Writer and Editor as Creative Collaborators
My years in corporate communications taught me how to churn out copy that met deadlines and management messaging strategies. I built a career but lost my drive as a creative writer. Criticism came fast post-publication, but collaboration during the drafting process was absent. I was a solo operator and just kept stringing words together on...
THE LATEST DRAFT
REVISION ON MY MIND ON REVISION A DRAFT ON REVISION START HERE? THE LATEST DRAFT The hardest part about revision — this is what I woke up thinking today — the hardest part is to sleep on it. In the flush of the moment, two drafts in (or three, or seven, or ten) we might...
Transforming an Essay Collection into a Memoir
A year-and-a-half ago, I wrote a craft essay for Brevity about being a literary late-bloomer and finishing my first manuscript, an essay collection about my relationships, in my forties. In the piece, I said I was “done” with my book. Since then I’ve received encouraging feedback from agents and editors, but no solid bites. Over...
Review of Daniel Menaker’s My Mistake
Perhaps it’s the ideal pairing of human characteristic and profession: the anxiety-ridden who becomes editor. In My Mistake, former New Yorker fiction editor and Random House’s executive editor-in-chief Daniel Menaker explores the life that led him to become one of the country’s most reputable editors. The book’s title is a sly reference to the editor’s...
Becoming Your Own Best Critic
I worry when a person announces proudly that they’ve done a serious revision of something they wrote. Usually, that means they’ve proofread it with style sheet in hand, getting rid of, for example, a lack of agreement between a pronoun and its antecedent, like the lack of agreement I have in the first sentence with...
Ten (or Twenty) Points on Publishing, Plus a Few Playful Tidbits
When to begin the process of submitting one’s work and weathering the storms of submission depend on any given writer’s sensibility – and vulnerability. Publication is the natural desire of any writer (even Emily Dickinson, who claimed she wanted all her poems burned, wrote in riddles – and have you ever told a riddle to...
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