Quote of the Day: On The Rewards of Writing

"If you’re going to write, you’re going to have to find a reason to do it that has nothing to do with money or recognition or award."

That, says poet Hala Alyan in a Literary Hub article, is because publishers mostly say "no."

I also liked the following from the same article:

"We are living in an age of borders, a moment when people will either cling to those borders or try to dismantle them. A time when language matters more than ever, when words can be used to stoke or resist fear, as people try to criminalize words like 'immigrant' and 'trans' and 'Black.' Reclaim language. Allow writing to transcend those borders."

I don't agree with President Trump on much, but I do agree that political correctness has gone too far.

Writing in the Internet Age: Quantify Yor Skills

Want to get a job as a writer in the Internet Age?

Katherine Power

Here's what one potential employer, Katherine Power, chief executive of Clique Media Group, a media and marketing agency, wants to see:

"I look for people who can quantify their value, who can really think like an entrepreneur and put a value around their skill set and growth. So if you look at a resume of someone who was a lifestyle writer for XYZ publication, I like to see that they wrote 16 pieces of content per week resulting in X percent growth in page views over three months," she told The New York Times in a "Business Day" interview.

There you have it: ever-increasing page views -- a metric that would leave me, well, unemployable!

Where to Start When Writing a Novel?

One often hears that good stories have a beginning, a middle and an end. So it might seem logical that someone wishing to write one would start where the tale begins and march forward to the conclusion. But that’s not always the way it works.

The New York-based Center for Fiction recently interviewed Matthew Thomas, author of We Are Not Ourselves, which won the Center’s 2014 Flaherty-Dunnan prize for a first novel.

Among other things, Thomas was asked to identify the “entry point” – where he began writing – because the novel took over 10 years to complete and because it covers a great deal of ground.

“The very first thing I wrote in the novel was an in medias res [in the middle of things] moment -- a version of the section in the book where Eileen gives Ed a surprise party for his birthday. I had an idea of the sweep of the life of this character and this family, but I wanted to start somewhere in the middle. There's something useful about getting into the middle of something and looking around to see where you are,” Thomas explained.

Then he wrote Eileen’s back story before continuing forward.