Straight talk from the sisters about blood, sweat and ink
Not so long ago, there were a whole lot of good reasons to go to university and earn a degree. This is increasingly up for debate, what with rising tuition costs, spiraling and unforgiving student debt and increasing numbers of graduates who find themselves armed to the teeth with glossy educations, near perfect GPAs, tons …
Continue reading “Honoring Creativity: What My MFA Taught Me, And What It Left Out”
We live our lives at dizzying speed. Things pass us by so quickly we miss a whole lot, and we’ve gotten used to this accelerated pace, even come to crave it. I’ve been trying to keep up, but to tell you the truth I often feel uncomfortable, as though I’m trying to fit into a …
Continue reading “Trusting The Reader, Trusting The Writer: Hidden Luxuries Of Literary Fiction”
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 …
Continue reading “Honoring Creativity: Giving And Taking Critique”
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 …
Continue reading “Friday’s Inspiration: Love Poems To Read To Yourself Or Someone Else”
< p class=”MsoNormal”>Today the Sisters share a happy occasion, we cross the 100-post finish line. Since we only started the blog last summer, we didn’t expect to get here so fast. Or to have so much fun during the journey. Plus, we learned a lot, and shared what we learned at each step with our …
Continue reading “Writeonsisters.com Marks a Milestone: 100 posts!”
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 …
Continue reading “Honoring Creativity: Discerning The Angels And Demons Of Writing Advice”
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 …
Continue reading “Writing Sex”
After watching my writing pal enter the contest this month, I decided I wanted to know more about how successful some of the past winners had been at building careers. Also, I wanted to know what steps a writer could take to improve their odds of winning. As the historian of the Write On Sisters …
Continue reading “Another Look at Amazon’s 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 …
Continue reading “Writing Contests And Awards: Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award”
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 …
Continue reading “The Fiction Writer’s Taboos: Are There Any?”