MEMOIR VS AUTOBIOGRAPHY
I’ve posted about this before and I do it again now. I’ve had clients—phenomenal writers—who have dealt with this. Here’s a quote from Writer’s Digest on the subject: “An autobiography focuses on the chronology of the writer’s entire life while a memoir covers one specific aspect of the writer’s life. So, if I chose to write about my complete life up to this point—including growing up in Cincinnati, my time in New York, the few years I spent in Chicago and eventually landing
WHAT ANNE PERRY DOES: SUCCESSFUL WRITING TECHNIQUES
Anne Perry. Author of the William Monk and Thomas Pitt series –The face of a Stranger; The Cater Street Hangman—Perry is an authorial behemoth. She published her first book in 1979 (The Cater Street Hangman), introducing her series character, Thomas Pitt. Since then, she’s published dozens of novels, and is an international bestseller. At seventy-seven, she still writes regularly, publishes often, and tours the world attending writers’ conferences and panels. In short, she’s
THE ART OF THE QUERY LETTER
I want to talk for a fast minute about query letters. For those of you who don’t know what they are, or for those who know very little, this should prove to be a helpful post. Query letters are the first professional handshake between an aspiring author and a literary agent. The first hurdle you must pass through in the writing world is an agent; once you snag a good one, you will usually have them guiding you for the rest of your career. Of course, it’s not unheard of to run
2016 WRITING GOALS: PERSEVERANCE
Well, it’s 2016 my [writer] friends. Can’t believe it, but it is. Twenty-fifteen was a hell of a [writing] year. I pumped out many new stories, got a few published, polished my psychological suspense novel, got that brutally but necessarily critiqued by an established author (17 page single-spaced evaluation letter that broke my heart and warmed my soul simultaneously), and revised and edited by YA punk rock novel (think twenty-first century Huck Finn meets Catcher in the Rye
