Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
by Anne R. Allen Sometime during your query process, you’ll get a request for a partial or full manuscript (yay!) But this time it comes with a request for an exclusive read (not so yay.) It happened to me about a year ago. I really wanted to work with the agent, but it would […]
by Anne R. Allen Finding a beta reader or critique group is essential to any writer’s development. We can’t write in a vacuum. Nobody ever learned to be a good writer holed up in an attic with no one to review his work but the cat. (Cats can be so cruel.) Rachelle Gardner ran […]
by Anne R. Allen I’ve been looking over some of my much-rejected early novels recently and discovered they have something in common with a lot of other unpublished fiction: way too much dialogue. They’re too LOUD. The characters need to shut up already and get on with the story. And yet, in all the […]
by Anne R. Allen In his painfully funny 2006 book, Famous Writing School, a Novel, Stephen Carter’s writing teacher-protagonist advises his students to seek character names in the obituaries. But although Carter’s bumbling protagonist offers mostly dubious advice, that tip is a keeper. Obits are full of great names. I keep a list in a […]
by Anne R. Allen I know this is a blog on writing, but I’m going to talk this week about Marxism: Groucho Marxism. The Groucho Marxist manifesto is, to paraphrase the great Julius Henry Marx himself— “I DO NOT CARE TO READ A BOOK WRITTEN BY A PERSON WHO WOULD ACCEPT ME AS A […]
by Anne R. Allen You know how everybody keeps telling you to keep sending out those queries in spite of all the rejection? How it pays to persevere? And the only way to fail is to give up trying? Now I have proof they’re right. You’re never too old for success. My nearly 89-year-old […]
by Anne R. Allen First, completely off topic here, I’d like to say—after stumbling out of bed an hour early and changing the time on all 30 of my clocks, electronic devices and watches—that Daylight Savings Time is WAY more trouble than it used to be, because we all own so many time pieces. […]
by Anne R. Allen Beginning writers love prologues. My first novel had one. I’ll bet yours does too. And why not? Prologues are the quickest way to set the scene and establish the mood and tone of your novel. They allow us to snuggle into a fictional world and get comfy before the action […]
by Anne R. Allen This has been hard to keep under my cyberhat all week, but Nathan asked that winners keep the info off the internets until the big day. Which is TODAY. So here it is: I’m one of the three winners of Nathan’s guest blogger contest. You can read my post on […]
by Anne R. Allen Today agents Janet Reid and Colleen Lindsay have both blogged complaints about writers including extraneous publishing credits in their queries, so here are some guidelines: Contests: Ms. Reid says agents do NOT want to hear about your 3rd place or hon. mention “wins”. It’s first place or nothing. She […]
I just heard one of my YA stories, The Big Ones will be included in the Literary Lab’s new anthology, Genre Wars. Nice, since it looks as if the competition was stiff. It’s only my second venture into the genre, and short stories are a stretch for me. My muse likes big, juicy novel-sized plots. […]
How Long Should A Novel Be? by Anne R. Allen A lot of agents have been complaining about queries with inappropriate word counts recently. If you’re getting a lot of form rejections, this may be why. Today Fineprint agent Colleen Lindsay has posted an update of contemporary word count rules on her great blog, THE […]
There’s been some discussion on other blogs about some of my statements about how publishers label things. Please know I’m just the messenger—I don’t condone those one-size-fits-all categories any more than other writers. Catherine Ryan Hyde, author of Pay it Forward weighed in by directing me to a blogpost in her blog archives about the […]
Anne R Allen’s Blog With Ruth Harris