1) The Splendid and the Vile: A New York Times bestseller by Erik Larson about the Churchill family in the first year of WWII. Covid may be bad, but Western Civilization was at risk in WWII. Even if you think you know the history of the period, you’ll hear many fascinating stories about surviving the Blitz, fighting among the cabinet, smoking cigars, drinking champagne, and Churchill wandering around the house naked.
Category: Writing Techniques
How to Submit Stories to Literary Magazines
Literary magazines occupy an important niche in the publishing world. They publish longer, more artistic stories that would make a tough sell in a commercial magazine. Many bestselling memoirs such as Kathleen Norris’ Dakota grew out of shorter stories published in literary magazines. They are one of the few markets that publish short fiction. They pay little or nothing other than extra copies but are prestigious and can serve as an important stepping stone in a literary career. As the publisher/ editor of The Writer’s Workshop Review, which just published its 14th edition, I read a lot of manuscripts and accept only a small percentage of them. Here’s some advice about how to win acceptance at a literary magazine.
FIND A THE RIGHT MAGAZINE: Duotrope’s Digest is an excellent place to start. For a small monthly fee you get access to a searchable database of over 2000 different literary magazines. You can peruse the magazine rack at a good bookstore like Seattle’s Elliott Bay Book Company to find a home for your story. Googling the term, literary magazines, will also turn up a lot of potential target publications. As I emphasize in my Seattle writing classes, read the magazine to make sure it’s an appropriate fit for your story. Half of all stories are rejected simply because they are not the right fit for the magazine.
FOLLOW THE GUIDELINES: The magazine will spell out when and how to submit manuscripts. Make sure to follow these guidelines. Your story may never reach the right editor if you don’t follow the guidelines.
FORMAT YOUR WORK: As recommended above, follow the magazine’s guidelines. Sometimes the magazine will want the story cut and pasted into an email message or attached to the email. Some of these magazines will want hard copies. As I say in my Seattle writing classes, make it easy for them.
COVER LETTER: A short cover letter accompanying the story or as part of the email message can help your cause. List previous publications, relevant degrees, etc. These shouldn’t make a difference to an editor but sometimes they do. If you’ve got it, flaunt it. If you have none of these, just send a strong story and it will find a home.
TRACK SUBMISSIONS: Keep a record of what stories are out and where you sent them. Celebrate acceptances. Don’t sweat the rejections; there are all kinds of reasons a magazine will reject a piece. It may be outstanding, but may not fit the publication. Pay attention if an editor takes the time to give you advice about how to improve your manuscript; the editor doesn’t do this casually and may be receptive to future stories from you.
If you want help with this, please consider signing up for one of my Seattle writing classes, online writing classes, or travel writing classes. I look forward to working with you!
How To Write a Page Turner
Scenic writing animates some of the most moving, satisfying, sophisticated works of literature as I teach in my Seattle writing classes and other writing classes. It quickly brings readers into the story because it helps create a world, a world that you the writer have inhabited and can share with the reader through words. Scenes present a visual, sensual dimension the reader can inhabit, a kind of imaginary garden with real toads, whether that’s the world of the astronaut program of Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, the landscapes of the American South in Flannery O’Connor’s stories or the hard-bitten, humorous Irish Catholic childhood of memoirist Frank McCourt’s Angela’s Ashes. As I describe in my Seattle writing classes, Stimulus-Response scenes create a cause and effect relationship, adding pace and direction to the narrative.
How do you accomplish this? Read on.
1) SETTING THE SCENE
- a) OPENING SENTENCE: Find a sentence that creates suspense and foreshadows what will happen. This makes clear to the reader that information in summary lead is important and needs to be read. In William Stafford’s memoir Down in my Heart, he uses the opening line, “When are men dangerous?” which accomplishes this perfectly.
- b) SETTING DETAILS: Provide details that suggest what will happen in scene. These should be chosen for their inherent interest, color and humor and for what they illustrate about main point of story. For instance, in Down in My Heart, Stafford includes details like “loafing around in the Sabbath calm.” These details help set the scene, and also create suspense. Readers suspect that something will soon shatter this tranquility. The best scenic details do double duty, both painting a picture and creating suspense.
- c) SCENE GOAL: After sketching in the scene and briefly introducing the main characters, the writer makes a transition to the action. This transition is crucial, often spelling out the main character’s goal in the scene. What does the main character want? Will he get what he wants? Will the other characters help or hinder him? What is the larger point of the scene? Why should the reader care?
2) DESCRIBE ACTION
Use Stimulus-Response to organize the action from beginning to end. The stimulus should be external, an action or a dialogue. The psychological response should follow directly from the stimulus. This response should lead immediately to another stimulus, back and forth, like a ping-pong match, until the action of the scene is finished.
3) CONCLUSION
What happened in the scene and what does it mean? For more, please consider signing up for my Seattle writing classes, online writing classes or travel writing classes.
New Issue of The Writer’s Workshop Review
I’m now working on the new issue of The Writer’s W
orkshop Review. Stay tuned!
Jeff Smoot Reads at The Writer’s Workshop Seattle Writing Classes
I take great pride in seeing the students in my Seattle writing classes succeed. One of these students, Jeff Smoot, wrote the memoir, Hang Dog Days, which recently earned a runner up for the Banff Mountain Festival Book Award and the Boardman/ Tasker Award, two of the most prestigious prizes in mountaineering literature.
Jeff finished The Writer’s Workshop’s certificate program two years ago and began working on his memoir about sport climbing. Having published some 10 guidebooks, he had a lot of writing chops but needed some help with storytelling.
“I joined Nick O’Connell’s Certificate program in narrative writing as a refresher and to improve my storytelling so I could get a longstanding book project to the point I felt confident in pitching it,” he said at a talk for my Seattle writing class last Wednesday. “With Nick’s help and encouragement, it was accepted. In addition to achieving this goal, the course reignited my passion for writing.”
After writing the book, Jeff had to edit it before the Mountaineers Publishing Company would accept it. “I did my best to cut down the narrative and got it into the hands of a developmental editor who wanted to kill my babies,” he said. “Then it got into the hands of the copy editor and got cut down some more.”
Despite the pain of having some of his stories cut, he believes the process helped the book.
“It’s important to have a good editor,” he said. “You want someone who can debate. Sometimes you win, sometimes you lose, but it made the book so much better. I used to hate editors, but I loved my editor.”
Hang Dog Days chronicles the difficult birth of sport climbing in America. It is rich with the vernacular of the sport, one of the techniques I emphasize in my Seattle writing classes. “Climbing went from being a traditional sport with the adventure of ascent, starting from bottom and going to the top,” he said. “If you went to the top and came down that wasn’t the way it was done. But youth rebelled against the old guard.”
The new technique of rap-bolting, inspecting and fixing a route while on rappel, caused a great deal of controversy in the insular world of climbing. “Some bad things happened,” he said. “I received death threats from some climbers I wrote about. The book is about my growing up climbing in that era and some of the characters I hung out with like Todd Skinner who was pushing the boundaries.” Skinner died in 2006 in a climbing accident. “He’s one of the best storytellers we had and he’s gone so I have to tell the story.”
To read an excerpt from the book, click the link to https://www.thewritersworkshopreview.net/article.cgi?article_id=97.
Pacific Northwest Booksellers Shortlist
2020 Pacific Northwest Book Awards Shortlist Announced The Pacific Northwest Book Sellers association just announced its 2020 Book Awards Shortlist, selected by a committee of independent booksellers from Washington, Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Alaska, a non-profit trade association that supports independent bookselling, literacy and free speech in Alaska, Idaho, Montana, Oregon and Washington. Each year since 1965, the Pacific Northwest Book Awards have celebrated exceptional books written by Northwest authors. In my Seattle writing classes, online writing classes and travel writing classes, I hope to teach aspiring authors to write books such as these. I also encourage students in my Seattle writing classes, online writing classes and travel writing classes to support organizations like this one who keep independent bookstores in business. From more than 400 nominations, the committee winnowed 12, finalists, crafted by Northwest authors and illustrators and published in 2019. The six winners of the 2020 Pacific Northwest Book Awards in early January. For more contributor and title information, visit PNBA’s 2020 Shortlist page. Shortlist honorees will be profiled on NWBookLovers.org over the next several weeks.
2020 Shortlist: Aloha Rodeo: Three Hawaiian Cowboys, the World’s Greatest Rodeo, The Cassandra: A Novel The Death & Life of Aida Hernandez: A Border Story Deep River: A Novel Exhalation: Stories Fall Back Down When I Die: A Novel Is, Is Not: Poems The Merciful Crow My Heart The Phone Booth in Mr. Hirota’s Garden Queen of the Sea A Wolf Called Wander |
In her essay collection, Mystery and Manners, Flannery O’Connor talks about writing as a habit of art. I discuss this approach in The Writer’s Workshop talk on The Writing Life, on Wednesday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. in room 221 at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. This approach emphasizes that writing is a craft and a daily discipline as well as an art. It relies as much on regular practice as inspiration. While inspiration plays a large part in any literary breakthrough, the habit of art gives concrete expression to inspiration, making the story or book possible. Here are some of thoughts on how to develop your own habit of art.
WRITING AS A PROCESS – Thinking of writing as a process allows you to complete a story in a series of steps, avoiding the paralysis of perfectionism. Instead, write a draft (a “shitty first draft” in Anne Lamott’s memorable phrase), organize and polish it. By breaking things down into a series of steps you increase the odds of creating something special.
SET A SCHEDULE – Set up a time to write, ideally five days a week for an hour or so a day. If possible, write for more than that. It takes practice to hone and perfect your craft. This comes by repetition. I usually write about three hours a day, five days a week, sometimes more, sometimes a little less. I schedule the time and try to stick to it.
SHORT ASSIGNMENTS – As the Chinese say, the thousand mile journey begins with the first step. Give yourself short assignments every day – a page, a lead, a character sketch. Then perhaps complete a story or novel chapter every week or so. Making steady progress increases your confidence and the fluency of your writing.
I’ll be offering a free class, The Writing Life, on Wednesday, Oct. 2 at 7 p.m. in room 221 at the Good Shepherd Center in Seattle’s Wallingford neighborhood. You’ll have a chance to learn how to get started with your story, hear about our classes and enjoy some delicious Spanish food and drink. Please RSVP.
How To Write for Magazines
In my Seattle writing classes, I have experts talk about how to write for magazines, among other topics. Alaska Airlines Magazine associate editor Andrew Waite talked to my summer Seattle writing class about how to write successfully for magazines. He offered excellent advice about working with editors, including making sure to read the publication before pitching.
“If I haven’t worked with the writer before, I like to write out an outline of how I would write it,” he says. “What’s the lead, nut graph, etc. I want this piece to come in as close to being finished as possible. Make sure you’re on the same page up front. If I have the outline I have an idea of what it’s going to look like. It likely won’t need a major rewrite.”
Though the magazine has a number of writers who work for it regularly, it’s always looking for new writers. He says they usually break in with shorter assignments of 300 words or less. “If you do an awesome job on a shorter story, we’ll definitely look at you for another longer story. We’re looking for writers who travel a lot, have good reporting skills, turn in clean, structurally sound copy. We like to take on new writers with fresh voices.”
The magazine considers regular freelancers as part of its staff. Such writers have a sense of what the magazine publishes and how it approaches travel, among other subjects. He suggested looking at the magazine’s editorial calendar to get a sense of what it will cover over the year.
“Pitch three months before the story should come out,” he said. “Pitch what’s unique.”
In putting together an issue, Waite emphasized the care the editors take over the editorial process. “We search for a writer for the ideas,” he said. “Then we get the ideas assigned. When the finished piece comes in, we hope it looks like the original assignment. We usually do a developmental edit for structure, content, and organization. Later, we’ll get into the nitty gritty as well as fact checking.”
He emphasized that breaking into freelance magazine writing is possible, but you have to work hard at it, something I emphasize in my Seattle writing classes. “There’s a lot hustle involved in the freelance game,” he said.
How to Outline a Story or Book
How to Outline a Story or Book
Outlining a story or book allows you to chart the emotional peaks and valleys of the story so that you’ll know where you’re heading when you sit down to write. As I explain in my Seattle writing classes and online writing classes, the five short statements below describe the major actions in the story. There is one statement for each major focus. This is not like the outline you wrote in English composition class; these statements highlight the dramatic actions in story. They help you focus on what’s essential to the story. This is a conflict—resolution outline, with the conflict introduced in the first statement, developed in the next three statements, and resolved in the last statement.
1) Complication – Make it simple and active. Have you chosen active verbs to show action? Is the main character included in the statement? How will you illustrate the main action? Do you have the source material for this? Is the action dramatic enough?
2) Development Action – Clear, cogent, related to complication.
3) Development Action – Clear, cogent related to complication, tied to previous development, tied to main character.
4) Development Action — Clear, cogent related to complication, tied to previous development, tied to main character.
5) Resolution – Must fit the complication.
Writing this outline will save you a lot of time. You’ll be able to figure out in advance where the story is going. You can still change it as you go, but at least you’ll have a clear direction when you write the first draft of your story or book chapter. For more on how to do this, please consider signing up for my Seattle Writing Classes or an online writing classes.
Break into Freelance Magazine Writing
In my Seattle writing classes, I invite experts to talk about their approach to writing and editing. I had the pleasure of having Alaska Airlines Magazine associate editor Andrew Waite talk to my spring Seattle writing class about how to break into freelance writing. He offered excellent advice about approaching magazines, including making sure to read the publication before pitching.
“The best pitches reveal a sense of who we are and what we do,” he said. “We want your piece to slot in easily to the magazine. I’m looking for pitches that meet our needs, show command of writing and have an engaging hook.”
Though the magazine has a number of writers who work for it regularly, it’s always looking for new writers. He says they usually break in with shorter assignments of 300 words or less. “If you do an awesome job on a shorter story, we’ll definitely look at you for another longer story. We’re looking for writers who travel a lot, have good reporting skills, turn in clean, structurally sound copy. We like to take on new writers with fresh voices.”
The magazine considers regular freelancers as part of its staff. Such writers have a sense of what the magazine publishes and how it approaches travel, among other subjects. He suggested looking at the magazine’s editorial calendar to get a sense of what it will cover over the year.
“Pitch three months before the story should come out,” he said. “Pitch what’s unique.”
In putting together an issue, Waite emphasized the care the editors take over the editorial process. “We search for a writer for the ideas,” he said. “Then we get the ideas assigned. When the finished piece comes in, we hope it looks like the original assignment. We usually do a developmental edit for structure, content, and organization. Later, we’ll get into the nitty gritty as well as fact checking.”
He emphasized that breaking into freelance magazine writing is possible, but you have to work hard at it, something I emphasize in my Seattle writing classes. “There’s a lot hustle involved in the freelance game,” he said.