Your Research is Showing
Everyone has to do research from time to time. When one reader exclaimed of my early sprawling draft, set in the 1930s and ‘40s: “You sure know a lot about a lot!” I did not take it as a compliment….
Category: Craft Discussion
The Trouble with Endings
By Guest Contributor Kate Leary. In early September I finished the first draft of the novel I’ve been working on for a year. My kids were spending the week with their grandparents in Albany and my husband was backpacking with…
YA Wednesday: How to Reality-Check Your YA Manuscript, What Agents Want to See, and Big Deals for Little Books
You finally finished writing your YA book! You’ve polished and repolished your manuscript until it positively shines. Now what? If you’re like me, you continue to tweak and revise while sending it out to agents, collecting those rejection slips, sighing,…
Craft on Draft: Lessons in setting
During last month’s Craft on Draft event three authors were on hand to discuss how they developed their unique settings. In addition to sharing their own work, Stephanie Gayle, Anjali Mitter Duva, and Patricia Park selected the event’s contest winner,…
Friday Feast: Interviews with Margaret Atwood, Marilynne Robinson, Hanya Yanagihara, Cristina Henríquez, and Marlon James
This week, I’m all about the authors. The ones I love. The ones whose books I want to read. The one whose book I’m currently reading for our next Novel Incubator alumni book club (A Little Life). It’s a smorgasbord…
An Interview with Lauren Groff, Author of Fates and Furies
Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies elbowed out some of its competition last Wednesday when the National Book Award announced its 2015 finalists, but of any writer I know, I don’t expect such adulation to go to Groff’s head. I first…