Author: Jennifer Skutelsky

Honoring Creativity: Giving And Taking Critique

As writers, we love (and hate) feedback. However long it takes us to produce a story or a book, in the end, when we feel ready, we can’t wait to surrender it to someone who’ll point out its flaws and merits. But that in a sense is an editor’s job. The job of a beta …
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Friday’s Inspiration: Love Poems To Read To Yourself Or Someone Else

I came to writing through poetry, and as a young writer, wrote dozens of love sonnets. Poetry felt right because to me it captured the essence of experience, and it was through poetry that I developed my love of words and language. There’s powerful contemporary poetry about, but I chose to go back in time …
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Honoring Creativity: Discerning The Angels And Demons Of Writing Advice

I’ve spent the past five years exploring the publishing industry from different angles: as an MFA student, as an associate literary agent, as an editor. I’ve been a writer for a lot longer than that, and my first book, Breathing through Buttonholes, was published in 2003. But the writer I was back then looks nothing like …
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Writing Sex

For a few heart-stopping moments, I considered leaving this post blank because writing sex is difficult. Seasoned writers I know avoid it like the plague. I thought maybe I’d toss in a few photos instead: one of Bigfoot and/or the Yeti; possibly a couple of anatomical drawings from a medical textbook; a quote or two …
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Writing Contests And Awards: Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award

A while ago I wrote about today’s saturated book market and the challenges writers face: getting work noticed and read; earning a living; building a platform so our work can get noticed and read and we can earn a living. It’s kind of a circuitous dance of codependent steps that does this sad shuffle or …
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The Fiction Writer’s Taboos: Are There Any?

Departing for a while from my posts on Cross Training for Writers, I set out to explore the barriers fiction writers must navigate if we’re to tell stories other than our own. So this is less a post about finding solutions than it is about raising questions, the answers to which will be different for …
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Cross Training For Writers: Think Like A Sculptor

Sculpture tells a story, the same way a book does. The difference lies in the medium, but the essence of any art form rests in connection and communication. As children, we learned to associate shapes with their function, even before we identified them with words. We didn’t know how to write VROOM VROOM, but we …
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Cross Training For Writers: Think Like A Ballerina

Ballet remains the one career in which a girl gets to bring a crowd to its feet while wearing a tiara and tutu. Ballet’s history; its demanding, often petulant nature; its narratives, romance, melodrama and mystery enthrall audiences from Russia and China to Cuba and South Africa. Giselle and Swan Lake have a fairy tale …
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Cross Training For Writers: Think Like A Film Maker

As one year tips into the next, a lot of blogs look back as well as forward. I read an interesting post on Kristen Lamb’s blog that forecasts trends in the publishing industry, and she’s pretty spot on if you ask me. Artists in different disciplines will begin to work more collaboratively as we all …
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