I’ve written previously about how I have an MBA, not an MFA. And how that didn’t work out so great for me. So when I was unemployed and stuck in a tiny apartment while raising a newborn baby, it wasn’t a great time to contemplate going back to school for yet another masters degree. Plus, I reasoned, I’d always been told I was a great writer. How hard could it…
Hello Friends, I’m here today writing about tips for writers. I am the social media maven for The Debutante Ball this year and lead a team of 2021 debut authors on our Instagram account. One of the things I/we focus on is creating attractive visuals. We want to snare attention from those who use and enjoy social media, especially those folks who see social media as a means to find…
“It’s a black fly in your chardonnay. It’s a death row pardon two minutes too late.” Alanis Morissette was kind enough to give us many definitions of irony in 1995, and to those I would like to add, “It’s a jackhammer in your basement when you’re trying to write a blog post about writing through distractions.” We’re getting our house earthquake-retrofitted — a project that was initially supposed to take…
When writers talk about “world building” they mean more than just setting. Setting is where a story takes place. But a fictional world is setting, history, the special rules of that particular place, the people who inhabit that world, as well as the general tone or atmosphere that sort of floats over every page. The setting of the Harry Potter books is England, but in order to build her fictional…
When I was in my undergrad program for fashion, I took my very first writing gig blogging for a recently launched menswear site. I remember applying and being so excited when I was chosen! I felt so official with this, my first fashion writing gig. But I was super nervous upon accepting the position. I realized, my name would be “out there” and what if people didn’t like the content…
R. Eric Thomas may be the funniest current events writer around. In “Eric Reads the News” at Elle.com, he presents his unique take on pop culture and politics, like Watch Donald Trump Explain How a Dog Works or Once Again I Am Delighted To Spend My Entire Check On Oprah’s Favorite Things. I’m so excited for his memoir in essays, HERE FOR IT, or How to Save Your Soul in…
Lisa Barr is the author of The Unbreakables (HarperCollins) a delicious, sharp novel about a Chicago woman who jets off to France after her “perfect” marriage collapses, putting the broken pieces of herself back together while rediscovering her own joie de vivre—a lust for life, art, and passion. Artful, feminist, and emotionally gripping, The Unbreakables is a remarkable tribute to a woman’s strength in the face of heartbreak and adversity. What’s one book that made…
You always hear people talking about muses whispering in their ear, as if in a trance, or their “characters” speaking to them. Well, I’m not a novelist so I don’t have characters to take over the heavy lifting of writing, but I will say that it feels like someone else wrote up my book proposal. I had been working for a while on a memoir about my infertility, based on…
I have two manuscripts in the drawer. Although they’re not actually in a drawer, and I have no idea where they went. They are so old now that I know not if any current software could even read them, so I’ve pretty much abandoned the idea of ever looking at them again. This may be for the best. The first time I wrote a book, I sat down…
I’ve moved around a lot in the past decade, and I’ve had to cull my writing friends from a number of different sources. The first time I joined an actual writing group was when I moved to the outskirts of Philadelphia and found one through Meetup that was only a few minutes from my children’s school. In many ways, Just Write changed my life. I had started a…
