Writer Unboxed - The "Connect Kitty" Approves
AAC can't help but deliver the best bloggish content that will inspire writers to new leaps of imagination. This one is mostly new releases, bestsellers, literary fiction historical fiction, mysteries, popular non-fiction, memoirs and biographies.
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I’ve spent virtually my entire life in the entertainment business, starting as a child in local amateur theater, then professional music, then this whole crazy book-writing thing. As different as these disciplines are, they have some core traits in common, chief of which is the need to please an audience. After all, if nobody comes to your show, or listens to your music, or reads your book, aren’t you just shouting into the void? So a core trait that each successful artist has in common is that they do please their audience. The really successful ones please a really BIG audience. But it’s never everybody. Just as not everybody likes chocolate better than vanilla (beca…
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There’s a concept in storytelling that I’ve long tried to understand: “authentic”. Mostly it’s invoked with respect to characters. It’s important to know them. It’s important that they act and speak in ways consistent with who they are, whether entering a room or rocketing to the stars. It’s also important to know how they came to be who they are. Back story wounds and burdens shape and define them and become the engines of change. If writing is “authentic” then every gesture, action and utterance is “honest” and everything observed is rendered in a way both original and pinpoint accurate. “Authentic” means writing not to formula but as characters would actually beh…
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Please welcome back former contributor and friend to Writer Unboxed today, Allison Larkin! Allison is the internationally bestselling author of the novels Stay, Why Can’t I Be You, and Swimming for Sunlight. Her short fiction has been published in the Summerset Review and Slice, and nonfiction in the anthologies, I’m Not the Biggest Bitch in This Relationship and Writer Unboxed’s own book, Author in Progress. Allison’s latest novel, The People We Keep, releases today! Several of us have been lucky enough to read advance copies and can attest that it’s a beautiful coming-of-age story, and the buzz over it is well-deserved. Said Booklist in their review of the book: “Larki…
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We wouldn’t need the saying “Don’t judge a book by its cover” if people weren’t always doing exactly that. The cover of your book is important! It makes a huge difference to how the book is perceived at every stage of the process, regardless of how your book is published or distributed. And making the most of the cover reveal is something any writer can do. Fresh off my own cover reveal (about which more later), I thought I’d share a few tips that you can use as guidelines while you’re planning and executing on sharing that powerful first look at the cover of your upcoming book. Here are three things you’ll want to do: Plan ahead. When the final cover of your book hits…
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The Writer Ghost Lights One of my favorite fanciful notions is that of the ghost light, the light theaters leave burning center stage, a light that serves a practical purpose, yes. A way to keep the dark safely at bay until proper lights can be reached and turned on. It’s also a light said to appease the spirits in the theater, a way to give them what they most want- the stage. As a writer, I’m learning to keep my own ghost light burning, an offering to the restless stories and luscious words too often just out of reach. I visit them, humbly, with pen and paper, and keep a record of them, of their stories. But the question I kept asking myself is this- am I truly a writ…
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Welcome to a new edition of Desmond’s Drops! This month, enjoy three drops about: Combining Characters Escalations Flashbacks Email subscribers, please click through to view. Look for more of Desmond’s Drops in September. Have your own bit of wisdom to share? Drop it in comments. About Desmond HallDesmond Hall, author of YOUR CORNER DARK, was born in Jamaica, West Indies, and them moved to Jamaica, Queens. He’s worked as both a high school biology teacher and English teacher, counseled at-risk teens, and served as Spike Lee’s creative director at SpikeDDB. He’s also written and directed the HBO movie, A DAY IN BLACK AND WHITE, which was nominated for …
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“One writes out of one thing only—one’s own experience. Everything depends on how relentlessly one forces from this experience the last drop, sweet or bitter, it can possibly give. This is the only real concern of the artist, to recreate out of the disorder of life that order which is art.” James Baldwin – Notes of a Native Son Life is full of disorder. There are so many things that are, that ought not to be. In any environment, we not only see disorder when it’s present but we can feel it, we can sense it, we can taste it. It messes with our holistic equilibrium. Some of us fear disorder, others easily live in it, but many despise it. The real question is, “What d…
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So we’ve got this whole “third-person narration” thing. You know it already. It’s that “he/she/they” thing instead of the “I/me/we” thing. The narrator isn’t the protagonist or (usually) any of the playing characters, and so the narrator is kind of floating above everybody’s heads, nonexistent, as lives are lived. But the thing is, the third-person narrator isn’t floating. They’re not nonexistent. Not really. Rather, they envelope the book, hold it in their hands, and therefore are arguably one of the most crucial elements to your entire story. Just because nobody can see them doesn’t mean they’re not important. So what do we do with an invisible narrator? First off, l…
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How did Judith Ortiz Cofer transform herself from a “frustrated artist” to a “working writer”? Read The Latin Deli, where she describes her transformation as “an act of will.” She decided to get up at 5:00 a.m. each morning, two hours before anyone else in her household. The decision became an expectation she had of herself, and the expectation developed into a daily ritual, whether she was writing poetry or fiction or dividing her time between the two genres. She completed her novel, The Line of the Sun, not by expecting an enormous swath of time to open magically before her, but by writing in small increments every day. She developed short, reflective essays and stories…
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I’ve recently become obsessed with pie. Not eating it, necessarily—I can generally take or leave most pies—but I’ve been dedicating an inordinate amount of time to making pie…more specifically, pie crust. Partly I blame the Great British Baking Show for my obsession—my husband and I devoured ten delicious seasons night after night for months, and I managed to convince myself while watching these avocational bakers that I, too, could churn out flaky rough puff like a natural-born pâtissier. But pie crust, as it turns out, despite having basically four simple ingredients, is a lot more difficult than cutaway shots of bakers expertly book-folding fat chunks of grated butt…
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USA Today bestselling co-authors, Hazel Gaynor and Heather Webb’s novels have all been published to critical acclaim. Last Christmas in Paris won the 2018 Women’s Fiction Writers Association Star Award, and Meet Me in Monaco was shortlisted for the 2020 Romantic Novelists’ Association Historical Novel award, as well as the 2020 Digital Book World Fiction award. Their latest work, Three Words for Goodbye, will be published this coming Tuesday! It’s gained some serious notice already, sweeping the “Best of” lists at: BUZZFEED, “17 Historical Fiction Books You’ll Want To Get Your Hands On This Summer,” FROLIC, “The 25 Best Books of Summer 2021,” BIBLIO LIFESTYLE, “Most Antic…
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Here is the thing you need to understand about this post – It is not a recipe for perfecting the meet-cute scene of a new romantic comedy, at least not exactly. Simply ask Google to find dozens of suggestions for tackling that particular knot, which makes for a good writing exercise even if not your usual cup of tea. But, no, today my inspiration derives from something much simpler – an admiration I have long held for writers of stage, screen and print, across a wide range of genres, who manage to craft indelible moments when characters engage each other for the first time. Such interactions, handled deftly, add intrigue, tension and occasionally, as with the aforemention…
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There’s been an awful lot of difficult news in the publishing world lately. The year has been packed with releases that were delayed because of the pandemic, making some books completely undiscoverable. Editors are more backed up than usual, trying to wade through enormous piles of submissions that were also delayed. Which, in turn, affects writers as we desperately wait for news—will it sell or won’t it? Most of us are feeling a little malaise, or as Adam Grant called it, languishing, in this article from the New York Times, post-pandemic. (Is it really post? Who knows) But a little camaraderie among friends and colleagues goes a long way to turn the ship around. In fa…
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You’ve made your manuscript as good as you possibly can—for now. Everyone has advised you to take a break, let the book rest, so you can return to it with fresh eyes. Perhaps you’ve sent it off to a Beta reader or developmental editor, hoping they’ll see the flaws and holes that you can’t and will show you how to bring your story to the next level. You know you have to avoid the temptation to keep tinkering with the manuscript while you await the very feedback you’ve requested—yet you can’t bear to do nothing. The good news is that there are ways to work with your novel, rather than working on it—that is, without opening the Word document where it lives and awaits your r…
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“A poem is never finished; it is only abandoned.” W. H. Auden, paraphrasing Paul Valéry I edit books for a living, so I know it’s true that writing is rewriting. But I’ve sometimes seen clients fall into editing traps that can cause real damage to their work. Although some simply waste valuable writing time, others get so caught up in the wrong kind of editing that they either lose sight of or actually blot out their vision of the book. Before we get into these traps, a caveat. Every writer has their own approach to writing, including rewriting. There are plenty of exceptions to everything I say here. So unless you recognize yourself in the problems I describe, fee…
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Shaking off our pandemic-induced ennui and embracing what looks like a permanent empty-nester status, the ToolMaster and I are currently surfing a massive wave of decluttering. It’s the sort of purge I’ve craved for years. It’s also quite daunting. We are both crafty, DIY types with multiple hobbies that require an infrastructure of tools and equipment. Our past careers required a substantial investment in books and paperwork, most of which will be required should we choose to practice again. In my case, I’ve also acquired a vast mountain of writing-related possessions. (Not that you’d know anything about that.) Also, from an environmental perspective, we dislike the id…
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It’s summer here in the northern hemisphere. In the U.S., we’re at 159 million people fully vaccinated against Covid-19. Everyone’s happy about “hot vax summer,” right? …Right? If the viral success of psychologist Adam Grant’s article about languishing a few months ago is any indication, a lot of us aren’t exactly feeling at the top of our game right now. And when I’m feeling bad and doing the bare minimum of household work, taking care of myself, and fulfilling my external responsibilities takes up all of my energy, I know that writing is one of the first things to fall by the wayside. But writing makes me happy—when I can drag myself into my office to do it, at least…
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Until I was 9 years old, my favorite part of the school day—the part when you could count on me sitting still, looking industrious, trying hard to be noticed for not standing out—was the five minutes before our morning playtime, lunch, and dismissal. The reason for my desperate attempts to be good sat atop the bookshelf by the doorway between Mrs Thomas’s classroom and the grand staircase of the converted Victorian house that formed our school. The object of my ardor waited silently, gleaming brass with a dark wooden handle: the school bell. Sometimes, if you were good, the teacher might pick you, at a random point in the day, to take the blackboard erasers out and bang…
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Trained by reading hundreds of submissions, editors and agents often make their read/not-read decision on the first page. In a customarily formatted book manuscript with chapters starting about 1/3 of the way down the page (double-spaced, 1-inch margins, 12-point type), there are 16 or 17 lines on the first page. Here’s the question: Would you pay good money to read the rest of the chapter? With 50 chapters in a book that costs $15, each chapter would be “worth” 30 cents. So, before you read the excerpt, take 30 cents from your pocket or purse. When you’re done, decide what to do with those three dimes or the quarter and a nickel. It’s not much, but think of paying 30 …
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I could make that title even grander by adding a subtitle: And How to Handle Them. I’ve written on this topic before. One can generalise about rejection, writer’s block, bad reviews, and how hard it is to keep going in tough times. But the journeys of individual writers are many and varied, from the one-hit wonder to the focused career writer to the newbie dipping a cautious toe in the swirling river of self-publishing while wondering whether to wait for the big mainstream deal that may be just around the corner. There are the poets, the dreamers, and the dilettantes, each following their own muse. And more, many more, just as there are many pathways in this world – from …
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A couple of years ago, a friend of mine was in a meeting to pitch his screenplay to a movie exec. My friend sold that plot with all the gusto he knew he needed in these rare moments. And he did well. He’d rehearsed that pitch till he could recite it backwards. On a tightrope. While juggling. The exec was impressed. He picked up the screenplay from his desk and flicked through the pages. He turned to page 10. Not 8, 9, 11 or 12; 10. Then he turned to page 25. Again, not 24 or 26; 25. He put down the screenplay, the disappointment clear on his face. “I don’t see the inciting incident or the shift to act two.” To this exec, the inciting incident comes 10% of the way into t…
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image by Deepti Juturu As I was preparing to write this month’s post, I took a quick spin through the posts on the site that talk about reviews. No surprise, most of them focus on what you as an author should do about reviews of your book. (Consensus: ignore them, mostly, and go about your business.) But I thought it might be interesting to look at things from a different angle. Should you, as an author, review other authors’ books? After all, major publications do it – many of the reviews in the New York Times are one author’s opinion on another author’s work. At its best, this yields insightful analysis from someone who knows a lot about how hard it is to suc…
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In 2017, during the early days of the last presidency, a quote from the American Pragmatist philosopher Richard Rorty—from two decades earlier in 1998—went viral due to the eerie prescience of its prediction: “Members of labor unions, and unorganized and unskilled workers, will sooner or later realize that their government is not even trying to prevent wages from sinking or to prevent jobs from being exported. Around the same time, they will realize that suburban white-collar workers—themselves desperately afraid of being downsized—are not going to let themselves be taxed to provide social benefits for anyone else. At that point, something will crack. The nonsuburban el…
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photo adapted / Horia Varlan I suspect we all know people who will walk in a room and say something like, “I still can’t believe she’d quit on me.” I’m married to one of them. It’s obvious there is conflict, so this might end up being a good story, but right now the comment is floating in space. I’ll need more words to understand it. Who is this woman? Where did he see her? When did this happen—ten minutes ago? Is he still chewing on something from his youth? Or is this a future action that worries him? One thing is for sure: to assume that I can read his mind is a sweet yet preposterous overestimate of my editorial prowess. I suppose that’s what happens after you’ve be…
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The most misunderstood component of fiction craft is also one most commonly discussed: pace. You hear it all the time, especially in critique. “Pace” as a word seems inevitably coupled with words like “slow” and “drags”. It speaks to speed—speed which always, pretty much without exception, could be faster. But speed of what? Plot pace is generally what people mean. Keep things moving. Get to the next event. Don’t meander around, cut to the chase. Get to the meat and quickly move on. It’s as if story is a double-speed march, or ought to be. As we know, however, story is not always about moving events along rapidly. A novel is more than that. It includes tone, …
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WTF is Wrong With Stephen King?
An Algonkian Success Story
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New York Pre-Event Assignments - June 2021
1. Before you begin to consider or rewrite your story premise, you must develop a simple "story statement." In other words, what's the mission of your protagonist? The goal? What must be done? To assert her presence in a society that dismisses her as invisible and voiceless 2. in 200 words or less, sketch the antagonist or antagonistic force in your story. Keep in mind their goals, their background, and the ways they react to the world about them. The antagonistic force is the Philippine class system as embodied by various characters. Among the primary ones are members -
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The Genealogy of Disaster
© Vyacheslav Argenberg, Beirut, Lebanon, 2008, CC BY 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons. We walked over to the olive trees, he and I. There were three of them, and some little holm oaks. On the horizon, to the east and the south, you could see mountain ridges, and in the two other directions it was so wide that you couldn’t make out the boundary of the plot. The fellow had offered me another one, with a sea view, and I had replied that I didn’t care. I can look at the sea often enough, every day at home, and if I’m going to be in the mountains I might as well gaze up at the peaks and the canopy of sk -
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Road Trips, Small Town Romance, & More
A Good Duke is Hard to Find A Good Duke is Hard to Find by Christina Britton is $1.99! This is the first book in the Isle of Synne series and I’m sure it’s pronounced “sin” but my mind went to “sine” and I, for one, will avoid an island of calculus. No thank you! Get swept away by a Regency romance of broken engagements, second chances, and stolen kisses from the author whom Publishers Weekly calls “irresistible”. After her third fiancé leaves her at the altar, Lenora Hartley is beginning -
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Two Thumbs Up and a Smiley Face
Everybody knows the book The Little Engine That Could. Published in 1930, over the years, that little blue engine has taught billions of kids to keep on trying, to not give up. "I think I can, I think I can," was popularized by the train engine that managed to make it up the mountain. A bigger, more powerful engine broke down; other locomotives were asked to take over, but each of them refused. The little blue locomotive was asked, and it agreed to try. Because it kept believing it could, because the little locomotive kept encouraging itself, it suceeded in making it over the mountain. But n -
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To Be Liked, or Not to Be
I’ve spent virtually my entire life in the entertainment business, starting as a child in local amateur theater, then professional music, then this whole crazy book-writing thing. As different as these disciplines are, they have some core traits in common, chief of which is the need to please an audience. After all, if nobody comes to your show, or listens to your music, or reads your book, aren’t you just shouting into the void? So a core trait that each successful artist has in common is that they do please their audience. The really successful ones please a really BIG audience. But it’s n -
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Perfume Thieves and the History of Temptation
The thief of perfume is, in fact, one of the most active of the twenty-first century. In the UK, cosmetics/perfume was the fourth most-shoplifted category in 2019 (after packed meat, razor blades, and whisky/champagne/gin). In the US, perfume is first on the list of products pinched by women, and an AdWeek list of the ten most shoplifted items ranks Chanel No. 5 at No. 9 (a few notches down from Axe body spray). Just ask Mrs. Thyra G. Youngstrom. In a 1959 news article, she’s reported as having discovered her West Hartford, Connecticut, home had been ransacked. It seemed everything was out of -
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The Bleakest Noir: A List of Ultra-Dark Thrillers
Carol and Charlie were my upstairs neighbors. They were an older couple, sliver-haired and retired, always around on weekdays. I registered them as vaguely eccentric but sweet, complete opposites from one another. Carol was gregarious. She was always smiling, always generous, delivering packages from the lobby to our apartment doors and feeding a feral cat on our block. I met her as I was moving into my now-husband’s place. She seemed delighted to have me in the building, peppering me with personal questions like some cheerfully nosy aunt, welcoming me to the family. Charlie was quieter, inco -
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Suicide, Despair, Lunacy, and Hysteria (and Surprisingly Little Murder) Among WASPS
la valle d’abisso dolorosa . . . the valley of the sad abyss . . . —Dante, Inferno You find comparatively few murderers among WASPs. Harry Kendall Thaw (the Pittsburgh coal heir who shot Stanford White, the beaux arts architect, on the rooftop of Madison Square Garden in 1906), Jean Harris (the Smith College alumna and Madeira School headmistress who murdered the diet guru Dr. Herman Tarnower in 1980), and William Bradford Bishop (the Yale-educated diplomat who bludgeoned his family to death with a sledgehammer in Bethesda, Maryland, in 1976) very nearly exhaust the list of WASPs who killed -
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There’s an Abundance of Wives In Book Titles—Where Are the Husbands?
I got married in 2012. I remember sitting on the plane en route to our honeymoon staring at my brand new wedding band and thinking: I am somebody’s wife now. A small thrill passed through me at the idea of belonging to someone in this way. Ever since, I have always enjoyed introducing myself to my husband’s coworkers or high school classmates as “Rob Baker’s wife.” Hey, he’s a great guy to be married to! But also, let me be perfectly clear, as much as I love him, ‘til death do us part and whatnot, that sobriquet better not be the thing engraved on my tombstone. And furthermore, if someday I be -
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First Degree: A Crime Anthology
__________________________________ “The Text Message” by Luc Brahy is excerpted from FIRST DEGREE: A CRIME ANTHOLOGY. Used with the permission of the publisher, Humanoids. Copyright © 2021 by Luc Brahy. View the full article -
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One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston
Squee One Last Stop by Casey McQuiston June 1, 2021 · St. Martin's Griffin Contemporary RomanceLGBTQIA CW/TW: reference to a historical hate crime against LGBTQ people One Last Stop is the tale of August, a young woman who has recently moved to New York City, and Jane, the mysterious woman that August meets on the subway. When August moves to New York, she intends to do what she’s done her whole life, namely, keep to herself. However, h -
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Authenticity and Apocalypse: An Interview with Alexandra Kleeman
Photo: Nina Subin. I first encountered Alexandra Kleeman’s work in the pages of this magazine. Her story “Fairy Tale”—published in 2010, when Kleeman was still a student in the M.F.A. program at Columbia University—is a nightmarish account of a woman confronted by a barrage of strangers who all claim to be her fiancé. The one she is forced to choose tries to kill her. Kleeman’s novel You Too Can Have a Body Like Mine employs a similarly arch and sinister surrealism to tell the story of two roommates whose identities slowly melt into one. In her latest novel, Something New under the Sun, the -
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Interview with Johanna Sinisalo (THE BLOOD OF ANGELS)
Johanna Sinisalo is a pioneer of the Finnish Weird. Her debut novel Not Before Sundown (2000, translated 2003) won the prestigious Finlandia prize in her native Finnish and won the James Tiptree, Jr Award on its translation into English. The novel is a wonderful mix of the speculative and the realist, imagining an alternative Finland in which trolls really exist from the perspective of the gay community in Sinisalo’s hometown of Tampere. Her other novels translated into English include Birdbrain (2008, translated 2011), a masterpiece of the eco-Weird, the utterly wonderful The Blood Of Angels -
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The Walking Stick
There’s a concept in storytelling that I’ve long tried to understand: “authentic”. Mostly it’s invoked with respect to characters. It’s important to know them. It’s important that they act and speak in ways consistent with who they are, whether entering a room or rocketing to the stars. It’s also important to know how they came to be who they are. Back story wounds and burdens shape and define them and become the engines of change. If writing is “authentic” then every gesture, action and utterance is “honest” and everything observed is rendered in a way both original and pinpoint accurat -
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Sophie Hannah on the Literary Side of Agatha Christie: “Her style is not simplistic but, rather, beautifully simple.”
Last year, I took part in a London festival’s panel discussion of the work of Agatha Christie. On the panel with me were four other writers, all passionate Agatha fans. One by one, we described what we loved about her work and talked about how much she meant to us. Then it was time for the Q&A, and the questions we were asked by the audience were, by and large, the same ones I’ve been answering on Agatha-themed panels since around 2011: why is she still the no. 1 bestselling novelist of all time? Is her work dated now or is she still relevant? Even though she’s widely and rightfully regard
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