (based on
WHEN:
WHERE:
double occupancy). $100 deposit
is due at registration; general registration deadline is Dec. 6, 2016.
WHAT MAKES THE CONFERENCE
UNIQUE: Sponsored by the team
of literary agents at The Seymour
Agency, Winter Escape is one of
the few writing conferences held at
sea. “Attendees will have the opportunity to meet and pitch to editors
and Hollywood producers poolside,”
conference director and Seymour
agent Lane Heymont says. WHO IT’S
PERFECT FOR: Aspiring authors
eager to learn from industry insiders while escaping the winter
blues. HOW MANY ATTEND: 80–100.
FACULTY: Editors Deb Werksman
(Sourcebooks Casablanca), Diana
M. Pho (Tor/Starscape) and Chuck
Sambuchino (Guide to Literary
Agents); agents Julie Gwinn and
Nicole Resciniti (The Seymour
Agency); publishers Liz Pelletier
(Entangled Publishing) and Matt
Wise (Blumhouse Productions/
Doubleday); and more. HIGHLIGHTS:
Instructional workshops include
such topics as author marketing and
a seminar on the writing software
Scrivener, as well as an editor panel
on “What We Are Looking for Now.”
A photographer will also be available
for authors who wish to purchase
professional headshots. See website
for details. IF YOU GO: Ports of call
include Cozumel, Mexico, and the
Bahamas, so plan the kind of excursions that will complement your
writing time and send you back to
the conference aboard inspired
and refreshed. FOR MORE INFO:
theseymouragency.com/2017winter-escape.html. WD
Keynoters : HEATHER GRAHAM,
JOHN PERKINS &WILLIAM BERNHARDT
100+ presenters—authors, editors,
publishers & literary agents from
New York, L.A. & S.F. Bay Area
February 16-19, 2017
at the InterContinental Mark Hopkins Hotel
Substantial early discounts & special room rates.
xFeb. 16 & 20: Single & half-day, in-depth
classes are available to all writers.
xFree events including author/illustrator
Jon Agee children’s book session.
x2017 San Francisco Writing Contest is
NOW accepting entries
xFree SFWC Newsletter subscription
For event/class details & online registration;
contest rules; and SFWC Newsletter subscription:
www.SFWriters.org
SFWC is a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization
Don Vaughan (donaldvaughan.com)
is a freelance writer in Raleigh, N.C.,
and founder of Triangle Association
of Freelancers.
64_wd1216_ConfScene.indd 65
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CO NF E RE NC E G U IDE
CONFERENCE GUIDE
NOVEMBER/DECEMBER 2016
• Keep in mind that there may be more
than one workshop in each listing.
• These workshops are listed alphabetically by state, country or continent.
• Unless otherwise indicated, rates include
tuition (T) only. Sometimes the rates also
include airfare (AF), some or all meals (M),
accommodations (AC), ground transportation (GT), materials (MT) or fees (F).
• When you find workshops that interest
you, be sure to call, email or check the
website of the instructor or organization
for additional information.
• All listings are paid advertisements.
CALIFORNIA
MASTERS WORKSHOPS FOR ASPIRING,
ACTIVE AND ACCOMPLISHED WRITERS,
produced by West Coast Writers Conferences.
DoubleTree Hilton Hotel, Los Angeles Westside,
CA, and other locations. Every writer needs
the skill-sets to develop a great story from
the first sentence, through the developmental
and editing process, solving manuscript issues,
and polishing the work until it is ready for
publication or production. Now you can learn
the tools and secrets to take your writing to
the next level by working face-to-face with
literary agents, renowned educators, and
industry veterans as they discuss topics such
as: “From The Writers Fingers to the Keyboard
to Money in the Bank” with top literary agent
and intellectual property attorney Paul S. Levine,
“Write a Query Letter with a Literary Agent,”
“BCX™ - Boot Camp Extreme Intensive Writing”
with veteran literary agent Toni Lopopolo,
“Crafting Scenes Like a Pro” with author of 40+
TV movies Christine Conradt, “No Agent - No
Problem: How To Sell a Screenplay,” “Generate,
Develop, and Pitch Successful Stories Interactive
Training,” “Master The Skills Needed to Write
Your First Novel, or Revise Your First Draft,”
“Fiction/Narrative Nonfiction Intensive Class:
Improve Your Writing—Now!” and much more.
Length of workshop varies from four hours to a
full day. Seating is limited to 20 per session. See
website for details. Early registration discounts
available.
Contact: Tony or Lillian Todaro
P.O. Box 2267, Redondo Beach, CA 90278
Ph: 310/379-2650
info@wcwriters.com
www.wcwriters.com/workshops
2017 SAN FRANCISCO WRITERS
CONFERENCE, February 16–19 at the Mark
Hopkins Hotel in San Francisco. This “Celebration
of Craft, Commerce and Community” welcomes
major names in publishing. Bestselling authors,
literary agents, editors and publishers attend
the SFWC and take personal interest in projects
discovered there. The 100+ presenters list includes
Heather Graham, William Bernhardt and John
Perkins. Writer’s Digest is the “Speed Dating
With Agents” sponsor. Open Enrollment Classes
available on Feb. 16 & 20. All levels and genres.
$795 (with substantial early discounts available).
Contact: Barbara Santos
1029 Jones St., San Francisco CA 94109
Ph: 415/673-0939
Barbara@SFWriters.org
www.SFWriters.org
WRITER’S DIGEST NOVEL WRITING
CONFERENCE, presented by Writer’s
Digest. This brand-new event takes place at
the Westin Bonaventure Los Angeles, October
28–30, and features multiple educational
tracks covering everything you need to know
about improving your craft and increasing
your book’s market viability—to agents and
readers alike. Featuring Keynotes Garth
Stein, Jane Smiley and Christopher Rice!
Focused solely on the novel, the weekend
is a start-to-finish progression of instruction
from knowledgeable mentors and Writer’s
Digest, the experts at developing writers for
more than 90 years. Register by October 27
to save!
Contact:
Ph: 877/436-7764, option 2
writersdigestconference@fwmedia.com
www.Novel.WritersDigestConference.com.
NEW YORK
Nast Traveler). 2017 Keynote Speakers: Mary
Karr, Billy Collins, Naomi Klein, Judy Collins,
David Ebershoff, Lisa Moore, Pedro Pallou,
and Robert Moor. Previous speakers include:
Cheryl Strayed, Gloria Steinem, Lawrence Hill,
Margaret Atwood, Barbara Kingsolver, Luis
Urrea, Joyce Carol Oates, David Whyte, Joy
Harjo, Scott Turow, Alice Walker, Ellen Bass,
Sandra Cisneros. Plan now to attend the 12th
annual SMWC, featuring distinguished authors
and faculty from the U.S., Canada and Mexico.
Sunny, historic San Miguel is known worldwide
as the creative crossroads of the Americas—a
mecca for writers, artists, and musicians. The
entire town is a UNESCO World Heritage Site,
ringed by mountains, filled with cobblestone
streets and colorful 18th century buildings,
worlds away from border issues. Hotel rooms
$85+, double/single. Select seven of seventy
90-minute classes in all genres, beginning/
advanced; keynotes and panels (bilingual); open
mic; spectacular Mexican Fiesta; breakfasts,
lunches, receptions. Optional consultations,
agent pitches; post-conference workshops;
explore San Miguel excursions. Join the mailing
list for conference updates and articles. (T, M,
MT, F, parties!)
Contact: Maia Williams
San Miguel Literary Sala
Box 526, 220 N. Zapata Hwy. #11
Laredo, TX 78043
Ph: 415/324-5020
director@sanmiguelwritersconference.org
www.SanMiguelWritersConference.com
UNICORN WRITERS’ CONFERENCE,
Saturday, March 25, 2017, 7:30 a.m.–8 p.m. at
Reid Castle, Manhattanville College, Purchase,
NY. As valuable for published authors as it is
for beginners! This conference covers the total
story from craft to career. Meet industry shotcallers, get one-on-one face time with industry
insiders, including: One-on-one manuscript
reviews and feedback sessions with agents and
book editors. Networking breakfast, lunch and
dinner. Perfect your craft with a choice of six
workshops every hour, and over 37 different
sessions offered. Price: $325 includes all
workshops and three meals. Additional $60 for
40 pages and book summary (read in advance
by your selected agent/editors) and 30 minute
meeting. Three agent panels, one editor
panel, and printer panel. Sponsorship booths
available upon request.
Contact: Jan L. Kardys, Chairman
Unicorn Writers’ Conference, Inc.
Ph: 203/938-7405
unicornwritersconference@gmail.com
www.unicornwritersconference.com
SPEAKER!
SPEAKER!
Our editors are available to
speak at your conference or
workshop. We’re happy to talk
about technique, business or
inspirational topics. We also help
evaluate query letters or book
proposals. We won’t break your
budget, and we’re fun people!
INTERNATIONAL
MEXICO
2017 SAN MIGUEL WRITERS’
CONFERENCE AND LITERARY
FESTIVAL, produced by San Miguel Literary
Sala. February 15–19, 2017 in San Miguel de
Allende (No.1 City in the World 2013, Condé
For more information, email us at
Writers.Digest@fwcommunity.com
WD Nov-Dec '16 ClassifiedsTemplate.indd 66
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C L A S S I F I EDS: R EA DIN G N OTIC ES
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headlines, illustrations, rules, etc.) of 1–3
inches in depth: $375 per inch for 1 issue;
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will be accepted at special rates; ask for
details. Ad prices are calculated on a per
word, per issue basis (20 word minimum).
All contracts must be prepaid at the time
of insertion. $7.25 per word for 1 issue;
$5.75 per word for 3; $4.75 per word for
6 or more consecutive issues. Street and
number, city, state and ZIP code count as
4 words. Area code and phone number
count as 2 words. Email and website
addresses count as 2 words.
A sample of any product and/or literature
you plan to send must accompany your
order. Literary Services and Editing/
Revising advertisers must send a résumé
and sample critique.
CLOSING DATE FOR THE FEBRUARY
COACHING
Book Editor
BLOCKED? STRUGGLING? I'll help you write,
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WRITING FOR PUBLICATION?
When you submit your manuscript you have
only one chance to make an impression. Writing
for publication is a business, and those who
judge your work will expect a fully professional
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So how can you move your book from “Just OK”
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THE MANUSCRIPT DOCTOR
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Services. Editing, book design, & author services. Cris Wanzer, www.manuscriptstogo.com,
spuntales@gmail.com
BOOKS/PUBLICATIONS
Jessi Rita Hoffman • 360-264-5460
jessihoffman8@gmail.com • www.JessiRitaHoffman.com
EDITORIAL SERVICES
2017 ISSUE IS NOVEMBER 8, 2016 .
To adver tise, call Jill Ruesch:
(800) 726-9966, ext. 13223.
Former publishing house editor in chief.
Award-winning/agented clients.
Elevate your novel from good to great.
Book Author – Article Writer – University Instructor
THOROUGH editing: $2.00 per page,
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Unlock the potential of your manuscript!
Helga Schier, PhD, published
author and editor with years of
experience at major publishing
houses offers comprehensive,
personalized, constructive and
effective editorial services.
PROFESSIONAL EDITOR, award-winning
author (Bantam, Berkley/Ace, others) offers
extensive critiques, in-depth editing. Fiction,
nonfiction, juvenile/YA. Carol Gaskin,
941/377-7640. Carol@EditorialAlchemy.com;
www.EditorialAlchemy.com
PERSONALIZED, IN-DEPTH, comprehensive,
developmental editing for fiction and nonfiction. Turning writers into published authors,
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www.maloneeditorial.com;
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EDITORIAL SERVICES from a nurturing but
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nonfiction, scripts, poetry, theses. Ten percent
discount if you mention WD ad. Email:
jilldearman@gmail.com, www.jilldearman.com.
QUESTIONS? FEEDBACK?
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Special Archival
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SCRIPTWRITING
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CLOSING DATE FOR THE FEBRUARY
2017 ISSUE IS NOVEMBER 8, 2016.
To advertise, call Jill Ruesch:
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The Official Online Home of Charles Dickens
Chuck Dickens
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attending estate sale at Satis House
Catherine found a tattered wedding dress at this crumbling
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I understand the appeal—the old thing is covered in cobwebs and
comes with only one shoe.
Comment
Mark Twain Thank goodness she has a benefactor so trained in the
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Charles Dickens
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4d
Plum pudding on the table tonight—
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CharlotteEmilyAnne Brontë How romantic!
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27 5 hrs
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Charles Dickens
@TheArtfulCodger
8d
I will honor Festivus in my heart, and
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TheArtfulCodger
Charles Dickens
@TheArtfulCodger
5h
Started a new hair growth treatment,
but I have no great expectations.
Charles Dickens
@TheArtfulCodger
1d
Wife Catherine has new handmade
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Charles Dickens
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15d
Another vicious bout of writer’s block
today. Just cannot focus!
KING CHARLES’
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GeorgeEliot Blessed is the man who at some point saw the sun.
VerySmallTim God bless us, everyone!
Charles Dickens
@TheArtfulCodger
25d
Whether I shall turn out to be the
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must show …
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LONDON © SHUTTERSTOCK.COM: TKEMOT
94 likes
TheArtfulCodger Fog, fog, go away. Come again another day …
Charles Dickens
@TheArtfulCodger
19d
Oh! But he was a tight-fisted man
at the keyboard, Scrooge! Miserly with his
characters, limited to 140.
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