The Market Always Has Room for New Artists
When I think of the start of my artistic journey, I think of greeting cards. I was probably five or six, literate, but writing only with tremendous difficulty. My mom would …
Tag: Writing Craft
How to Find an Agent: Utilizing Meta Tags and Twitter Advanced Search to Kick Querying’s Butt
In November of 2020, I queried twenty-two agents, and was so emotionally smashed by the process that I didn’t query again until November of 2021. For me, querying was disorienting, disheartening, and often felt like yelling into the void of a stranger’s inbox…
How to figure out what you love so that you can write what you love
In a perfect world, writing what you love would be easy. You’d dig deep into your heartsong and out on the page would come, you know, your heartsong—the most passionate, authentic literary expression you could muster. But we don’t live in that perfect world, and when…
Showing vs. telling: When is it appropriate to tell rather than show?
In writing, “show, don’t tell” is a frequently touted maxim, probably because the CIA pushed it into prestigious writing communities like the Iowa Writer’s Workshop and the Paris Review, and they, in turn, spread it as an unbreakable literary law. But unless you only want…
Writing as a form of dialogue with mythological traditions: What is white culture anyway?
This month, I read Roshani Chokshi’s Aru Shah and the End of Time, a middle grade novel about an Indian preteen who has to come into her power as a “soul-daughter” of a Hindu god of the heavens in order to stop an ancient, world-destroying evil that she, herself, accidentally summoned. The book is good. The book is good in a way that makes me screw up my eyes and puff out my cheeks and become a red-faced jealousy goblin. And so…
