Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
by Anne R. Allen The brilliant columnist/philosopher/literary outlaw Michael Ventura famously said the most important talent required of a writer is the ability to work alone. In his 1993 Sun article, The Talent of the Room , Ventura wrote, “Writing is something you do alone in a room. It’s the most important thing to remember if you want to be a writer….Unless you […]
by Anne R. Allen I’ve had a number of people ask me that question in the last few months. There’s tons of info out here in Cyberia, but not everybody knows how to access it. And along with the good info, there’s plenty of bad—especially from predatory vanity publishers and bogus agents. So here are some […]
by Anne R. Allen When you’re a beginning writer, you’re likely to get bombarded with advice from all quarters—your family, your friends, your hairdresser, and of course that know-it-all guy at work. I don’t know why, but everybody who’s ever watched a few minutes of Oprah seems to think they know all about the […]
by Anne R. Allen Ever get the “OMG I’m-not-really-a-writer, why-am-I-kidding-myself” blues? Agent Nathan Bransford calls them the “Am-I-Crazies.” Most of us have been there. Rejections are pouring in. Your WIP is stalled. Your BFF has refused to listen to one more word about the unfairness of the publishing industry. After a sleepless, agonizing night, […]
by Anne R. Allen I’ve had a lot of great responses to last week’s post about dealing with less-than-helpful criticism from beta readers and critique groups. I think my favorite was a Steinbeck quote offered by freelance editor (and great blogger) Victoria Mixon: “I am never shy about it when a professional is doing […]
by Anne R. Allen Great writers tend to be depressives. From Plato, who was reported to suffer from “melancholic disease,” to recent suicide David Foster Wallace, writing and depression seem inexorably linked. In Nancy Andreasen’s famous study of the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, 80% of writers surveyed met the formal diagnostic criteria for depression. Until recently, nobody […]
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 […]
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. […]
by Anne R. Allen Hundreds of folks weighed in on the great literary vs. genre debate on Nathan Bransford’s blog last month (He says good writers need to read both. I agree.) A few days later, in a Writers Chronicle thread more writers debated the subject. But nothing much got resolved—I think because the […]
by Anne R. Allen This week, agent Nathan Bransford posed this question on his blog: “How Do You Deal with the ‘Am-I-Crazies’?” Those are the blues that can overwhelm the unpublished/underpublished novelist as we slog away, year after year, with nothing to show for our life’s work but a mini-Kilimanjaro of rejection slips. The […]
by Anne R. Allen I’m starting to pull my old columns from the INkwell Newswatch archives. I hope to post updated versions here for the next few months. This is from June 2007, in response to lots of questions I was getting about the necessity of attending conferences. Writers’ Conferences–the INside Scoop Writers’ Conference […]
Anne R Allen’s Blog With Ruth Harris