“Luckily for art, life is difficult, hard to understand, useless, and mysterious.” By Maria Popova “As a person she is tolerant and easygoing, as a user of words, merciless,” the editors of The Paris Review wrote in the introduction to their 1992 interview with poet, short story writer, educator, and activist Grace Paley (December 11, …
The following is an excerpt from the new book Why We Write: 20 Acclaimed Authors on How and Why They Do What They Do. The book is compiled of essays from famous authors, all explaining why they love writing. Below is New York Times bestselling author Jodi Picoult’s response. Picoult has published 20 books over …
The late American novelist shared career lessons that we can all learn from. By Monica Torres Toni Morrison, the first Black woman to win the Nobel Prize in Literature and the author of 11 novels, died at 88 on Monday, leaving behind a legacy of words that reshaped American culture. Her writing itself was a singular …
From the “Writers on Writing” Column in the NYTimes By Richard Nordquist For almost a decade, the “Writers on Writing” column in The New York Times provided professional writers with an opportunity to “talk about their craft.” Two collections of these columns have been published: Writers on Writing: Collected Essays from The New York Times …
Via Authors Guild The Authors Guild’s 2018 Author Income Survey, the largest survey of writing-related earnings by American authors ever conducted finds incomes falling to historic lows to a median of $6,080 in 2017, down 42 percent from 2009. The Authors Guild surveyed its membership and the members of 14 other writers organizations in 2018, …
Via The Authors Guild The Authors Guild is appalled by the Internet Archive’s (IA) announcement that it is now making millions of in-copyright books freely available online without restriction on its Open Library site under the guise of a National Emergency Library. IA has no rights whatsoever to these books, much less to give them away …
Via The Authors Guild The Authors Guild has co-signed a statement (Click link for statement, or read below) issued on April 21 condemning the increase in attacks on LGBTQ books included in school curricula and circulated in public libraries. We have joined a coalition of national groups to fight this particularly insidious form of censorship …
by Jane Friedman The query letter has one purpose, and one purpose only: to seduce the agent or editor into reading or requesting your work. The query letter is so much of a sales piece that it’s quite possible to write one without having written a word of the manuscript. All it requires is a …
‘Sometimes I think writing is like living with a terrible boyfriend who drains you financially and tortures you mentally’ Rosemary Jenkinson All of us writers question why we write. Which is fine – we spend so much time examining our characters’ motives, we might as well look at our own. This piece is about the …
“When you can’t create you can work.” By Maria Popova After David Ogilvy’s wildly popular 10 tips on writing and a selection of advice from modernity’s greatest writers, here comes some from the prolific writer and painter Henry Miller. In 1932-1933, while working on what would become his first published novel, Tropic of Cancer, Miller …
