Want to write a killer personal essay? Tell stories that evoke "that squirming in my seat feeling."
That's the advice of novelist Liza Monroy. She mastered the fine art of the first-person essay (writing about it for MediaBistro, even), and is sharing her wisdom in a fabulous five-question interview at The Urban Muse.
If your personal essay turns out well, why not make a personal essay web video out of it? Steve Bryant reports how a couple kids earned $20,000 in sponsorship for their groundbreaking short film. Dig it:
"Four Eyed Monsters, the 71-minute film posted on YouTube recently, has garnered its creators about $20k in referral payments from Spout.com. The film chronicles the dating life of its creators."
And, if you want to turn your personal essay into a novel, why not self-publish? John Coyne has the scoop on Jan Worth--a Peace Corps volunteer who wrote a novel about the murder of a beautiful American worker. She just released a useful podcast about her self-publishing adventure.
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Thanks so much for mentioning Night Blind and my Book Expo podcast. Seeing all those thousands of booths and shelf upon shelf of books was a sobering and depressing experience, but I have no regrets about self-publishing. See my blog, nightblindblog.blogspot.com for a more detailed account of that sweaty NY weekend. You probably were there, too, right? Power to the writers, I say.
Posted by: Jan Worth | June 28, 2007 4:52 PM | Permalink to Comment