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May30
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That’s a video of today’s special Five Easy Questions guest in action. Novelist DeLauné Michel (author of The Safety of Secrets) knows how to keep an audience in rapt attention during a public reading, and her professional training as an actor has helped her writing in unexpected ways.
For your weekend reading pleasure, I have two bits of wisdom from Michel, as she explains how to read your work out loud and how to edit our novels more effectively. This is all part of my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson’s mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality conversations with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing. Jason Boog:
You give the most amazing public-readings. How did you develop your reading style? How do you prepare? Any advice for writers with stage fright? DeLauné Michel:
I think I’ve cheated a bit because I was an actor for years, so performing is very comfortable for me. My friend, Christopher Rice once said that one reason he is a writer is that he loves to act, he just doesn’t want to do it in front of people. Continue reading...
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May29
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Many writers, myself included, think that books get published through a magical set of circumstances; a process so daunting that we could never, ever complete it.Today novelist DeLauné Michel (who just published her second novel, The Safety of Secrets) tells...
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Public readings are rough. Most writers are shy to begin with, and these events force normally solitary people into the spotlight.Today, our special guest DeLauné Michel (who just published her second novel, The Safety of Secrets) explained how reading your...
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May28
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So you have a videocamera and you want to promote your book. You can spend all your time talking about yourself and the book, or you can pretend you are somebody else and shoot a lo-fi set of deadpan Thesaurus...
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"I'm so insanely happy, and I kept wishing you could've been there, but, you know, here we are in Vegas and Zane was on this crazy nonstop winning roll, and there was the chapel, and it was like, I looked...
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May27
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I should have linked to this over the long weekend, but I forgot. Sorry, but...Bat Segundo returns! Check out more thoughtful podcasts featuring everybody from novelist and editor Ed Park to cartoonist Mort Walker. Next, the Harper's book blog strikes...
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"Zane. Whenever I hear the name of Patricia's boyfriend of six months, I imagine some woman in a lonely rural town stuck with dusty old videos of 'Shane' and 'Zorro' to get her through her pregnancy, then in the delirium...
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May23
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I saved the sneakiest writing advice for last for our Writing With A Day-Job Week. When all else fails, just write your book at work... Just to recap, over the last week I've brought you advice from working writers about...
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May22
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By this time next week, retired Gawker writer Emily Gould's long essay "Exposed" will have been batted around every literary blog in the neighborhood. Her writing about blogging has already stirred up six-hundred readers. No matter what you think about...
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Find a day-job you love, and stick with it. As we near the end of Writing With A Day-Job Week, that's some of the simplest, best advice anybody can give you. But don't take my word for it. Earlier this year...
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May21
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While reading the new Wyatt Mason book blog at Harper's, I found this gem of a conversation between Jonathan Franzen and literary thinker James Wood. Check it out: "'[O]ne always imagines that New York is the place, or at least...
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For your day-job, do you work in a writing intensive field? In some ways, these writers have the hardest time trying to write when they come home from work. As we move into day three of Writing with a Day-Job...
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May20
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What can a 50-year-old poem tell us about day-jobs? The poet Weldon Kees wrote, painted and shot experimental films until he disappeared--a possible suicide or expatriate--in 1955. That's his Modern American Poets picture.Just seven years before he vanished, he wrote...
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May19
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What do you consider youreself? A novelist with a day-job? A full-time worker with a writing hobby? Or a writer who writes for a living? As print media jobs disappear and the book industry struggles to enter the 21st Century,...
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May16
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Got your attention, didn't I?Silly as that joke sentence sounds, it's easy to write that kind of prose when describing your work in a pitch letter--but a sentence like that can be the kiss of death in an agent query....
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May15
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Quick! What's the most popular thing on Google right now?It literaly takes five seconds to figure that out. Just visit Google Trends, and you can see that the most popular topics are: fantasia on american idol and jill nicolin and...
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May14
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What if you promoted all day but never actually wrote anything?Journalist Dennis Cass asks that question, and promotes his book at the same time in a bit of web video genius-ness. As I pointed out earlier today, more and more...
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The work doesn't stop when you publish your book. Earlier this week Ed Park--my editor at The Believer and one of my favorite literary essay-writers, published his first novel. It's called Personal Days, and he's taking off for a book tour...
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May13
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I've been researching agents lately, and the writing world is overloaded with advice on the subject. Who do you believe? Me? Your mom? Or a real-live agent?If you guessed "a real-live agent," then you win a prize--a look at a...
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Does your prose feel boring? Does your fictional world feel shallow? Read some Stanislaw Lem, the Polish master of space stories. You can meet him in this short film that I found on SFSignal. The movie gives you a groovy...
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May12
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Why am I on a horse? The answer follows, but first of all...the excellent Writer Beware blog has a winning piece of news: 120 writers who had lost money through an allegedly deceptive publishing agency have launched a class-action suit...
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The web has made it too easy to build a spreadsheet and email-bomb publications with your stories. But just because you can submit your stories to one hundred magazines in a single keystroke doesn't mean that you should do that.For...
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May 9
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You can't write a book by yourself.As I wrote my novel, I counted on a number of writing buddies. Some of them helped me through the messy writing process, some helped me survive various catastrophes, and a couple generous souls...
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In the pinnacle of my literary geekiness, I’ve started reading acknowledgements pages in books.You can learn a lot—how many people it takes to make a book, how many friends contribute and the professionals who supported the writer.Today, Joie Jager-Hyman tells...
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May 8
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From the imaginary libraries of Jorge Luis Borges to the books-inside-of-books that obsess Paul Auster's heroes--I've always loved imaginary texts inside fictional worlds. Novelist Chuck Palahuniuk's book trailer takes literary fakery into low-brow history--introducing a fake porno movie that features...
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Here at The Publishing Spot, we specialize in one thing: practical tips for the working writer. This site is for writers with dayjobs, families and other commitments. Everytime I meet a published author, I ask them how they managed to...
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May 7
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I'll be the first to admit that there's no correct way to write a novel. But there's something awe-inspiring about novelist Jeff VanderMeer's compulsive, inspiring method for finishing his most newest book:"I’ve instituted a strict exercise regime for two hours...
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Write about what you know. I can't tell you how many writing teachers told me that, and how long it took me to figure it out. It's even more important to think about while planning a non-fiction book. Readers respond...
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May 6
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"If I knew nothing about these students, I could ignore the fact that the vast majority of them (about 80 percent of Dartmouth applicants at the time) would eventually be turned away. Like the students themselves, I focused on the...
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May 5
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"[I]t is harder today than ever before to get into a selective college. Harvard College turned down almost 21,000 candidates--including thousands of valedictorians and students with perfect SAT scores--in 2006-2007. That same year, Columbia University denied admission to about 16,500...
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May 4
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So over the weekend, I stopped by the PEN World Voices Festival, catching Jo Nesbo, Rick Moody, John Wesley Harding and the rest of the motley writerly crew at A Believer Night-time Event. That's my video, but I totally recommend you...
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May 2
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Even though writing is a pretty solitary profession, most writing manuals never mention out the importance of having a writing buddy. Today, journalist Kate Torgovnick explains how her writing buddy--and her writing group--helped her write her non-fiction book about the...
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We spend too much time buried in our computer screens. A month ago, I left my computer and took a surreal trip to the Queen Mary 2 cruise ship to hear novelist Francine Prose and a motley crew of writers celebrate...
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May 1
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Why don't I have a Twitter page? I've been asking myself that ever since I interviewed Smith Magazine editor Larry Smith about micro-blogging. Luckily, the Book Publicity Blog has been researching writerly Twitter sites so we don't have to. Just...
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"Anyone who's been to a movie or turned on a television in the past fifty years can list dozens of pop culture images of cheerleaders, from the now-classic movie Bring It On, to Saturday Night Live sketches, to Heroes' telling...
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