How to Not Waste Your Words: The Secret to Writing a Crappy but Usable First Draft
observer.com – Saturday January 14, 2017
Okay. Let’s get this out there: your first draft of anything is going to be bad — I mean, really bad. Because that’s the job of a first draft. To be bad. And your job is to write it.
Once you write the terrible first draft, you can write a better second one, and an elegant third one, and so one. But you must start somewhere. As writer Anne Lamott says, “Almost all good writing begins with terrible first efforts.”
Is 2017 Your Year To Write And Publish A Book?
forbes.com – Thursday January 12, 2017
Should you write a book this year? Do you have an idea that you’re convinced the world needs to read about? Consider the strange experience of Mr. Franz Kafka.
You Can Write a Best-Seller and Still Go Broke
slate.com – Wednesday January 11, 2017
In 2012, a month after the publication of her memoir, Wild, Cheryl Strayed was on a book tour, soaking up the wonder of her first big success as an author, when her husband texted her to say that their rent check had bounced. “We couldn’t complain to anyone,” Strayed told Manjula Martin, editor of the new anthology Scratch: Writers, Money, and the Art of Making a Living: “My book is on the New York Times best-seller list right now and we do not have any money in our checking account.”
The Kindle Effect
fortune.com – Friday December 30, 2016
Consider the metamorphosis of self-publishing. For decades it was dismissed as the desperate refuge of authors rejected by publishing houses, wannabes who paid a fee to a musty vanity press that would dutifully typeset their words and transform them into a few boxes of books that the “writers” could hand out to their friends.
Today, thanks to ebooks and Amazon (AMZN, -2.02%), self-publishing is a global phenomenon—an independent route intentionally chosen by more and more authors—that has spawned not only mega-bestsellers like Fifty Shades of Grey, but also hits in other realms, such as the movie version of The Martian. Ebook self-publishing has become a $1 billion industry.
Make this the year you finally write your book
mprnews.org – Friday December 30, 2016
According to a New York Times op-ed from over a decade ago, "81 percent of Americans feel they have a book in them."
If that's still true today, there's almost 200 million American adults roaming the country, dreaming of the novels and memoirs and cookbooks they have yet to write. If even a quarter of them ever move on to the actual writing stage, our bookstores are going to explode.
Irish novelist Elizabeth Reapy give her tips on writing a page-turner
irishpost.co.uk – Thursday December 29, 2016
FIRST-TIME novelist Elizabeth Reapy’s debut Red Dirt is a thrilling piece of fiction based on the lives of three Irish emigrants attempting to find their way in Australia.
Here, the Co. Mayo-based author tells Fiona Audley her top tips for any prospective writers…
Caimh McDonnell: too funny and too Irish
irishtimes.com – Wednesday December 21, 2016
Publishing used be a lot like a bad country disco. The publishers in this metaphor are the lovely ladies and the authors are the likely lads. I don’t mean that the ladies stand bored on one side of the hall while the lads are on the other skulling pints. No, this is another kind of bad. Imagine a GAA tournament clashed with a young farmer’s convention and the AGM of the Association of People Called Sean. The ladies are so out-numbered, it’s like the film 300 remade as a romcom.
Good news, though, the publishers found a solution. The ladies hired some bouncers to do their rejecting for them – literary agents. As a lonely author looking for love, you’ve now got to convince one of them to dance with you long before any of the girls will consider it.
A primer on writing from a gifted novelist
usatoday.com – Friday December 16, 2016
Charles Johnson, one of America’s finest novelists (Middle Passage) and foremost thinkers pondering the cosmos of literature, has published a road map to that cosmos as complex, daunting and rewarding as the destination itself. Titled The Way of the Writer: Reflections on the Art and Craft of Storytelling (Scribner, 256 pp., *** out of four stars), this dense little book could just as cogently be called The Rigors of Writing Seriously.
Is making a living just from writing books a literary fiction?
irishtimes.com – Monday December 5, 2016
Rumour has it that there are only 12 writers in Ireland who can make a living from their books alone.
Of course, the figure changes with on the telling – dropping to seven, or rising to 20, perhaps even 30 – and while trying to guess the names of those on this privileged list makes for a good game, I’ve yet to uncover the research on which this supposed statistic is based.
‘Writing a good sex scene is a skill you hone over and over again’
independent.ie – Thursday December 1, 2016
Is there anything worse than a bad sex scene in a book? (Apart, maybe, from a bad sex scene in real life.) There you are, mentally immersed in this fictional universe, lost in an invented world, and suddenly… a clumsy, clunky, cringy sex scene blunders into view, waving its unmentionables about, and breaks the magic.
Badly written sex scenes are jarring. They’re jolting. They just feel wrong, even more so if the book you’re reading is otherwise well-crafted.
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