Anne R. Allen's Blog... with Ruth Harris
Writing about writing. Mostly.
Writing rules, rejection & why to forget them and have some holiday fun! Ruth Harris joined this blog five and a half years ago with a wildly popular blogpost on rejection. Because she worked as editor at a couple of Big Five Houses as well as being a New York Times bestselling author, she knows […]
Fear of success: If you never publish, you can keep believing Midnight in Paris is a documentary. by Anne R. Allen What is “Publishing Success?” Our culture attaches all sorts of romantic ideas to the business of writing. Beginning writers tend to conjure up nostalgic writer fantasies like Woody Allen’s Midnight in Paris reveries and ignore the boring […]
by Anne R. Allen Happy New Year! Congratulations if you won NaNoWriMo in November. And even if you didn’t. In fact, you deserve congrats if you didn’t join in the madness at all, and you’ve been writing slowly and steadily all year. No matter how long it took you, pat yourself on the back […]
Rejections. We all get them. In fact, there are only two things we can absolutely count on in the writing business: rejections and bad reviews. There’s no doubt rejections make us feel terrible. As Brian Doyle wrote in Portland Magazine and was quoted in Letters of Note, “To receive one is to instantly and all at once […]
by Anne R. Allen I’m not going to pretend that picking a title for your book is easy. In fact, it gets tougher all the time. We have to consider a lot more than how grabby a title looks on a bookstore shelf these days. In choosing a title now, we have to think […]
by Ruth Harris Every writer has (at least) one— The trunk book The published bestseller to which the rights have reverted but which is showing its age The half-finished book, the abandoned book, the book—published or not—that fizzled The manuscript languishing on a hard drive or gathering dust under your bed The aargh draft aka […]
by Melodie Campbell I was tickled when the big city (Toronto) library sought me out to do a workshop for aspiring writers on “Building Atmosphere”.“Sure!” I said. “Are you paying me?” I said. (Although not necessarily in that order.) They were, thankfully. And then the anxiety set in. (Cue the strident violins.) Was I the best […]
by Anne R. Allen We get lots of questions from new writers who have spent time in forums and online writers’ groups where they’ve been given advice by other newbies. Some of that advice is fine, but a whole lot is dead wrong. Unfortunately, the wrong stuff is usually delivered with the most certainty. […]
by Anne R. Allen A couple of weeks ago, when I wrote a post about writing as a hobby as opposed to a profession (hint: they’re both good choices), I got a couple of comments from new writers who were discouraged to read how much work and dedication it takes to become a professional writer. They […]
by Anne R. Allen Somerset Maugham famously said, “There are three rules for writing. Unfortunately, nobody knows what they are.” But pretty much everybody you meet in the publishing business will give you a list of them. (One is “never start a sentence with ‘there are’” —so watch yourself, Mr. Maugham.) Last year I […]
We’ve got a V.I.P. guest on the blog this week. She’s Melodie Campbell, bestselling author and the Executive Director of Crime Writers of Canada. She’s also hilarious. She contacted me last month because she liked one of my blogposts. (See, blogging is an effective networking tool!) She saw we share a love of funny books. […]
One of the biggest changes the e-reader has brought to the publishing industry doesn’t get much cyberink in the online book community. It’s the huge international market that’s opening up now that we don’t have to pay to ship physical books around the world. If, like me, you’ve ever experienced that terrible moment on vacation […]
Some pretty scary things have been happening in the online book world recently—stuff that’s been shocking to those of us who expect our fellow book-lovers to behave like civilized adults. I spend a lot of time telling new authors how to use social media to create a “platform,” but I probably don’t warn you enough about the […]
Anne R Allen’s Blog With Ruth Harris