February writing links

I’ve finally finished a freelance project that was hanging over my head and am trying to get back whatever it was I was doing before said freelance project. It feels like that was about 3 years ago, but it was only 3 weeks. While I was busy juggling mom-work and freelance work (there’s probably a blog post in that, if I could just find the time to write it) apparently February ended. Which means it’s past time for February writing links. Here they are!

This one’s a bit of a rant, but a rant worth reading/thinking about, by Leon Wieseltier at the New Republic. It’s an essay on what the “digital revolution” is doing to writers (impoverishing them!), and why “nausea is in order.”

On a somewhat related note, “crowdfunding” author advances … In which “crowdfunding” is a fancy way of saying “begging.”

Mentioned in the New Republic piece above, this one, in the Atlantic, argues for shorter newspaper articles. I’m not sure if I agree or not, though the examples here sure are good ones.  I think if I was teaching a beginning journalism class, this piece might be required reading.

The Millions’ excellent guide to fiction online.

Sorry non-tweeting reading public, this one’s on Twitter.  It’s the Twitter feed of @longreads, which provides links to long-form nonfiction/journalism. I keep getting sidetracked reading the excellent writing @longreads suggests.

This one’s been widely posted, but I’m posting it here again anyway, in case you missed it. The Guardian asked various authors to give 10 Rules for Writing Fiction and the results are here. Some of the advice is quite funny, whether it was meant that way or not (“Don’t have children.” – Richard Ford) and a lot of it is to-the-point and hard, which I suppose the best advice should be.

If, like me, you’re interested in creative nonfiction, then this one’s for you. Susan Orlean, she of Orchid Thief and New Yorker article fame, is teaching a nonfiction class at NYU these days, and she’s posted her syllabus online (scroll down to find it). I found it interesting to see what she’s assigned for reading material and so on. Or maybe I just wish I could take the class.

Finally, a day in the life of author Alexander Chee, part of a series on writers’ daily lives here. What struck me most: Chee has three writing spaces set up in his house, so that no matter what part of the house he’s in, he can’t escape the work of writing.

The party is over, time to get back to work.

For me, back to work means SUBMITTING. I’m determined to send out some of my writing this month, for the first time since 2007. So I’m doing something I haven’t done for a long, long time: research on lit magazines. This can be a frustrating and time-consuming part of the submission process, but for the moment I’m finding it kind of fun. (Someone please remind me of this in about a month.) There are so many new magazines out there, and so many great ones that have been around for a long time — I’m finding it interesting to be reminded of some that had disappeared from my radar.

Wondering where to look for markets for your work?

Poets & Writers magazine maintains a nice database of literary magazines, sortable by the genres each magazine accepts. Once you’ve whittled the database down to those mags that accept the genre you’re submitting, the list provides a brief description of each magazine, gives reading periods and lets you know whether each one accepts simultaneous and electronic submissions. When you click through for more info on a magazine, there’s a helpful “what editors are looking for” graph, as well as some other great details, including the magazine’s contact info, circulation and reporting time. Most importantly, each entry includes information on how many first-time authors are included in each issue and what percentage of unsolicited submissions are accepted. Aside from the great information, the uncluttered look and logical organization of Poets & Writers’ database really works well for me.

Duotrope’s Digest is perhaps the most detailed database of lit mags I’ve seen. You can sort by genre, theme, length of submissions accepted, payscale, whether the magazine offers royalties, whether a market is audio, electronic or print, whether the magazine accepts print or electronic submissions,  whether they accept simultaneous or multiple submissions, magazines that are temporary closed to submissions, or anthologies only. You can sort results by title, pay, response time, or acceptance ratio, which is all pretty darn impressive. There’s a great deadline calendar that includes special themed issues  Registered users have access to the site’s submission tracker. In all a great site with a lot of information you won’t find elsewhere, particularly on accuracy of response time and acceptance rates, but sometimes the amount of information here can be overwhelming.

New Pages offers a complete alphabetical listing of literary magazines, with descriptions, response times, contact info, type of submissions accepted, etc.  A great site for browsing and learning about new markets, but lacks the sorting features of some other sites. There is, by the way, a lot of other great resources for writers here as well, including a “calls for submissions” page.

There’s a lot of snobbishness out there when it comes to online mags, but it really is worth taking a look at them as markets for your writing. This list provides links and descriptions of 20 of the best. The same site also does a full list of mags, sortable by theme (such as “Canada” “Defunct” or “Experimental”), alphabetically, highest rating and most reader votes.  If you’re aiming high, Every Writer’s Resource also does a list of the top 50 print literary magazines with links and descriptions.

What sites do you use to do your research?

Teaching and the MFA

It says something that one of the most popular posts on this blog is What Are You Going To Do With An MFA? Namely, that there are a lot of people out there who are looking for answers to that question… So in need of answers are they that they google the question, which lands (at least some of them) here on a regular basis.

It should be said that I don’t have the answers, I was only musing about my possibilities and letting off some steam about the incessant questions I was getting about my future. And here I am, a year and a half later, still musing. (And still getting questions about my future.)

Earning an MFA was a great experience, but for me (and I think for a lot of others), finishing the degree brought about an instant personal conflict that had been held off, with the help of student loans, for two or three years. The conflict comes down to this:

I have to make a living.
I want to keep writing and get published.

As most MFA grads know, it can be difficult to balance those two needs, because of lack of time (due to working full-time), or lack of creative energy (due to the demands of working full-time), or both.

Since earning my MFA I’ve tried freelance writing and I’ve tried a full-time reporting job. The full-time gig, while it paid better than the freelance, filled me with panic over my lack of time to write. I felt all that creativity I had rediscovered during my MFA program slipping away, and I didn’t like it. I didn’t want to end up back where I’d begun before I started the program in the first place. So I quit. Since then, I’ve been thinking a lot about what do next.

I’m still taking the patchwork approach that I thought I might a year and a half ago. A little freelance writing here, a little freelance editing there. And now, I’ve begun looking into teaching.

I did not teach during my MFA program, for a variety of mostly logistical reasons, and now I feel ill-prepared to do so. There’s this idea that teaching writing is the prescribed career path for MFAs, but a lot of MFA students don’t have the opportunity to gain this experience during the course of their programs. Without decent, or enough, publication credits and no experience it can be tough to swing a job teaching writing at the college level. Most job ads ask for several years of teaching experience… but how to get this experience?

-Author Michelle Richmond has a helpful post about her experience landing teaching jobs and suggestions for getting your foot in the door.

There are a few other resources I’ve found on the web for MFA grads looking into teaching, but not as many as I would have thought.

-Practicing Writing lists some post-MFA job-hunting resources here.

-This article on the MFA weblog lays it all out, no punches pulled. Sigh. It also suggests, for a slightly more hopeful outlook regarding teaching in academia, going on to earn a Ph.D.

I’m iffy about the continuing-with-school options. On the one hand, usually more school = more debt. And that’s the last thing MFA grads need. On the other … maybe it helps, I don’t know. There are also shorter post-MFA teaching certificate programs out there (for example), which again, seem like a good way to acquire more debt … Do they work? Do they help when looking for teaching jobs? Are they worth it? I’d be curious to know.

I am, in fact, looking into taking a couple of classes locally in order to gain some experience/preparation for teaching, but also to potentially get my foot in the door at the school where those classes are offered. It seems like this path is all about persistence and connections, just like most others that MFA grads walk.

I’m getting ready.

I’m not usually one who’s much for books about writing. Particularly books about how to write.

But I’ve picked up this book, for NaNoWriMo. And I’m quite psyched about it.

There are, I will admit, writing books that I would recommend. Particularly for people just getting started. But only a few. This is not to say there probably aren’t more…

A couple I like in the how-to department (nonfiction-centric, but probably applicable for all narrative writing):
- On Writing Well, by William K. Zinsser.
- The Art and Craft of Feature Writing, by William E. Blundell. Good primer for journalists.
-Writing for Story by Jon Franklin.

Some I like in the inspiration department:
- Bird by Bird, by Anne Lamott
- Writing Down the Bones, Natalie Goldberg
- The Writing Life: Writers on How They Think and Work, edited by Marie Arana.

Rightreading happens, I see, to have a great list going, in the post and comments, on the best books for writing/publishing.

Anyway, I must get back to learning why not having a plot will not be a problem next month. Just that title alone is reassuring.

lit classes for the people

I was browsing iTunes the other night and noticed that they are now offering “iTunes U” — podcasts of lectures, events, speeches and so on. You can “take” literature courses at various schools, and there are some universities that have recorded author readings. You can listen to a course on the nature of creativity at MIT, for example, or on “the literature of crisis” at Stanford. Stanford actually has a bunch of tracks on literature, including discussions of various authors and books, like ZZ Packer and Wallace Stegner. Neat.

No more Word

This writing software looks really helpful. I kind of wish I had it when I was working on my thesis.

To Facebook or not to Facebook

I was reading Written Road, a travel writing blog, this morning, and now another of my life principles (besides Math is Evil) has been called into question: Stay Off of Facebook.

I have avoided those sites — Facebook, MySpace, Friendster — because, well. Because.

And now this, which seems to indicate that there are good professional reasons for writers/journalists to be on Facebook. Even the Poynter Institute is coming around.

I don’t mean to sound stodgy and old before my time, but I don’t know how I feel about this… I can see that social networking sites could be good ways to market yourself and your work, but… Really?

Still wrestling with these people

Not too long ago, I wrote about some characters I couldn’t get out of my head. Well.

These characters have apparently decided to camp out for a while. I can’t let them go. I guess that means this is a story I need to tell. I have never been this focused on a short story. Often I lose interest in the story I’ve thought up, and I go back to nonfiction. But I have written the beginning to this story twice, once in my notebook, and once on my laptop. And I have written the first paragraph at least four other times since then in my notebook. I don’t know why I am so stuck on the way that the story begins. I don’t actually have a problem with the way that it began in either of the other two drafts.

Except that obviously I do.

Like I said, I’m pretty entangled with these fictional people. Today, on the train, I wrote another beginning. This time in present tense. Oh, no. Not that again.

For some reason, I seem to need to view these characters from all angles. The story, so far, until today, has been in third person, and in past tense. And now there’s a present tense first paragraph…And (slight digression) since the train I was riding home today changed from a K train into an N train while I was riding it, much to the consternation of, well, me, and all of the other people who were suddenly not riding the right train, I ended up walking the mile or so home from the first available stop and I had some time to think about other ways to write the same story. And I thought, first person! What about first person? And I rewrote the first paragraph in my head all the way home in first person.

But. I think I’ve reached my play-with-possibilities limit. First person didn’t seem right (though neither did present tense)…and then I started thinking about why, exactly, it didn’t seem right. The thought of writing this story in first person makes me all kinds of uncomfortable, as in, it might be too raw, or too hard to write. Which makes me wonder if first person is the right choice after all.

Sigh.

There’s a distinct possibility that I’m overthinking this thing.

What should I call this thing?

I have trouble with titles.

I’m the kind of writer who will write a complex and emotional personal essay about memory and friendship and loss and then call it “Friendship,” or “Memory,” or “Loss.” Or I won’t think about a title at all, realizing five minutes before I’m about to print out the piece to submit somewhere that I don’t have one.

The best titles, I think, get at the heart of the text without giving away the story. They often have double meanings, or can be interpreted in more than one way. They draw in readers without being too cloying. I suppose publishers would say that titles sell books and they probably have formulas for coming up with good ones when an obvious one doesn’t present itself. These days, it certainly seems as though any nonfiction book title must have a colon in it. Just look at the bestselling nonfiction on Amazon.

But there are other books that manage to sell despite what seem like awful titles. Look at Cormac McCarthy’s The Road. Bor-ring.

You can visit Lulu Titlescorer and find out what the chances of your title becoming a bestseller are. Apparently a research team analyzed the titles of every novel to have topped the hardback fiction section of the New York Times Bestseller List between 1955 to 2004 and then compared them with the titles of a control group of less successful novels by the same authors. The result of that data is program that can supposedly predict the chances that any given title would produce a New York Times bestseller.

I put in the title of my book about Korea, and it told me there’s a 10 percent chance of it becoming a bestseller. I suppose this wasn’t fair, since it’s nonfiction and Lulu scores fiction titles… But. It never asked me about punctuation, and I’ve got one of those must-have colons in my nonfiction book title….I think that must be worth at least a few more percentage points, right? And maybe The Road isn’t a bad title after all; Lulu Titlescorer gives it a 35% chance of becoming a bestseller. Which calls into question the accuracy of Lulu, what with The Road being an Oprah selection and currently sitting at No. 2 on the NYT paperback fiction list. And my book sitting in a box in my office. Ten percent chance seems, um, high, now that I think of it.

There’s also Lulu Titlefight, with which you can pit two possible titles against each other. I did this for two titles I’m considering for the short story I’m writing, and they tied…with both having a 31.7% possibility of hitting the NYT list. I don’t know whether to be happy that my titles are consistently mediocre or annoyed that both titles came out the same, which seems to indicate that I should think of a new one.

I was thinking about titles and how I might get better at coming up with them, and I came across this article, which does a decent job of examining why books are titled they way they are, and lists some of the best titles…not sure how they chose these, but I agree: The Unbearable Lightness of Being is a catchy one, as is One Hundred Years of Solitude.

Where do titles come from? How does one get better at thinking of them? Title writing is not discussed so much in writing workshops, though I’ve had classmates who suggested that my working titles weren’t working.

I think about the kinds of titles out there… There are the titles that are just bits from the writing itself; a phrase or word that, when pulled from the text gives both the title and the text greater meaning. There are summary sorts of titles, and vague, mysterious titles. There are quirky, odd titles, like Bombproof Your Horse, which actually won a prize for its weird name. Yes, there’s a prize for oddest title. But that’s not necessarily what you want in a title either… it’s got to be a name that is a perfect combination of eye-catching and meaningful, which is never an easy thing to shoot for.

Sputtering starts

You know how dogs sometimes circle their beds before they lie down to sleep? Or cats hunch down in the grass, waiting, waiting, waiting for the right moment to pounce on the mouse?

That’s me when it comes to starting a piece of writing. I circle, stare, wait and circle again. I delay, I read over my notes, I get up, I sit down. I write a sentence and then back away and circle some more, then try again. It’s not just my own creative writing; I even do this before settling in to write a story for the newspaper I freelance for.

The pre-writing circling kind of bugs me…it takes time, after all, and when there are deadlines, time is important. I suppose the circling is a way for my brain to start organizing the pieces that will make up the whole of an article or essay. But until I actually get going on a piece of writing, it’s like a stutter. I keep starting, but can’t get the words out.

Some people are gifted with the ability to just sit down and crank things out. I am not one of those people. At least not until I’ve gotten started and written a few sentences or paragraphs. Often, the time circling and getting started will take twice as long as the writing of the rest of the piece. Weird.

Getting a Life

It’s been a while since I’ve actually written anything here about writing…a sad state of affairs, since writing is supposed to be the focus of this blog. My silence on the subject is completely attributable to two things:

1. While I am doing some freelance work, I am not writing creatively. I have been doing so much reporting in the past week or so that I feel too scattered and burned out to do my own writing. My thesis has taken a serious back seat. As in the back seat of another car, one that I’m not driving.

2. I’m feeling pretty uninspired, frankly. I’m cut off from all of the creative people, locations, and internships I had been a part of for the past two years, and I hadn’t realized how much those people and environments were keeping me going both in terms of my own writing and in terms of being aware of things going on in the literary world. It’s not exactly like I had my finger on the pulse, but I felt a bit more connected than I do now. The lack of connection is kind of sucking away my previously held optimism.

Kind of as a result of point number two, I ended up going to a panel discussion hosted by MediaBistro last night. The panel was titled Get a Freelance Life. (Exactly what kind of life I need to get is the subject of much debate, mostly by me, with myself, but that’s another topic for another time.) So at this panel, five freelance writers talked about how they go about their freelance lives, everything from pitching magazines, to setting pay and contracts, to how to deal with loneliness.

Most of the info was familiar to me, but I learned a few tidbits. I love hearing stories of writer’s experiences interacting with publications and editors, so it was entertaining for me just for that. And hey, I got a free book called, you guessed it, Get a Freelance Life.

So what did these successful freelancers have to say? There was lots, but some interesting bits:

• One thing I came away with was this (please prepare yourself for a hefty dose of marketing speak here… one of the speakers’ words, not mine): I, the freelance writer, should consider myself a brand. For every project that comes up, I should consider how that project is going to add value to the brand that is me. So, for example, if a magazine approaches me about doing a story on something I love to write about but it can’t pay much, I should consider doing the project to further my goals as a writer, thus advancing the brand that is me.

• a web site is crucial for displaying clips and contact info. (and advancing your, um, brand.) All of the freelancers there swore by their websites. I later checked them out, and really liked this one and this one, in terms of good design, concise copy, and clarity of message. Or brand, if you want to continue with that awful way of looking at yourself in a freelance career.

• Someone in the audience asked the freelancers to name web sites they found useful as resources. This seemed like a great question, but: They all mentioned FreelanceSuccess.com, which I later discovered has an $89 subscription fee. Not sure if I am quite ready for that cost yet. They also touted the American Society of Journalists and Authors which I later discovered has an intense application process required for membership (i.e. publishing a book at a reputable publishing house or a long history of writing for national magazines. Newspapers don’t count. Which is odd considering that many journalists work for newspapers.). So anyway, those sites, not so helpful after all for the beginner. But! Since obviously if you are pitching to magazines you’ll need to be reading them, one guy suggested discountmagazines.com, where you can apparently get tons of glossy magazine subscriptions for $5.95 a year. It’s not all magazines like OK! either. They have Mother Jones, for example. They also have lesser discounts on mags like the New Yorker, Atlantic Monthly, etc. I couldn’t find a catch. So good tip there. And, if you are a freelance magazine writer, you can deduct said subscriptions on your taxes. Smart.

guilty as charged

I subscribe to a weekly email newsletter that lists writing markets, funding opportunities for writers, contests, and so on. It’s usually something I skim through and delete, but every so often I learn about something that is directly relevant to what I am writing and so getting those extra couple of emails a week pays off. Every week the editor of said newsletter sounds off with advice, inspiration, etc. before listing the opportunities. This week she was full of admonishment, even though her advice directly conflicts with her own product:

But how many times do you hear writers talking about not having enough time to complete a project? Yet how many of these same souls spend time chatting, blogging, emailing, reading newsletters, attending conferences, and buying writing books?… We want to know how someone else did it instead of using our own ingenuity, creativity, and personal brilliance. We stifle ourselves with busy-work to dodge the real work of introspection.

Guilty. I am one of the people she describes in this tirade who spends time whining on her blog about how she’s not getting any writing done, rather than just using that time to do some hard thinking and get some writing done. Ouch. The Internet is definitely more of a hindrance to my writing than I would like to admit.

I should feel inspired to pull the plug on this blog and get to work after reading the aforementioned email newsletter. But the truth is I don’t. I am kind of addicted to writing here. And I do think blog writing can serve a useful purpose. First, when I write here, I don’t spend  a lot of time agonizing over word choice, order of information, style, voice, etc. It’s like a writing exercise: the words come from quick, free thinking. For a slow writer like me, this is good practice. I don’t have time to spend all day on these posts, and I know it. Second, as I have noted before, writing here is like cleaning out the muffler on your car by taking it out on the highway after months of city driving. There’s lots of gunk, i.e. bits of every day life and worry, clogging up my brain, and writing here is a way to clear it out so that I have a fresh mind with which to work on more personal writing projects. Third, this blog keeps me connected at least one way or another to other people who write. This can be inspiring and motivating, which is important in such a solitary activity. Even jealousy can be a motivator.

OK, now that I have managed to spend another half hour rationalizing why not working on my writing is good for my writing, I have to get down to it.