Romancing Rejection: ‘Don’t Cut Off An Ear’

O, ‘To Be Poor, Misunderstood, Overlooked’ In this blog-heaving era, you sometimes can find comments as compelling and as nuanced as the writings they follow. An instance of this occurs this week at Writer Unboxed where Simon & Schuster author Jael McHenry is followed in her post by the literary agent Donald Maass. Taken together, her original post… Read More

In The Season Of Giving: Unwrap The Truth For Your Creative Loved Ones

A Token Of Your Esteem: Honesty The greatest gift you can give to a creative friend or relative sometimes is a compassionate, thoughtful, patient negativeresponse. Not negative in terms of how you say it or any intention of being hurtful. Exactly the opposite: negative in the sense of an authentic, truthful reaction in a world… Read More

Mission Critical At Writer Unboxed’s UnConfab in Salem

Reviewing? What’s Your Motive? Next week, I’ll be leading a session on criticism — “When To Listen And What To Hear” — at Writer Unboxed’s “Un-Conference” event in Salem, Massachusetts…where they know a few things about being critical. That session and this column are not about the more extreme moments in consumer review that have… Read More

"Visionaries on the Decks": Storytelling

“To Declare Your Story’s Intent” There are things important to you. You hurt. You know stuff. I don’t. You see things that I cannot…You have everything you need, including the courage to declare your story’s intent. — Donald Maass, Writing 21st Century Fiction Not for nothing am I looking forward to the November 3-7 Writer… Read More

Publishing, Between Revolution and Revolt

Follow that burn­ing fuse. It runs between these two curi­ously dif­fer­ent words. We may need to think about which of them is closer to us. Rev­o­lu­tion. Pretty com­fort­able. Thanks to Madi­son Avenue, we nowa­days say “rev­o­lu­tion” for every change, from geopo­lit­i­cal alliances to bath­room tis­sue. Revolt. Not so com­fort­able. More acute. Some­thing or some­one feels out of con­trol. It’s an upris­ing, not a down­falling. Dangerous. Read More

Self-Publishing’s Parallel Disruptions

It comes as news to no one in the indus­try! the indus­try! that self-publishing is con­tro­ver­sial. We may tend, how­ever, to think of it as con­tro­ver­sial for that indus­try, while not look­ing at what it can mean for writ­ers and writ­ing. It is, in fact, a devel­op­ment full of argu­ment not only for pub­lish­ers but also for literature. Read More