How to Promote Your Book Promoting a book is not often an author’s favorite past time, but it can reap huge dividends in exposure and book sales. Molly Woolbright, the publicist at Sasquatch Books, visited my summer Seattle writing …
Tag: Writing Classes
The Queen’s Gambit Book Review for The Writer’s Workshop
Reviewed by Kate Jackson The Queen’s Gambit is an opening move in chess used by the player of the white pieces. The objective of the move is to temporarily sacrifice a pawn to gain control of the center of …
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A View from Two Sides: Review of Apeirogon by Colum McCann
By Kate Jackson Two fathers, two daughters, Israeli and Palestinian, woven together by two tragedies: this is the substance of Colum McCann’s latest novel. Published in February 2020, the characters and events are based on actual people and events. …
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The Perfect Pitch: Story Ideas in Writing Classes
THE PERFECT PITCH: STORY IDEAS IN WRITING CLASSES Narrative writers organize their books and shorter pieces in terms of a story or chronology, probably the oldest and most compelling way of relating information. In Aspects of the Novel, E.M. …
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Take a Journey with a Traveler’s Tale
If you love to travel like I do, you’ve probably found the last six months a challenging time. After canceling my Travel Writing class in Spain and an assignment to ski in Austria, I have hunkered down at home to …
Summer Reads for Tumultuous Times from The Writer’s Workshop
In these tumultuous times, it seems hard to imagine how things can return to normal. How can we get through Covid, police brutality, protests, riots, high unemployment and general malaise? One of the best ways to find hope in dark …
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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 …
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 …
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 …
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 …
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I was trying to write then and I found the greatest difficulty was to put down what really happened in action; what the actual things were which produced the emotion that you experienced…the real thing, the sequence of motion and fact which made the emotion and which would be as valid in a year or ten years or, with luck and if you stated it purely enough, always.
Ernest Hemingway -
And as imagination bodies forth
William Shakespeare (from A Midsummer Night’s Dream)
The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen
Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing
A local habitation and a nam -
First, find out what your hero wants, then just follow him!
Ray Bradbury
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Isn’t it queer: there are only two or three human stories, and they go on repeating themselves as fiercely as if they had never happened before; like the larks in this country, that have been singing the same five notes for thousands of years.
Willa Cather
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It is wrong to have an ideal view of the world. That's where the mischief starts. That's where everything starts unravelling.
V.S. Naipaul
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The Writer's Workshop, an on-campus and online program offering writing
classes in Seattle, online and travel writing classes.