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Novel Development From Concept to Query - Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect
Haste is a Writer's Second Worst Enemy, Hubris Being the First
AND BAD ADVICE IS SECONDS BEHIND THEM BOTH... Welcome to Algonkian Author Connect (AAC). This is a literary and novel development website dedicated to educating aspiring authors in all genres. A majority of the separate forum sites are non-commercial (i.e., no relation to courses or events) and they will provide you with the best and most comprehensive guidance available online. You might well ask, for starters, what is the best approach for utilizing this website as efficiently as possible? If you are new to AAC, best to begin with our "Novel Writing on Edge" forum. Peruse the novel development and editorial topics arrayed before you, and once done, proceed to the more exclusive NWOE guide broken into three major sections.
In tandem, you will also benefit by perusing the review and development forums found below. Each one contains valuable content to guide you on a path to publication. Let AAC be your primary and tie-breaker source for realistic novel writing advice.
Your Primary and Tie-Breaking Source
For the record, our novel writing direction in all its forms derives not from the slapdash Internet dartboard (where you'll find a very poor ratio of good advice to bad), but solely from the time-tested works of great genre and literary authors as well as the advice of select professionals with proven track records. Click on "About Author Connect" to learn more about the mission, and on the AAC Development and Pitch Sitemap for a more detailed layout.
Btw, it's also advisable to learn from a "negative" by paying close attention to the forum that focuses on bad novel writing advice. Don't neglect. It's worth a close look, i.e, if you're truly serious about writing a good novel.
There are no great writers, only great rewriters.
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AAC Activity Items
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New York Write to Pitch 2024
Money (and time) WELL spent! I can't stress that enough. As an "aborning author," I heeded the admonitions to leave my ego at the door and came in hungry to learn the answer to the burning question that has eluded me after nearly a year's worth of boilerplate rejections: "Why?" Is it my query letter? My premise? My writing? What...what?? Having faculty the caliber of Paula Munier impart her gems of experience across four intensive days, along with the opportunity to sit before three publishing editors, a literary and film agent, and a developmental editor, and receive candid and specific feedback was invaluable. And the format of bringing together a hand-picked, well-matched group with whom to interact and share ideas both in and outside of the sessions truly added to the experience, and I came away with a new friend and someone off which to bounce ideas. In addition to a refined professional pitch, I now have a wealth of newly-minted knowledge on how to improve my novel to have a more than fighting chance to break through the tsunami of queries to accomplish that first step toward realizing my dream of becoming a traditionally published author. Thank you Paula and Michael. Well done! -
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New York Write to Pitch 2024
Write to Pitch has been a harrowing experience and the greatest investment in my writing to date. I cannot express this enough. I will be doing it again for my next novel. This was an intimate workshop with a cohort that truly took an interest in each person pitching. Beyond the workshop, the feedback from the industry professionals was invaluable. -
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New York Write to Pitch 2024
I came into Write To Pitch as if I was part of the full cast of The Apprentice, expecting that I would be "fired" in an editorial way. I left with honest, but also encouraging feedback, as well as a direction for my novel that I could take off and run with. I learned so much that I was writing a revised outline with plot points and pinch points as I waited to pitch the guest editors and agents in the actor's audition setting and while I was at breakfast and dinner before and after each day. Michael and Juju encouraged me in the perfect way: tell me the truth about the story, give me ideas to make it better, give me feedback from the guest editors and agents and show me how to present myself and my work respectfully. Write To Pitch has a steep and fast learning curve. It was the best program for where I am as a writer. I look forward to the opportunity to participate in the self-directed program that follows. -
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New York Write to Pitch 2024
The write-to-pitch program was terrific. I came away with lots of ideas not just about pitching but about how to improve my manuscript and become a better citizen in the writing community. Paula and Michael are rich in knowledge, savvy, and contacts. They are generous teachers. And all we participants were interesting people (of course) so any downtime between sessions was a pleasure. -
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New York Write to Pitch 2024
The many iterations of the pitch helped me decide what to cut from my manuscript. The publishing professionals were not only helpful, but they seemed to get into the spirit of the conference. I really appreciated the vibe in the room. The writers were rooting for one another, not competing with one another. -
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New York Write to Pitch 2024
I've been to many writers' conferences. Most focus on one learning about craft OR pitching. This one combines both: we were actively pitching to industry professionals while, at the same time, learning how best to hone the pitch--and all instructions included the 'why' so we can take that forward to future projects. Every single person in my group left with a sharper, much more powerful and effective query. It's an intense few days, and well worth it. -
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New York Write to Pitch 2024
Here we go friends! Honestly, going into this event... I was terrified. I've completed an MFA in Creative Writing from a good program and that helped me approach the conference with a level, confident head (you don't need an MFA for this conference btw--if you write and are serious about being professionally published, attend it). However, meeting some "big fish" in the industry with my child (as we sometimes feel about our treasured WIPs) can be daunting for any writer. As an author seeking a good deal for a debut novel/series, I felt it was my duty to find and submit to this conference and man... I am glad I did. One of the greatest benefits is the amount of time and energy that goes into perfecting a pitch and practicing that pitch live. There's nothing quite as scary or meaningful as live feedback from an agent, editors, authors, and publishers. It helps open the veil into the process of publication in an approachable way-- giving faces to those who will receive your manuscript. Obviously, I recommend attending this conference (or trying to--polish your pages y'all!) but some pieces of advice that I didn't realize I needed but experienced/heard from the conference were the following: SLOW DOWN. Haste breeds waste. Sure, get the draft down, but when you're sending your work to professionals, do all in your power to be professional. Of course you want to be relevant, but relevancy is only possible if the work is good work. Seek out mentors in the industry. Their experience and anecdotes are meaningful, harrowing, and incredibly helpful. They also care about what you do and understand it. I could go on and on about the lessons and practical knowledge I learned through this conference, but nothing will replace you actually deciding to go to it. Seriously. Thank you for coming to my Ted Talk ;). Have a lovely day and hey, if you go to one of these, perhaps I'll see you there. -Julia Warner -
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Elyse Graham on the Librarian Spies of World War Two
As Elyse Graham recounts in her new book Book and Dagger: How Scholars and Librarians Became the Unlikely Spies of World War II, with the Nazis gaining ground across Europe in the early years of the Second World War, the United States and United Kingdom drew on an unlikely reserve of combatants to build new spy organizations from the ground up. Instead of employing suave lady-killers or gadget whizzes, they turned to a group of people whose skills and areas of expertise would not only alter the fate of World War II but of modern spycraft for decades to come: academics and librarians. In our interview, Graham told me she had “a lot of fun” researching Book and Dagger, and that delight shows on the page: her book is full of stories of unlikely characters who became crucial spies for the Allied forces (like Joseph Curtiss, a shy Yale professor who wound up temporarily running America’s espionage bureau in Istanbul), how-to tips for making it as a spy in the 1940s, and perilous tales of industrial sabotage. While the men and women who undertook these undercover operations were undeniably heroic, their profiles were much different than the figures we see in spy movies, and they were backed up by bureaus of researchers at home who made essential discoveries based on their research. As Graham explains, Book and Dagger not only showcases the power of libraries and the humanities — two institutions currently under threat from right-wing campaigners — but also reveals what ordinary people can do to fight authoritarian regimes. “The reserves of courage that ordinary people found to win against the Reich impressed me the entire time that that I was writing this book,” she says. “The fact that they really did make a difference taught me something also about the power of power from below.” Morgan Leigh Davies I want to ask how you got interested in the subject. Do you have a passion for the period, or for spy novels? How did you come to write this book? Elyse Graham I write a lot about the history of universities, and I became curious about why, during a certain period of the 1950s and 1960s, all of the spies going into the CIA from places like Princeton and Yale were getting recruited from English and history departments. It turned out that figuratively, and maybe literally, all of their professors had been spies during World War Two, which was a very exciting story. And of course, anybody in academia is familiar with secret keeping and grudges and all of the sleuthing and gumshoe work that you have to do to get your hands on highly prized papers, which is exactly, it turns out, the set of talents that these spies were prized for during their time fighting the Nazis. From there, it’s a true story with the plot of a spy thriller. MLD It was really interesting to see the overlap between the skill sets required for so many of these different fields that were applicable to this spy world. How much did your background as an academic give you insight into the sort of work that these people were doing? EG Spending time in archives, you learn a lot, not just about the tremendous amount of information that’s available, but also all of the things you have to do to get access to information that exists, but it’s not immediately obvious that it exists. So it takes time, for example, for a library or an archive to put stuff on the catalog. It can take decades. So sometimes you know that something exists but you have to go through back channels to get access to this thing that isn’t on the catalog yet, and that you wouldn’t know existed if you were simply going by the catalog. There are tricks that people tell each other about how to make use of certain archives. Traditionally, women have told each other, while making use of the Vatican archive, that you get a better response if you take off your wedding ring. So these are very human histories. This story has a lot to teach us about today’s world in a sense, not just that these ways of finding out information are still used, not only by intelligence agencies, but also by professors and other people who want to pull stories out of the past and unearth hidden histories. It also teaches us about the value of libraries, not just as centers of community and education, but as places that preserve information. Information that you don’t even know is going to be valuable until all of a sudden, it helps you to plan the invasion of North Africa. The value of the readers that those libraries nurture, people who learn how to read in all sorts of different ways that turn out, again, to be incredibly useful. MLD One of the things that really struck me is how much information they were making use of that was publicly available. Of course, there’s a huge amount of effort that has to go into digging that stuff up and putting it together in a coherent package that makes it worthwhile. But that struck me as kind of counterintuitive to the spy narrative that we have in our head, which is not necessarily based in reality in any way, right? EG The activity of these spies in the field, and these intelligence analysts who are making use of the documents they sent home, reshaped all of spycraft. It was really the growth of intelligence analysis, which is the basis of how the CIA works today. The spymasters at the OSS [Office of Strategic Services, the precursor to the CIA] had an idea, which is that 90 to 95% of the information that you need in order to, for example, find out about someone’s military capabilities in order to fight a World War, is publicly available. It’s in newspapers, in unlikely places like the society pages of a local newspaper, in color details in somebody’s travelogue about a trip to Greece. These are old fashioned references today, but people actually do get very actionable military intelligence by looking at people’s Instagram posts. You could look at what were known as Aunt Minnie pictures, which is just a photograph of somebody’s Aunt Minnie standing outside of a building, or at a phone book for a certain city, or you could read every single part of the newspaper as ingeniously as you possibly could. That gets you 95% of the way there. It was a fairly new idea in intelligence. Before then, a lot of intelligence had been conducted by way of whisper networks around embassies. What do diplomats know? What can people tell us by actually doing it the way that it was done in spy novels, which is to eavesdrop on people in a smoke-filled lounge. This was different, and it had a romance, but it is the romance of books and libraries. MLD The kinds of information and material you’re describing feel to me like types of information that women would be more suited to understanding or picking up on, especially at that time. How much did gender played into this process? EG In movies, spies are often these ripped hunks who are carrying a lot of gadgets. They’re wearing tuxedos and they’re sleeping with their sources. But that’s not how it works in real life. In real life, a weapon would blow somebody’s cover. A gadget would blow somebody’s cover. If the Gestapo stops you and you have a shoe that turns into a telegraph machine, you are a spy, you don’t have a cover anymore. So first of all, spies were chosen precisely because they would be overlooked. Hence the value of women as spies, which was really discovered during World War Two. There was a guy in Britain, Selwyn Jepson, who recruited women because he thought that they were much better spies than men. Most informants don’t know they’re informants. If you’re trying to get information out of somebody, you don’t want to be the person who asks a bunch of questions that will get you noticed. But if you say something incorrect, especially if you’re a woman, a guy’s going to come in and explain things to you. This was explicitly a part of the training wherein they were told, just say something that’s a little bit wrong, and guys will come in and they will explain things to you, and they’ll be sources. They’ll have no idea that they’re sources. They won’t remember your face. They may remember your legs. Women would be chosen precisely because they would be overlooked, and also sometimes because they would blend into the background in cities in which all of the men had been forcibly recruited to fight for the Germans: women were the only ones left behind. MLD When World War Two started, spy agencies weren’t particularly robust in the UK or the US, so these people were modeling their behavior in some way on fiction. How did that influence them as the war went on? EG The great history of Robert Darnton says, literature doesn’t just reflect upon history. Literature creates history. So we model our own lives after the things we read. When the US went into the war, they had to create a spy agency out of nothing, which meant that the people who were running the training camps had read novels about spies, and that’s about it. So they used techniques ripped out of spy novels at first while they were figuring out what to do. One of the characters in the book, Joseph Curtiss, was told, “Go to this train station, and you’ll see a man wearing a red carnation,” where he was told, “Wear a purple tie. Go to the Yale club. You’ll see a man smoking a cigarette who will put it out on the table.” That’s just from a spy novel. On the one hand, this sort of thing can give people a lot of courage at a time that they need courage. So there’s a young man, Varian Fry, who had seen a lot of movies. I mean, he was educated, but he went undercover in France and just acted like Humphrey Bogart the entire time. His job was to try and rescue people who were being targeted by the Gestapo, and he would give them, like in Casablanca, visas, letters of transit that would allow them to escape to the United States. He had no idea what he was doing, but he just acted like Humphrey Bogart and James Cagney mixed together. And it worked. That’s the American way. You know, you can go in there, and have seen a bunch of Hollywood movies, and just do it with this kind of reckless optimism and goodwill. That’s a possibility for you, if you’re an American. I was very entertained also, while I was researching, by how thoroughly the fact that these guys had read spy books both informed the things that they chose to do and also taught them about their own mistakes. The people who turned out to be the worst spies were the ones who would not let go of the idea that they were in a spy novel. They had to be the center of the story. Every time they walked into a casino, the band would strike up the song, “Boo Boo Baby I’m a Spy.” They would dance, they would sing. It’s all very entertaining. It can be dangerous to be so insistent on putting yourself at the center of the story. There has to be a certain ability to let somebody else take all of the attention, which, again, is something that women have been trained to do a little bit better than men. One of the things that I learned while writing the book is that what you have is what you bring to the war. To a certain extent, when your back is against the wall, you fall back on your training. So the English went into this like English people: they had spy training schools that were incredibly posh, that were in these country manors and had house masters and servants and that sort of thing, because they were English. That’s what they knew. So that’s what they fell back on. The Americans had these camps with tents where they were teaching people how to do quick draws like cowboys. Now, again, if you are a spy, you don’t get a gun. But they were still teaching them how to do quick draws, because they were Americans. So of course, they trained like cowboys. The Norwegians were out there on skis, the French Resistance robbed liquor stores, drank the wine, and then turned the empty wine bottles into Molotov cocktails. Because they’re French, they do as the French do. My point here being that the librarians also fell back on their training, and it turned out to be unexpectedly exactly what modern intelligence needed, if you think about the world of libraries as kind of its own nation. These guys fought in their own characteristic way, and it turned out to be so successful that they were hugely instrumental in winning World War Two and created the basis of modern spycraft, which is very impressive. And of course, they also had red spy novels and thought it was kind of fun that they were spies themselves. The better ones learned that you can’t always act like you’re in a spy novel. The worst ones didn’t learn that. But there’s this constant back and forth between fiction and real life. MLD There are a couple instances in the book where the American or Allied spies really managed to manipulate the Nazis because they used that academic cachet. There’s an idea that, because you’re from an educated background, that you’re above it all, which obviously the academics who go into spying for the US mostly don’t have, because they’re willing to go risk their lives to do this. EG One aspect of the academic world, especially in the 1940s, is prestige. You know, the three-button wool suits, the air of being a certain kind of gentleman — even into the 1960s and 1970s, “gentlemen” is a word that’s frequently used by professors at Ivy League schools, rather than referring to students. It is also the case in in Nazi Europe that some of the people who take charge see themselves as gentlemen, as men from a better world who are suited to rule. When these guys were caught and interrogated by the Allies, they thought, “Oh, the people who are interrogating me are from Harvard,” which is the case for a specific group of men in the book who are interrogating Nazis at what was called House 71. “These are gentlemen. I am a gentleman. Naturally, they would send Harvard men to talk to me, because I am worthy of being interviewed by a Harvard man. I’m not going to get in any trouble because we’re all gentlemen. Here, I’m going to tell them everything.” Some of them turned themselves in to the Monuments Men and the Art Looting Investigation Unit, which were the Allied units in charge of getting back stolen art before the Nazis could sell it or melt it down for bullets. They turned themselves in because they thought that they would simply be working for a new employer. Now, the fact that they weren’t simply working for a new employer, that they were caught and interrogated and punished, is largely because the scholars decided not to follow the orders of the US government, which was considering for a time actually taking the art as part of the spoils of war, which would be traditional. But these were historians, real art historians, who really valued the art and not just themselves. And they said, Hey, let’s not do that, which was the start of a new way of doing things. I was very struck by the conversations between, on the one hand, the Nazis in House 71 and on the other hand, the Americans who had to wear themselves as a disguise. The prestige, the pomp — they played into it, because it’s what the Nazis wanted. One of them, James Plaut, happens to be Jewish, but he was a Harvard man, and he understood the gestures of assimilation. He understood the art of disguise and the Nazis did not know that he was Jewish. They just knew that he was a Harvard man. So he got them dead to rights, which must have felt very satisfying. MLD I was moved by the fact that those academics actually believed in their profession and said, No, we can’t. EG The spies on the ground, the spies in the book, are also making very real moral decisions. Would you sink a ferry filled with civilians if you knew that it would deny the Germans access to something that might enable them to create a very powerful weapon without knowing what heavy water is, without knowing what a nuclear bomb is? Would you sink a ferry full of civilians if you were told the war might depend on it? What if, also a situation in the book, your friend was scheduled to be on the ferry? What if your mother was scheduled to be on the ferry — also a situation in the book. If you warn them, the word might get out and the Nazis might get the substance. Would you follow the orders of your government and do what has traditionally been done, which is to take art that has been acquired in war home to pay for the war as the spoils of war? Because you, yourself, are an art historian, it could make you very famous. Imagine that you could take some Vermeers for yourself, put them in your university’s library, study them, become a world-famous Vermeer person. That must be very tempting. You’re guarding a warehouse full of art after the war. Much of their art was painted by Nazis themselves, not particularly good art, but painted by people like Julius Stryker, and his watercolors are with you, and you don’t have a lot of space. Should you burn his paintings? Give yourself a little more space, indulge in a little revenge at the same time: it would be very satisfying. I actually talked with historians and art historians about whether they would do this, and I won’t name names, but one very eminent person said that they would, and another very eminent person said that they wouldn’t. Personally, I would, but that’s why I’m not tasked with these kinds of decisions. You were on the ground, you weren’t connected to anybody else. You had to make these very large decisions, kind of on your own, on the basis of the training that you had been given. As it happens, these guys had training from being art historians. They had been taught certain things about the love of art that guided the decisions that they made in a time before and its aftermath. So nothing that we learn is useless. It all comes to bear sooner or later. View the full article -
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How Patricia Highsmith, Shirley Jackson, and Leigh Brackett Defined a Strand of Midcentury American Literature
In June 1943, Patricia Highsmith tagged along with a friend on a social call to the Greenwich Village apartment of Stanley Edgar Hyman and his wife, Shirley Jackson. Highsmith’s interest was mostly in Hyman, whose employer, the New Yorker, had a frustrating habit of rejecting her story submissions, but the brief description of the event she recorded later in her diary focuses instead on her conversation with his wife. Highsmith, just twenty-two years old, was struggling to make ends meet by writing for comic book publishers, whereas the twenty-six-year-old Jackson had already placed several short stories in respected publications. And so while Highsmith found Hyman to be “horrible,” she grudgingly admitted that Jackson was “alright.” (1) As the two drank coffee together, Highsmith reportedly told Jackson about her own work, and the more seasoned writer apparently gave the newbie much-appreciated advice about acquiring an agent (Patricia 239). This otherwise uneventful meeting warrants a mention in Joan Schenkar’s 2009 biography of Highsmith because, though these writers have rarely been directly compared to one another, upon further consideration the similarity between their work is strikingly obvious. Schenkar notes as a primary point of connection Jackson’s interest in “the same psychological states which obsessed Pat” (242), but the professional parallels between these women extend much further. Both explored a relatively cohesive set of themes in a wide variety of literary forms ranging from children’s books to science fiction to mysteries. And despite their reputations as masters of suspense, both also had cantankerous and sometimes decidedly unfeminine personalities (at least by midcentury America’s standards) that added an underlying, often subversive sense of humor to their writing. Each produced a body of work that has been described both as outside of time and of its time, and their literary legacies were neglected until relatively recently when, with the rise of feminist criticism and queer studies, each experienced a renaissance. For scholars today, then, this encounter is more than just a trivial anecdote of literary history. The meeting of two great female creative minds so early in their respective careers suggests the tantalizing possibility of a very different narrative of post-war American literature, one that foregrounds the contributions of female writers and emphasizes a network of personal and professional connections between them. By studying these authors alongside Leigh Brackett, another midcentury, multi-genre writer whose legacy has been neglected, I hope to demonstrate the significant influence of women writers in the postwar era. In addition to highlighting gender influences, I will emphasize the way assumptions about genre—another important category of meaning—shaped critical perceptions of postwar publishing and its writers, thereby making the biases of this era visible. Though there are a number of significant similarities between these authors’ literary interests, most important for this study is the fact that all three took a fluid and creative approach to genre writing. Jackson’s distinctive fusion of various formats was her greatest strength but also a liability within an industry that preferred clear, simple (or simplistic) marketing narratives. Conversely, Highsmith was snared in just one of those categories—that of crime or suspense writer—and was never able to escape the burdens of such a designation. Brackett was perhaps most disadvantaged by genre biases, as she was a master of the pulpiest forms of two marginally respected genres: crime and science fiction. Yet all three writers, in part because of these associations, have been assessed mostly in comparison to male genre writers. For example, Jackson’s gothic approach has been considered against that of predecessors like Henry James’s Turn of the Screw (2); Highsmith is frequently grouped with Jim Thompson as crime writers who defied the genre norms of their era and thus influenced many authors to come; and Leigh Brackett is compared to Black Mask crime writers, usually Raymond Chandler, or, for her science fiction, her husband Edmond Hamilton or her protégé Ray Bradbury. Consequently, grouping these women writers upends narratives of literary influence and highlights more subtle elements of their treatment of gender—especially for Highsmith and Brackett, who were writing primarily in masculinized genres. Importantly, Brackett’s and Highsmith’s strong genre associations may have also disadvantaged them in another way. As feminist critics have sought to rewrite literary history, female writers whose work seems to hew more closely to the often-misogynist standards of their time period and genres were mostly left out of this process of reclamation. ___________________________________ Excerpted from On Edge: Genre and Genre in the Work of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackett, by Ashley Lawson (The University of Ohio Press) ___________________________________ Because Highsmith and Brackett utilized male protagonists (as did most crime and science fiction writers during this era), feminist critics have been too quick to assume their work adheres to a misogynist status quo. Instead, by foregrounding the influence of genre I will argue that both authors were aware of these conventions but sought to bend that framework to fit a more subversive purpose, one that focused on the way contemporary society—whether represented by a suburban small town or an intergalactic space colony—promoted restrictive gender roles that were often harmful to both sexes. Taking a broader, more inclusive view of literary production during the postwar era—one that includes more than just the realist fiction written by white, mostly straight men—a new picture is revealed that adds depth and breadth to the version of this history as it is traditionally described in scholarship and textbooks. Beyond the holy Updike/Bellow/Salinger trinity (which may alternately include Miller/Williams/Cheever/Lowell) and their counter- cultural Beat Generation counterparts Kerouac/Ginsberg/Burroughs exists a wide range of writing neglected by the literary surveys that seek to define the major trends of this century. (3) Those who seek to expand this view struggle to advocate for the worth of writers who do not meet the rather narrow qualifications of merit as they have been traditionally applied. Such criteria reinforce assumptions about the self-evident worth of these writers and make it difficult to add anyone new to the list, even as we become more aware of the biases embedded in our methods—especially those, I argue, of gender and genre. Even fifty years of recovery efforts by feminist critics (the first generation of whom came of age during this period) has done little to shift the image of postwar literature as an era defined by male authors and the verisimilar or realist novel. Only recently with the growing critical prominence of authors like Jackson and Highsmith have we begun to accept a different version. With almost two centuries of the American literary tradition laid out before them, the woman writers of the postwar era learned to cope with gender stereotyping in a variety of ways, as evidenced by this trio. Each was shaped in relation to the conditions of the literary marketplace, whether she worked with or against it. Jackson continually faced both sexism and genre bias in periodical and book publishing, but she rarely bent her work to editors’ or critics’ tastes. Highsmith typically preferred to write from a male point of view, but she never was able to shake the genre label that she felt disadvantaged her with American publishers and affected her sales in her home country. In contrast, Brackett fully embraced genre publishing and worked hard to excel at generic forms and thus achieve parity with male writers. Yet by grouping these three very different writers together, we can illuminate new patterns of women’s writing at midcentury that have been previously obscured. Specifically, each of these authors developed a distinctive suspense-forward style that playfully merged elements from multiple genres, a technique that was meant to reflect a growing sense that the world was more dangerous than even the pervasive Cold War hysteria of this time reflected, though in ways that the more explicit political propaganda ignored. They merged the dominant mode of literary realism with elements of genre writing to respond to the big questions of their era with startling and unnerving answers that inevitably produced even more queries and that perfectly illustrated the tension that defined the Age of Anxiety. In addition to their genre connections, other striking similarities within this trio’s biographies encourage fruitful comparisons: all three women were born within six years of each other (between 1915 and 1921) and grew up in middle-class or upper-middle-class homes. (Jackson and Brackett were raised in California, and Highsmith lived between Texas and New York City.) They all had access to the kind of quality education that was becoming increasingly available to women (Jackson attended University of Rochester and Syracuse University; Highsmith graduated from Barnard College) and a certain degree of family support (though Brackett was forced to skip college due to a lack of funds, her grandfather offered financial assistance while she tried to become a professional writer). Brackett and Jackson both married fellow writers (Jackson married literary critic Stanley Edgar Hyman, and Brackett wed fellow sci-fi writer Edmond Hamilton), and each was arguably even more successful than her surprisingly supportive partner. All three of these writers also chose authorship as a vocation from a young age, and they pursued their desired professional career with dogged determination. Brackett began writing at age nine by imagining sequels to her favorite films but began her “serious” work at thirteen (qtd. in Silver and Ward). She sold her first story to the pulp magazine Astounding Science Fiction while in her mid-twenties. Both Jackson and Highsmith achieved their first publications in mainstream periodicals during tweenhood: Jackson wrote a poem called “The Pine Tree” that won a contest in Junior Home Magazine when she was only twelve years old (Franklin 33), and Highsmith’s letters to her parents from summer camp were published in Women’s World magazine at the same age (A. Wilson 44). Jackson and Highsmith became stars of their college literary magazines, publishing stories that would serve as the foundation of their more mature work, but each struggled after graduation to get a foot in the door of the thriving periodical industry of the period. Despite some successes, neither could place their sui generis work in the slicks, even long after the success of their early books raised their respective profiles, and thus they often resorted to publication in genre magazines. In contrast, Brackett focused mainly on these specialized periodicals, especially pulp magazines. Brackett was one of the few women publishing in the male-dominated crime and sci-fi industries, and her gender ambiguous name likely mitigated discrimination to some degree until she became better known, though she usually claimed she never personally experienced any significant sex-based prejudice. And while there were many successful female crime and mystery writers during this era, few made use of the hard-boiled style that Brackett and Highsmith adapted to their own ends. The most significant challenge when comparing this particular trio is the varying degrees to which each of these writers has already been reclaimed by the critical establishment. Jackson is now, finally, a well-established brand: all her writing for adults is in print, and two volumes of uncollected work have been released. Two biographies devoted to the author have been published, and a volume of her letters came out in 2021. Highsmith has been subject to similar popular interest. Three biographies have been written about her life, her novels were reissued by W. W. Norton in the 1990s, and the recent publication of excerpts from her diaries and notebooks, as well as a documentary about her life, has confirmed her status as a cultural icon. She has also been claimed as a major, if problematic, figure of LGBTQ+ history. Such interest, though, tends to focus more on Highsmith’s personality than on her writing. Too often, the critical consensus agrees that she produced half a dozen masterful books, a bunch of middling ones, and a few clunkers, and so she is regarded as good for a crime writer. These latent biases are also found in literary scholarship. Most analysis of her writing treats it within genre studies of crime writing or as queer literature. Though Highsmith’s body of work does offer a distinct spin on both categories, such an approach limits her to the also-ran status that plagues so many genre writers. She is rarely studied alongside authors outside of the crime genre, and her broader literary influence has been mostly ignored. Leigh Brackett is by far the least known of this trio, at least in literary circles. Among Star Wars fans, she is known as the writer of the first draft of the screenplay for The Empire Strikes Back, and sci-fi enthusiasts know her as an important foremother—the queen of the space opera—though most of her work is no longer in print. But recognition of Brackett beyond her prominence as a writer of crime and science fiction—not to mention as a screenwriter of classic genre films—has been limited, likely due to her mastery of such conventions. Of these three writers, she was the most faithful to genre expectations and worked almost exclusively with the publishers in the booming midcentury industries of both the crime and sci-fi fields. This may explain why her name is now the least known of the three. The fact that Brackett chose to live in both Los Angeles and rural Ohio further detached her from the monolith that was the postwar New York literary industry. Yet she offers important contributions to this study, because even her most genre-faithful work is playful and creative in both its use of the standard conventions as well as her incorporation of tropes and techniques from other categories of literary texts. Her treatment of gender is also more nuanced than has traditionally been acknowledged in the limited critical engagement with her work. Another important commonality between all three of these women was, of course, their race. All three were white, which gave them a privileged point of view within the Jim Crow era of America’s history. Tracy Floreani has noted how, in a postwar period during which “ethnicity itself was being thought about in new ways,” writers from racial and ethnic minorities were emerging in greater numbers in the literary marketplace and doing important work to reshape concepts of national identity that had long been built on the ideals of white supremacy. As white women, these writers also worked from a distinct racial subject position, though one that has mostly been neglected in consideration of their work, in part because their engagement with issues of race was less explicit. Though Jackson focused almost exclusively on white female protagonists, she was the most interested of the three in addressing racial themes, especially in her short stories. The gendered anxiety that her female characters feel is often rooted in the same sense of threat implicit in racial hierarchies of the time. Though the segregationist philosophies (whether based in formal governmental segregation or more informal and often voluntary social divisions) were often justified as a means to protect this group of women, Jackson shows how the encoded ideology of racial difference only exacerbated that same sense of threat. While Brackett’s crime fiction sometimes included the kind of racial stereotyping that was typical of the genre at the time, she was more likely to address issues of discrimination in her science fiction writing, whether overtly or through the metaphors of otherness that were central to the genre, and both her sci-fi and her Western works emphasized the rights of Indigenous peoples. In contrast, Highsmith notoriously and belligerently held onto many of the prejudices instilled during her Southern childhood, and she became increasingly racist and bigoted in her beliefs as she aged. Yet her treatment of/obsession with the hegemonic white male of the period should be regarded as offering its own significant reflections on the nature of racial privilege in midcentury America. Thus, while race rarely constitutes the main subject of these writers’ work and while racial discrimination was not one of the challenges they faced when engaging with the literary marketplace, maintaining a focus on the less visible ways that race influenced their depictions of sociocultural dynamics is necessary in order to keep their own privileges visible. Just as this era of literary history has often been written as a masculine one, highlighting the racial homogeneity that is so often a part of this narrative offers another way to add depth to this important counterhistory of postwar American literature. ___________________________________ Excerpted from On Edge: Gender and Genre in the World of Shirley Jackson, Patricia Highsmith, and Leigh Brackets, by Ashley Lawson. Copyright, 2024. Published by The Ohio State University Press. Reprinted with permission. All rights reserved. (1) Schenkar suggests a handful of reasons that Highsmith may have reacted so strongly to Hyman, but the most likely seems to be her strong lifelong antisemitic streak. Though this part of Highsmith’s entry was excised from the published version of her diary, the biographer reports that she called Hyman “the Jew” and deemed him “disgusting” (qtd. in Schenkar 242). (2) Of the three, Jackson’s work, with its focus on female protagonists, is most likely to be considered alongside other female authors, though usually ones from earlier eras, including Charlotte Perkins Gilman. (3) One useful indicator of canonization is, of course, textbooks. In the current tenth edition of the Norton Anthology of American Literature, seven female writers are included for the postwar era, as compared to fourteen male authors. The beneficial effects of critical revision are also evident in this edition, as the modernist period, which has been subject to extensive feminist intervention, boasts the fiction and poetry of fifteen women alongside twenty-three men. Additionally, the modernist section includes coverage of popular fiction, which allows for the inclusion of three more women writers, whereas the postwar volume has no such insert. View the full article -
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Algonkian Pre-event Narrative Enhancement Guide - Opening Hook
The opening pages of my book: February 26, 1643 At first she didn’t know why she awoke. Then she heard cries in the distance. She couldn’t tell where it was coming from. Her husband Hans still slept so she parted the drapes and crept out of their cozy cupboard bed. As she unlatched the top half of the door to peek out she heard gunshots. The night was pitch black, moonless and bitterly cold. Suddenly she heard Hans come up behind her and he wrapped his arms around her waist. She was still shy around him as a 16-year-old bride but she was glad for his warmth. “What is it Sara?” “Listen.” The gunshots started again, and after a few seconds, bloodcurdling screams. “That is coming from across the North River” Hans said. “How can you tell?” “I can hear it carry across the water – it sounds very different from the sounds of war up close. Believe me, I know.” Sara knew Hans had a terrible experience that caused him to flee his hometown in Germany with his younger brother Jochem, but he never spoke about it. “Jan Damen has finally done it,” Sara said. “Done what?” “He was plotting to massacre the natives who fled from the Mohawks for our protection. His stepdaughter Rachel told me about a dinner he had on Shrove Tuesday with Governor Kieft and her husband Secretary Van Tienhoven. Damen was encouraging them to seize this opportunity to inflict great harm on the natives.” “But these natives have done us no wrong.” “They don’t care. They wanted to avenge the murder of Claes Switz and see any native as good enough to do so.” “This is madness. We were sworn to protect them by treaty. And without native friends we will have no furs to trade and not enough food to get through the winter.” “Damen doesn’t care. He has always despised the natives. Since I was a little girl I saw how he mistreated them, especially the women.” “I know you never trusted him.” The screams started again, and they stood together in silent horror. Hans wrapped his arms closer around Sara, who was shivering. They had not yet been married one year and Hans treated her like a fragile flower. She was just 16, and he was 31. Before they married her grandmother Trintje, the colony’s midwife, asked to speak with him. She knew he was a surgeon and an educated man, so she was very frank. She told him that Sara had only just come into puberty and she feared an early pregnancy could be dangerous. She asked him to wait a full year before attempting to get her pregnant. He agreed. She added that it may help her grow in love for him if he was gentle with her, letting her come to him when she was ready. Sara felt the warmth and protection of this man, who she resisted marrying but was growing to care for more every day. He respected her intelligence, especially her skill with all the languages of the patients he treated. He managed in Dutch and his native German but couldn’t master her Norwegian or any of the many other languages of the colony. He was in awe of her ability with language, especially all the native languages. He realized that if she had been born male she would have certainly been recommended to go to the University at Leiden – she was obviously that intelligent. But here she was – his young wife – in the far-off colony of New Netherland. As the gunfire erupted again and more screams followed, Hans said “Let us go in Sara. There is nothing we can do tonight. In the morning I will go to the fort and see if I can help the wounded.” Sara replied “I wish I could have stopped him. I knew what he meant to do.” “Do not blame yourself. Come, let us get warm and rest. Tomorrow we will do our best.” As they crawled back into their cupboard bed and closed the drapes Sara could still hear those terrible sounds. She wanted to hold onto Hans but was afraid. He had always been careful to give her space and respected her privacy just as her grandmother said he would. She had told her that he would wait for her to come to him, and explained to her what would happen. It frightened her, and she did not feel ready. Hans touched her shoulder and said gently “You are still shivering; I can help keep you warm.” She snuggled a little closer and the sounds drifted further away as she fell asleep with his arm around her. February 27, 1643 As soon as he opened the door Sara knew something was very wrong. He was shaking and pale, and beads of sweat broke out on his forehead despite the extreme cold. “What is wrong husband?” “It is worse than I feared. Our soldiers captured some of their men and have them in the guardhouse.” “Are they injured?” “If they were not already, they will be soon. They are being tortured.” He sat down heavily and put his head in his hands. Sara had never seen him like this. “It is just like my hometown of Madgenburg when Jochem and I fled for our lives. Heads on spikes around the fort…” He choked out the last words and fell silent. Sara was frozen, wanting to comfort him but not knowing how. She moved closer and he pulled her to him. They sat together in silence as she felt him fighting back sobs. She realized she knew so little about him and his past. She asked - “What can we do?” “I fear nothing. The soldiers would not let me in to attend to the wounded. None of our men were harmed. It shows you that this was not a battle, but a one-sided massacre. I saw De Vries, who said that there were few survivors. Our soldiers shot some, and hacked others to death. He said they even tore babies away from their mothers and flung them into the river. They were so brutal that some natives thought they were the fierce Mohawk warriors they had fled from. “They killed women and children too?!” “Yes – it was horribly brutal – something out of my nightmares.” “Why didn’t someone stop them?” De Vries tried to talk Governor Kieft out of this madness at dinner last evening, but he failed. Kieft was proud to show him the soldiers massed and ready to attack. De Vries tried to impress upon him that these natives were innocent, but Kieft said if they would not turn over the murderer of Claes Switz he considered every native guilty.” “How could women and children be guilty! They have done nothing wrong!” Sara cried. Hans replied, “Sara my lovely innocent wife, you have no idea what men can do in war. I have seen horrors you cannot imagine. When the Catholic forces attacked my town they first killed those they could find, then hunted down the rest, burning the city to the ground in just one day. Those who survived were tortured, the women raped, and only a few fled for their lives. Jochem and I were lucky to escape, but we were powerless to save our parents.” “I am so sorry…” Sara was speechless. She had not known the horrors of war. Her childhood upriver had been peaceful and mostly idyllic. While she was playing with native children, Hans had been fleeing for his life. -
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New York Write to Pitch 2024
Thank you to Michael and Paula. Before, during, and after, New York Write to Pitch was a true learning experience. -
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New York Write to Pitch 2024
The pitch that I came in with and the pitch that I came out with - are two totally different things, in the very best of ways. I learned about POV, what the reader cares about, and how to put that to work in my pitch, and also in my book itself. I am so grateful for the coaching I received at the conference, THANK YOU for everything!
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