O P E N I N G & C LO S I N G

KE Y N OT E SP EA KERS
WRITER’S DIGEST CHUCK WENDIG
ANNUAL Chuck Wendig is the New
CONFERENCE York Times bestselling author
of Wanderers, The Book of
Accidents, Wayward, and over
two dozen other books for adults
and young adults. Wendig’s latest
writing book, Gentle Writing
Advice, is “a book of writing
advice that accounts for all of
the messy, perverse, practical,
and inexplicable parts of being
a human who writes.” His next
novel, Black River Orchard, is due
out this September.

JASON MOTT
New York Times and USA Today
bestselling author Jason Mott
is the author of three novels:
The Returned, The Wonder of
All Things, and The Crossing.
Jason’s fourth novel, Hell of
a Book, was released in the
summer of 2021, and received
the 2021 National Book Award.
He has a BFA in Fiction and an
MFA in Poetry and his poetry
and fiction have appeared in
various literary journals.
AUGUST 17–20, 2023

New York Hilton Midtown

NEW YORK, NY REGISTER NOW

GET MORE DETAILS AT

WRITERSDIGESTCONFERENCE.COM
FE AT UR E S

40
Creating Double the Fun
Writing a manuscript with dual points of

STRUCTURE view can be a challenge, but it can also be

rewarding for both you and readers if it
serves the story. Here’s how.
BY BRIAN D. KENNEDY

28 44
This Changes Everything
Five steps to approach writing your story’s The Pocket Guide to Pantsing
inciting incident. How to write a novel without an outline
BY RAN WALKER
(with confidence).
BY MICHAEL LA RONN

32 48
Structure at the Chapter
Level The Literature of Comic
Keep ’em reading with irresistible Books
big bang-cliff hangs. Trace the rise of comic books from
BY JANE K. CLELAND
“disposable entertainment for children” to
graphic novels telling the most important

36 stories of our time.

BY DON VAUGHAN

Building the Essential

Linkages
Ten ways to craft the connective tissue your
story needs.
ON THE COVER
COVER HEADSHOT © JP CALUBAQUIB IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES: SHUOSHU

BY ELIZABETH SIMS
4 4 Writing Without an Outline
6 3 Track Your Novel’s Structure
4 0 How to Write a Dual POV Novel
2 8 5 Steps to a Standout Inciting Incident
3 6 10 Ways to Craft Essential Story Links
4 8 Tracing the Rise of Comics and Graphic
Novels
3 2 Structuring Chapters for Big-Bang
Cliffhangers
5 2 The 17th Annual WD Poetry Awards
Winner Purvi Shah
5 4 The WD Interview: Luis Alberto Urrea

2 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

 J ULY/AUGUS T | VOLU ME 103 | NO. 4

IN K W EL L

8 THE RIGHT VS. LEFT BRAIN DILEMMA

52 BY C. HOPE CLARK

10 PLUS: Worth a Thousand Words • The Hemingway

Home & Museum • Poetic Asides • Write It Out
Praising Connection in Poetry,
Family, and Life CO L U MN S

Purvi Shah, winner of the 17th Annual Writer’s

18 INDIELAB: Write a Short Book Fast
Digest Poetry Awards, shares the story behind BY NINA AMIR
her winning poem, “Helix of the gift, lineage
song.” 21 INDIE AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT: Sacha Black,
BY ROBERT LEE BREWER
Ruby Roe
BY AMY JONES

2 2 WD 101: The Three-Act Structure

BY GABRIELA PEREIRA

2 4 WRITERS ON WRITING: Julia Bartz

2 5 MEET THE AGENT: Cody Caetano •

CookeMcDermid Literary Management
BY KARA GEBHART UHL

2 6 BREAKING IN: Debut Author Spotlight

BY MORIAH RICHARD

6 0 YOUR STORY: Captive Audience #121

6 8 AGENT SPOTLIGHT: Ernie Chiara • Fuse Literary

BY KRISTY STEVENSON

7 0 ON NONFICTION: All Human, All the Time

54
THE WD INTERVIEW:
BY ALISON HILL

7 2 PUBLISHING INSIGHTS: 4 Shelter Magazines

BY ROBERT LEE BREWER
Luis Alberto Urrea
74 LEVEL UP YOUR WRITING (LIFE): Overcome
The bestselling novelist shares the forgotten the Pantser vs. Plotter Dichotomy—And Improve
“fated” true story behind his new novel and Your Prose
why he encourages writers to find joy in what BY SHARON SHORT
they do.
BY AMY JONES
76 BUILDING BETTER WORLDS: Clothing
BY MORIAH RICHARD

NE XT D R AFT 7 8 FOR ALL AGES: From Magic to Meet-Cutes

BY LIVIA BLACKBURNE
6 3 CHARTING YOUR NOVEL’S STRUCTURE IN A
SPREADSHEET 8 0 FRONTLIST/BACKLIST: Family Ties
BY AIGNER LOREN WILSON BY AMY JONES

PLUS: 4 Learn by Example 5 Editor’s Letter 6 Contributors 8 8 Creative Quill

Writer’s Digest (USPS 459-930) (ISSN 0043-9525) Canadian Agreement No. 40025316 is published bimonthly, with issues in January/February, March/April, May/June, July/August, September/October, and November/
December by the Home Group of Active Interest Media HoldCo, Inc. The known office of publication is located at 2143 Grand Avenue, Des Moines, Iowa 50312. Periodicals Postage paid at Des Moines, Iowa, and
additional mailing offices. POSTMASTER: Send all address changes to Writer’s Digest, P.O. Box 37274, Boone, IA 50037-0274. SUBSCRIPTIONS: For subscription questions or address changes, call 800-333-0133
(U.S. only) or email us at subscriptions@aimmedia.com. US subscription rate $24.96, Canadian subscription rate $34.96 USD.

WritersDigest.com I 3
LEARNBYEX AMPLE
Figurative Language
COMPILED BY JESSICA STRAWSER

Foreshadowing Character Conflict

Less’s latest novel
has been living
with his publisher
for over a month,
as any mod-
ern couple lives
together before
a marriage, but
surely his publisher will pop the
question any day now. There will be
champagne; there will be money.
—Less, Andrew Sean Greer
(humorous/satire fiction)
The law might not recognize it, but
fifteen’s a girl and sixteen a woman,
and you get no map from one land
to the next. They air-drop you in,
booting a bag of Kissing Potion lip
gloss and off-the-shoulder blouses
after you. As you’re plummeting,
trying to release your parachute and
grab for that bag at the same time,
they holler out you’re pretty, like
they’re giving you some sort of gift,
some vital key, but really, it’s meant
to distract you from yanking your
cord. Girls who land broken are
easy prey.
—The Quarry Girls,
Jess Lourey (thriller)
Shattered energy seemed to pulse
from him like sonar. Tight blips
of loneliness. Tallie translated the
echolocation easily. She was lone-
some and blipping, too.
—This Close to Okay,
Leesa Cross-Smith
(contemporary fiction)
She, like all mothers, constantly
casts out her thoughts, like fishing
lines, towards her children, remind-
ing herself of where
they are, what they
are doing, how they
fare.
—Hamnet,
Maggie O’Farrell
(historical fiction)
Tension
A town always looked different
once you’d returned, like a house
where all the furniture had shifted
three inches. You wouldn’t mistake
it for a stranger’s house but you’d
keep banging your shins on the
table corners.
—The Vanishing Half, Brit Bennett
(literary fiction)
He’d learned early on—fights in a
marriage were like seesaws. You
needed to balance blame carefully.
You pile too much blame on one
person, let them thunk down to the
ground, they’re liable to stand and
walk away, send you flying down on
your ass.
—Miracle Creek, Angie Kim (suspense)
About the war between me
and technology: it appears that
technology is rolling over me like
a blitzkrieg. I’m a victim of all its
barbarisms. I still can’t type, which
makes my e-mails seem composed
by a highlands baboon.
—A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections
on a Writing Life, Pat Conroy
(essay, “On the Future of Books”)
With six massive legs
reaching into the
night sky, the water
tower is like an enor-
mous metal insect
preparing to stomp the
high school.
—Don’t Get Caught,
Kurt Dinan (young adult)

Jessica Strawser (JessicaStrawser.com) is editor-at-large for WD and the author of five novels, most recently the People magazine pick The
Next Thing You Know. Her sixth novel, The Last Caretaker, is forthcoming in November from Lake Union.

WHAT WOULD YOU LIKE TO LEARN BY EXAMPLE? We want to hear from you! Email your ideas for future topics to cover here to
wdsubmissions@aimmedia.com with “Learn by Example” in the subject line. You might see yours in a future issue of WD.

4 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

 EDITOR’SLETTER
AN ACTIVE INTEREST MEDIA PUBLICATION

EDITOR-IN-CHIEF
Amy Jones

SENIOR EDITOR
Bella Figura
Robert Lee Brewer As I write this, it’s just a matter of weeks
MANAGING EDITOR
before I’ll be heading back to my favorite city,
Moriah Richard Florence. A quick look at any photo of the
EDITORS
skyline illustrates the beauty of the Tuscan
Sadie Dean capital, crowned by the breathtaking terra
Michael Woodson
cotta duomo of Santa Maria del Fiore. It was
ART DIRECTOR built to impress and still does, nearly 600 years
Wendy Dunning
later. Filippo Brunelleschi’s design—which
EDITORS-AT-LARGE solved a century-long architectural problem
Tyler Moss
Jessica Strawser
and features both an internal and external
dome formed of herringbone-patterned bricks
CONTRIBUTING EDITORS
Jane K. Cleland, Bob Eckstein, and eight marble ribs—was built to last, surviving world wars and massive
Jane Friedman, Sharon Short, floods. The interconnectedness of the structure famously supports itself and
Elizabeth Sims, Jeff Somers,
Kristy Stevenson, Kara Gebhart Uhl,
subsequently has withstood the test of time.
Ryan G. Van Cleave, Don Vaughan, So, when I think about structure, this issue’s theme, it’s the image of the
Ran Walker
Duomo that comes to mind. The articles here consider structure in a multi-
MARKETING DESIGNER tude of ways, and you might see a topic briefly mentioned in one article, then
Samantha Weyer
more fully addressed in another. That’s because when structuring one’s writ-
COMPETITIONS MANAGER ing, just as with a physical building, interconnectivity is key to effectiveness.
Tara Johnson
Ran Walker breaks down how to time your inciting incident to have the
VP GENERAL MANAGER strongest impact on readers. Then, Jane Cleland takes a deep dive into how to
Taylor Sferra
write chapters so each one ends on a cliffhanger and the next one begins with
a big bang, in an effort to keep readers glued to the page. Going even deeper,
WRITER’S DIGEST
Elizabeth Sims explains 10 ways to craft the essential components that tie
EDITORIAL OFFICES
your book together, things like section breaks, soliloquies, and flashbacks.
4665 Malsbary Road
Blue Ash, Ohio 45242 You’ll also find articles on the best ways (and reasons why) to craft a dual-
writers.digest@aimmedia.com POV novel; how to write a novel without an outline, but still feel confident
that you’ll end up with a structure that works for the story; and because they
BACK ISSUES literally have boxes containing the content on every page, a look at how comic
Digital back issues are available for books and graphic novels have become one of the most popular storytelling
purchase at WritersDigestShop.com.
methods of our time.
This issue’s WD Interview spotlights the novelist and poet Luis Alberto
CUSTOMER SERVICE Urrea. It was fascinating to learn about the incredible true story behind his
2143 Grand Ave., Des Moines, Iowa, newest novel, Good Night, Irene, inspired by his mother’s World War II ser-
50312 subscriptions@aimmedia.com
or call: (800) 333-0133 vice. But more than that, what struck me about talking with Luis was his joy
for the act of putting words on the page. If you’re struggling with your writing
PRIVACY STATEMENT
right now, this interview might help you find your spark again.
Active Interest Media HoldCo, Inc. is
Finally, the team at WD offers our sincere congratulations to Purvi Shah,
committed to protecting your privacy. For grand-prize winner of the 17th Annual Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards for her
a full copy of our privacy statement, go to
poem “Helix of the gift, lineage song.”
aimmedia.com/privacy-policy.
Whether your book follows a classic three-act structure or is as inventive
PHOTO © JASON HALE PHOTOGRAPHY

COPYRIGHT: 2023 by Active Interest

Media HoldCo, Inc., Des Moines, Iowa.
as Brunelleschi’s brilliant dome, I hope this issue helps solve whatever struc-
This publication may not be reproduced, tural challenges your writing presents.
either in whole or part, in any form without
written permission from the publisher.
Yours in writing,
Printed in the USA

WRITER’S DIGEST MAGAZINE IS A REGISTERED

TRADEMARK OF ACTIVE INTEREST MEDIA.

WritersDigest.com I 5
C ON TR IB UT O R S

JULIA BARTZ is the New York Times-bestselling

author of The Writing Retreat, a practicing therapist,
and a creative coach. Her fiction has appeared in South
Dakota Review, InDigest Magazine, and more. Julia lives
in Brooklyn, NY. Connect with her on social media
@JuliaBartz.

PRESIDENT HOME GROUP

Peter H. Miller

PRESIDENT MARINE GROUP

Gary DeSanctis

CTO
New York Times-bestselling author LIVIA
Brian Van Heuverswyn
BLACKBURNE wrote her first novel while research-
ing the neuroscience of reading at the Massachusetts CFO
Institute of Technology. Since then, she’s switched to full- Stephen Pompeo
time writing, which also involves getting into people’s
heads but without the help of a 3 Tesla MRI scanner. Her VP EVENTS
books include Midnight Thief (an Indies Introduce New Julie Zub

BARTZ HEADSHOT © SAVANNAH LAUREN BLACKBURNE HEADSHOT © A POCKET OF TIME PHOTOGRAPHY KENNEDY HEADSHOT © SYLVIE ROSOKOFF CLARK HEADSHOT © GARY W CLARK, SR.
Voices selection), Feather and Flame, and Clementine
and Danny Save the World (And Each Other), as well as ADVERTISING SALES DIRECTOR
Heather Glynn Gniazdowski
the picture book I Dream of Popo, which received three
starred reviews and was on numerous Best of Year lists.
DIRECTOR OF PRODUCTION
She is Chinese American and lives in southern California Phil Graham
with her husband and daughter.
AIM MARKETING SERVICES

BRIAN D. KENNEDY (BrianDKennedyBooks.com) Amanda Phillips

is a young adult author who likes giving queer characters

DIRECTOR OF RETAIL SALES
the happy rom-coms they deserve. His debut novel, A
Susan A. Rose
Little Bit Country (Balzer + Bray, 2022), was inspired by
his love of country music and Dolly Parton. He’s written for CIRCULATION DIRECTOR
Huff Post and The Gay & Lesbian Review, and had his book Paige Nordmeyer
featured in Buzzfeed, Newsweek, and Parade.com. When
not writing, Brian can be found working at an LGBTQ+ HR DIRECTOR
nonprofit, catching a Broadway show, and finding new ways Scott Roeder
to work Dolly Parton into every conversation. Born and
CHAIRMAN
raised in Minnesota, he now lives in New York City with his
Andrew W. Clurman
husband and their miniature Schnauzer.
CHAIRMAN EMERITUS
C. HOPE CLARK (CHopeClark.com) has taught Efrem Zimbalist III
at many writing conferences covering topics from the
writing business to how to master mystery. She’s presented
webinars for WDU, writes for WritersDigest.com, and ADVERTISING
freelances for several publications. Hope is also the
ADVERTISING SALES
founder of FundsforWriters.com, covering funding
REPRESENTATIVE
sources for writers via a website and newsletter reaching
Pam Stine (540) 773-8052
25,000 readers. The site has appeared on WD’s 101 Best
pstine@aimmedia.com
Websites for Writers list for more than 20 years. A South
Carolina native, Hope also has authored 17 mysteries, ADVERTISING SALES COORDINATOR
won the Killer Nashville Silver Falchion Award twice, Julie Dillon (715) 257-6028
and sold over 100,000 copies, her largest series being The fax: (715) 997-8883
Edisto Island Mysteries. jdillon@aimmedia.com

6 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

 EARLY-BIRD
DEADLINE:
AUG. 15, 2023

   
11 TH ANNUAL
DEADLINE:
SEPT. 15, 2023

 
HONORING THE BEST SELF-PUBLISHED E-BOOKS
You’ve chosen the independent route and self-published your e-book, now take
the next step and be recognized for your great work. Submit your self-published
e-book(s) in the Writer’s Digest 11th Annual Self-Published E-book Awards for a
chance to win $5,000 in cash, a featured interview in Writer’s Digest magazine, and
a paid trip to the ever-popular Writer’s Digest Annual Conference in New York City.

CATEGORIES
Contemporary Fiction • Memoir • Fantasy
Mystery/Thriller • Romance • Nonfiction
Science Fiction • Young Adult

Learn more at WritersDigest.com/wdebook

The Right vs. Left Brain Dilemma
Improve your writing by giving your brain a workout.
BY C. HOPE CLARK
M
ost of us have lived with
the belief that we lean
left brain or right brain
in all capacities—from our hobbies
to career to the movies we love. You
may have been told that this balance
of one side versus the other is a natu-
ral occurrence. From the genres we
write to the authors we love to read,
we try to give credit to DNA for our
preferences, believing how we were
created dictates our leanings when
actually that is far from the case.
In reality, the brain juggles tasks
and multitasks, and there isn’t a
clearly defined spot for many tasks
we do. For instance, it takes both
right and left hemispheres of the
brain’s cerebellum to write. Abilities,
as well as troubles in performing
activities, have more to do with how
well the parts of the brain work in
tandem using the neurons that con-
nect them rather than how they act
independently.
WHAT DOES LEFT VS.
RIGHT MEAN?
These hemispheres hold primary
duties while still retaining the ability
8 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
to juggle. That much is true. Neurons
in your brain light up with activity,
often multiple spots at once, which
tells scientists that areas of the brain
have stronger connections to specific
tasks than others.
LEFT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
• Logic
• Reasoning
• Calculations
• Criticism
• Analytics
• Language skills
• Speaking
• Understanding
• Coordination
• Attention to detail
Left-brain tasks are common
sense-oriented, like crossword
puzzles and web coding. These are
functions often absolute in design.
Also, changing your routine takes
left-brain effort since you compare
the old method to the new, with
consideration of the pros and cons
of making such adjustments and the
ramifications of choosing wrong.
Developmentally, the left brain
matures somewhat after the right
side, meaning the left side is more
conducive to nature and outside
influence.
RIGHT BRAIN FUNCTIONS
• Emotion
• Intuition
• Creativity
• Imagination
• Music
• Art
• Visual perception
• Facial recognition
• Spatial recognition
• Big-picture analysis
• Quality versus quantity
The right brain lends itself to over-
all consideration rather than falling
into the minutiae of detail. People
with damaged right hemispheres
struggle with focus, solving problems,
organizing, understanding social
cues, or telling jokes.
WRITING TAKES A BALANCE
OF BOTH SIDES
Regardless of the genre, style, or
voice of your writing, however, and
in spite of all the mythical tests across
the internet, you draw upon both
sides of your mind. When someone
is damaged on one side, it isn’t the
fact that the damaged location loses
the ability to do a task, but more of
a compromise in how the two sides
work together. The undamaged part
takes up more responsibility, just not
always in full capacity. The unity of
left and right dictate the quality of
your work, not the fact you can write
something as in-depth as A Game
of Thrones or as light as a short cozy
haiku.
LEFT BRAIN WRITING SKILLS
• Choosing words
• Understanding phrases
• Constructing sentences
• Calculating plot
RIGHT BRAIN WRITING SKILLS
• Comparisons
• Estimations
• Instinctive reasoning
• Impulsiveness
• Imagination of story
How to Use the Left Side More
A lot of the exercises that mental
health professionals tell us to do to
combat Alzheimer’s and mental acu-
ity in general are the same exercises
that activate your left brain.
READ MORE OFTEN AND MORE
DIVERSELY. Reading, particularly
reading widely, is a left-brain mas-
sage. Strong writers are voracious
readers. The more understanding,
reasoning, and analysis you devote to
a read, the more you draw upon your
left lobe.
WRITE MORE. Writing harder,
deeper, and in a different point of
view or unfamiliar genre taxes you,
therefore, exercising this side. The
more often you write, the more you
attempt to improve your writing,
the more you free up this side to
work more efficiently for you. Write
strategically with purpose and estab-
lish a routine.
PLOT DIFFERENTLY. We label our-
selves as pantsers or plotters, blaming
the choice on inherent left-brain and
right-brain tendencies. We either love
to jump into a story and create, or we
prefer to categorize and break down
the book’s structure before fleshing
it out.
Solving new problems is very
much a left-brain workout. If you typ-
ically outline your stories in advance,
change and leap into the storytelling
first, whether nonfiction or fiction,
book-length or short story, journal-
ism or fairy tale. On the other hand,
if you write by the seat of your pants,
outline the project from beginning
to end instead. Both shifts make you
court left brain critical skills, because
you must take a unique course to
complete the task.
The pantser is forced to solve
the story ahead of time and outline
high points. The plotter thrusts a
protagonist into a dilemma without
knowing how they will come out on
the other side. Amazingly, this hard
thinking opens thought processes to
fresh options.
WRITE TO PROMPTS. Anyone
writing a column eventually reaches a
point where they are taxed to find yet
another idea. Over the years, how-
ever, columnists learn to improvise
and think more quickly to meet dead-
lines. If you aren’t a columnist, take a
month to write to a daily prompt and
watch how your gears learn to lubri-
cate more freely.
EXPAND VOCABULARY. Word
choice is left-side behavior. Increasing
your vocabulary exercises that side.
Use apps to learn a new word a day.
Generate sentences with them. Be
more conscious in using a thesaurus.
Even 10 minutes of
emptying the mind
allows any and all
possibilities to ooze
in. Nothing is judged
and everything has
potential.
KEEP A PHRASE JOURNAL. When
reading, we stumble across a sentence
of prose or piece of dialogue we wish
we’d written, and we reread it and
take it to heart. There’s nothing pla-
giaristic about keeping a notebook of
these phrases. Such a journal makes
for excellent reading before you delve
into a project, reminding your gray
matter of the beauty available outside
of your experiences.
HOW TO USE THE RIGHT
SIDE MORE
A bit opposite than the exercises used
for altering your left-brain habits,
right-brain workouts involve more of
a letting go.
ENJOY THE ARTS. Let’s say you’re
watching a play, taking in the enter-
tainment, waiting for the unexpected
twist or laughter moments. That’s
right-brain titillation. You are collect-
ing material and don’t even know it.
The nuances, humor, and pregnant
pauses that make dialogue zing get
tucked away for later.
Same goes for visual arts or
music. They are a release, allow-
ing you to just feel. That, too, tucks
away not just what you heard or saw,
but also how you felt, harboring it
for future reference while lowering
your left-brain tendency to analyze.
We don’t think about why we like
the movie, the song, or the graphic
design on the book cover, but instead
WritersDigest.com I 9
we let it happen to us. All too often
we attempt to force feed our writ-
ing, when letting loose is more the
answer.
MEDITATE. Emptying your mind
lowers obstacles and frees creative
thought. We live in a world where
we push ourselves to accomplish
so much each day, almost per hour,
including writing. Stopping that
momentum periodically is medici-
nal and crumbles walls you may not
even know you had. Even 10 min-
utes of emptying the mind allows
any and all possibilities to ooze in.
Nothing is judged and everything
has potential.
To be honest, meditation is a
form of synchronization, too. As you
settle into this reflection, both sides
Worth a Thousand Words
Bob Eckstein is a New Yorker cartoonist, NY Times–bestselling author, and adjunct professor
at NYU. His new book is The Complete Book of Cat Names (That Your Cat Won’t Answer
to, Anyway).
10 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
of your brain connect more. You not
only free up creativity, but you also
improve cognitive skills and intellec-
tual function.
SOCIALIZE. Writers can easily lock
themselves away with their usual
words, and those words can become
stale. A bit of socialization through
coffee at a café, a concert, or backyard
cookout forces the mind to absorb
stimuli and activate senses you don’t
use seated at the computer.
LAUGH. Some cultures believe
in laughing to alter moods when
stuck in a mindset, which could also
be called writer’s block. In a short
video on social media not long ago,
a teacher said to laugh each time she
held up a finger. One finger was one
HA. Two fingers were HAHA. By the
10th finger, the student was genuinely
laughing. This frees the right brain,
maybe long enough to assist you in
redefining the scene you’re writing.
One might call these experiences
mindless when they are quite the
opposite. They are embraced by the
right brain, providing it healthy
exercise.
WHY BOTHER CHANGING?
You wish to change because going
against the current strengthens you,
giving depth to your talent, making
you more aware and more proactive
in the mental calisthenics that make
you stronger.
Maybe your story feels dull,
unemotional, too structured, or pre-
dictable. The right brain hasn’t been
allowed to play to full potential. It
might be time for a splash of yoga,
meditation, or a walk through the
park to declutter a messy piece of
writing. Listen to music or pull out
your sketch pad. Do something that
is more feeling and instinct rather
than planned or actively pursued.
Or maybe you have the ideas but
cannot mesh them into a tale. Then
work on developing your left brain
through focused word exercises or
change of writing routine.
Writing is meant to have its
struggles. Those hurdles are where we
define who we are and what we can
become, but that doesn’t mean we
can’t recognize where the struggles
lie and do something about them.
Even when we think we were just
born that way.
C. Hope Clark is author of three award-
winning mystery series, the most popular
being The Edisto Island Mysteries. She is
also founder of FundsforWriters.com, a
career resource for writers with a newsletter
reaching 25,000 readers.
 E A RLY-B I RD
D EA DL I NE

SEPT. 1, 2023

Personal
Essay Awards
CALL FOR SUBMISSIONS

You could win $2,500, a feature about you in an issue of Writer’s Digest, and a
trip to the 2024 Writer’s Digest Annual Writing Conference. Enter the Personal
Essay Awards and send us your best creative nonfiction essays of 2,000
words or fewer.

Make it personal. Make it brilliant.

And most of all—make it memorable!

WRITERSDIGEST.COM/PEA
The Hemingway Home & Museum
Literary Tourism, Part 1
BY ZACHARY PETIT
T
o the seasoned literary tour-
ist*, the Ernest Hemingway
Home & Museum might
seem too obvious a choice to launch
a series about the best writer homes,
haunts, and hubs around the world.
After all, if you were to ask a film buff
for their highest recommendation
for a weekend watch, they’d prob-
ably be tempted to offer up some-
thing obscure, something truly off the
beaten path … but ultimately, they’d
*One with inherent nerd-like proclivities to festoon any travel itinerary with detours to anything and everything writing-related
within an ultimately forgiving proximity.
12 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
likely tell you to watch The Godfather.
And rightly so.
When it comes to the Godfather of
American letters, you’ve gotta hand
it to Papa. Because in the end, story
trumps all—and his incredible house
in Key West, Fla., is where a key part
of his literary legacy, and his legend
as we know it today, was truly forged.
When Hemingway came to the
island in April 1928 for the first time,
he wasn’t yet the larger-than-life
novelist. Rather, he was a journal-
ist and war correspondent who had
just published The Sun Also Rises—
and, well, he didn’t really have a great
fortune under his belt (something
not wholly unfamiliar to many the
working journalist). But with his
wife Pauline, what he did have was
an Uncle Gus—and Uncle Gus had
given the couple a brand-new Ford
Roadster. Problem was, it wasn’t
IMAGES © ROB O’NEAL
ready yet, so Hemingway and his
wife hunkered down in a Key West
apartment for a few weeks. (Where
Hemingway sat down and banged out
A Farewell to Arms, as one does.)
Away from his typewriter, he
palled up with hardware store owner
Charles Thompson, who introduced
him to big-game fishing. Coupled
with the quaintness of the commu-
nity, the Hemingways became smit-
ten with the town—and in 1931,
Uncle Gus bought a dilapidated
80-year-old house for $8,000 in
back taxes, and gave it to them, as
one does.
Today, the fruits of their restora-
tion work dazzle. You could remove
Hemingway from the equation, and
you’d still be left with a stunning
piece of architecture. The founda-
tion of the Spanish Colonial home
was built from the very fabric of the
island, the native limestone beneath
it. Floor-to-ceiling windows connect
the property to the verdant city out-
side. Original wrought-iron frames
the all-encompassing balconies.
And stepping inside, you are
transported to the world of the
Hemingways in the ’30s.
“I always joke around that Spain
and Paris were two of Pauline’s
favorite places to shop,” says
Andrew Morawski, director of the
Hemingway Home & Museum. “And
unfortunately, all we have is Walmart
and Target nowadays.”
Visitors of the recreated home take
in Spanish chandeliers. Hemingway’s
bed, crowned with a headboard made
from a gate at a Spanish monas-
tery. The Spanish birthing chair that
Hemingway would lug out to the
fishing docks for the benefit of his
back, filled with 200-some pieces of
shrapnel from World War I. All told,
Morawski estimates that 70 percent
of the furniture is original.
As one continues through the
property, Hemingway’s trophy
mounts look on, recalling the couple’s
first trip to Africa … which Morawski
says was funded by (guess who!)
Uncle Gus, leaving a reverberating
impact on literature via works like
Green Hills of Africa and “The Snows
of Kilimanjaro”—which were indeed
written in part or wholly here.
And that brings us to Hemingway’s
studio. Located in a loft above the
pool house (formerly a carriage
house), Hemingway used to traverse
over from a catwalk that Morawski
says was destroyed by a hurricane
in 1948. Inside, there’s an ethereal
vibe—not least of which is centered
around the home’s most-prized item:
Hemingway’s portable Royal type-
writer, an object ubiquitous to the
property and the author’s many jour-
neys around the world, cementing and
supplementing his handwritten prose.
Of every object in the home, “No
question, that is the most remark-
able,” Morawski says.
In his time on the island,
Hemingway finished or worked on
To Have and Have Not. Death in the
Afternoon. Winner Take Nothing.
Half of For Whom the Bell Tolls.
“He started or completed 70 per-
cent of his life’s work in that writ-
ing studio,” Morawski says. “That’s
where the magic happened for Ernest
Hemingway down here in Key West,
besides on the water.”
While Hemingway diligently
worked in the early mornings,
the staff at the Hemingway Home
recently came up with a genius idea
for writers during the evenings. After
the museum closes for the day, a
writer and one guest can book the
home’s Evening Writing Experience,
which gets them a guided tour, free
run of the grounds, and the opportu-
nity to work in Hemingway’s studio.
Regardless of whether or not Papa’s
talent finds its way into their work,
the studio is a meditative space that
Morawski says participants have
dubbed, most often, spiritual.
Adjacent to the studio, one
beautiful space Hemingway ini-
tially found the antithesis of spiri-
tual is the pool itself. As the story
goes, Pauline wanted a pool—which
Hemingway thought absurd, given
that the house was nearly waterfront
property, with the Gulf of Mexico
mere blocks away. (“He would
tell Pauline, ‘You have the biggest
WritersDigest.com I 13

saltwater pool right over there,’”
Morawski says.)
Complicating matters, there was
a reason literally no other home on
Key West had a pool: In 1938, the
island had no fresh running water. So,
to attain the necessary water supply
for the pool—all 80,784(!) gallons of
it—workers had to drill down to the
salt water table beneath the home to
pump water back up to the pool. As
the Hemingway Home further details:
“Until the 1940s when Key West first
had fresh water piped in and the pool
was converted to a freshwater system,
the pool was very high maintenance.
Using the salt-water pump, it took
two to three days to completely fill the
pool. During the summer months, the
salt water would remain fresh for only
about two to three days. Then the pool
would need to be completely drained,
another day or two would be required
to scrub down and remove the algae
and debris, and then the cycle would
start again.”
Morawski says with a laugh: “I’m
sure you know the famous penny
story.”
Indeed. As construction pro-
gressed, Hemingway returned home
from Spain (where he was covering
14 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
the Spanish Civil War alongside
Martha Gellhorn … his future third
wife). Upon seeing the pool—built at
an expense of $20,000, the equivalent
of around $424,000 today—the legend
goes that an exasperated Hemingway
declared something to the effect of,
“Pauline, you’ve spent all but my last
penny, so you might as well have that!”
A penny embedded in the cement,
pressed in by Hemingway or not, can
still be seen today.
The irony of the pool saga (and
you probably saw this coming): “That
$20,000 pool was most likely paid for
again by Uncle Gus,” Morawski says.
It seems Hemingway eventu-
ally warmed up to his man-made
lagoon. In 1964, The New York Times
reported that he was so fond of swim-
ming in it nude that he had a six-foot
privacy wall built around the prop-
erty (though Morawski notes that,
more specifically, it was built to keep
out those seeking a glimpse of the
notable Key West figure).
Today, Morawski says the home
brings in around 800 visitors every
month. And most are eager to see the
phenomenon that perhaps eclipses
even Hemingway in his own home:
the cats. As (yet another) legend goes,
a sea captain pal gifted the author
with the polydactyl (read: six-toed)
cat Snow White. Such cats were said
to represent luck at sea, if only for
the fact that their extra digit made
them prime mousers on board, spar-
ing the crew from disease. Today,
the home presides over 57 delightful
felines who have their own on-call
vet and gobble up 60 pounds of food
every week (“Chewy.com loves us,”
Morawski says).
Ultimately, like so many writ-
ers of yore, fact and fiction relent-
lessly commingle to form our idea of
Hemingway and his mythic Key West
years. What is indisputable: No mat-
ter what happened in all those bars
and boats, in his studio he was utterly
disciplined—and literature is all the
better for it.
Pauline and Hemingway would
divorce in 1940, with the former stay-
ing at the home and the latter head-
ing off to Cuba.
Despite the bleak end to the
couple’s joint life in Key West, upon
entering the grounds today, one is
thunderstruck by the same sense of
wonder that Hemingway likely first
felt when he seized on the property.
As he wrote to his editor, Maxwell
Perkins, in 1931: “You’ll be crazy
about this place when you see it …”
The Hemingway Home and
Museum is open 9 a.m.–5 p.m.
every day, and is located at
907 Whitehead St. in Key
West, Fla. For more, visit
HemingwayHome.com.
Zachary Petit (ZacharyPetit.com) is a
contributing writer at Fast Company and
a freelance journalist whose work has
appeared in WD, Smithsonian, National
Geographic, National Geographic Kids, and
many other venues.
short SHORT story
COMPETITION

To make a long story (really) short...

We’re looking for writing that’s bold, brilliant, and,
most of all, brief.
Submit your best stories that are 1,500 words or fewer. You
could win $3,000 in cash, a trip to New York City for the
Writer’s Digest Annual Conference, and an interview for a
feature article in our magazine.

Early-Bird Deadline
November 15, 2023

Regular Deadline
December 15, 2023

Enter online at
WritersDigest.com/SSS
 No matter what you write, a bit of poetic license can be a valuable asset to any writer’s arsenal.
BY ROBERT LEE BREWER
HOW TO CREATE (AND PLAY
WITH) STRUCTURE IN POETRY
Poetry is fun and challenging for
many reasons. Poems offer meta-
phors and images. At the same time,
they’re working on sound. Most offer
a strong primary meaning with space
for readers to fill in their own mean-
ings and interpretations. And, on top
of all this, is the variety of structures
that poems can use.
Structures can be rigidly defined if
we’re speaking about poetic forms—
something I often like to highlight in
this column—but structure can be
applied in free verse by the simple act
of breaking a big block of text into
stanzas. Or playing with white space.
In fact, I’m going to use one of
my own poems that evolved from its
original publication in my self-
published chapbook ENTER to my
full-length collection Solving the
World’s Problems (Press 53) to illus-
trate one way to play with structure
in your poetry. While they’re both
essentially the same poem, both ver-
sions feel different. And yes, if I were
to include it in a future collection,
there are a few additional tweaks I’d
like to make.
Robert Lee Brewer is senior editor of Writer’s Digest and author of The Complete Guide of Poetic Forms.
SHARE YOUR POETIC VOICE: If you’d like to see your poem in the pages of Writer’s Digest, check out the Poetic Asides blog
(WritersDigest.com/write-better-poetry/poetry-prompts) and search for the most recent WD Poetic Form Challenge.
16 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
From ENTER: From Solving the World’s Problems:
“At the arboretum” “at the arboretum”
From his box of Sweethearts, he hands from his box of sweethearts
her candy that reads CUTIE PIE he hands her candy that reads
before eating his own WILD LIFE. cutie pie
They walk the paved path to a pond
before eating his own
filled with sleeping koi. A sign warns
wild life
KEEP OFF GRASS, but she leads him
they walk the paved path
there
anyway. In high school, this is where to a pond filled with sleeping koi
he would run across the frozen pond a sign warns
and keep off grass
wander off trails and into the summer
but she leads him there anyway
creek water. He hands her CLOUD
in high school this is where
NINE
he would run
and pops a CHILL OUT. He remembers
being young and cold in February, but across the frozen pond
a sweater feels just right today. He and wander off trails
thinks I’m not in high school anymore and into the summer creek water
and
he hands her cloud nine
starts to move back toward the path.
and pops a chill out
But then, she touches his arm,
he remembers being young
whispers, “Stay.”
and cold in february
but a sweater feels just right today
he thinks
i’m not in high school anymore
and starts to move
toward the path
but then
she touches his arm
BREWER ILLUSTRATION © TONY CAPURRO
whispers stay
 Write It Out
Writing prompts to boost your creativity.
BY MORIAH RICHARD

F
or this issue’s prompts, we’re
going to be exploring how
structure can influence the
way that you write a story. To begin,
set a timer for 20 minutes and free
write or use one of the following
prompts to write a flash piece or the
start of a longer story.
1. Write a story that includes the line
“We’re just too different.”
2. Start your story with a security
alarm going off.
3. Write about a magical object that
may or may not work.
Now that you’ve written for 20
minutes, you have your base story.
For each of the following exercises,
don’t let yourself spend more than 20
minutes writing; just let your writing
mind take over and don’t overthink.
Have fun with it, even if it feels odd!
3. Rewrite the base story as if it Now it’s time to grab a notebook
1. Rewrite the base story in another were a movie script, focusing on and reflect. You can either free write
point of view. If you used first- dialogue and using your descrip- or consider the following questions:
person POV (with I and me pro- tions and movement directions
1. What did you learn about your
nouns), rewrite it in third-person sparingly.
writing?
POV (with he/she/they pronouns) 4. Rewrite the base story from the
2. Are you more comfortable in one
and vice versa. Or, for an extra perspective of a different character
POV than another? Why?
challenge, rewrite the story in sec- who is observing the main char-
3. What happened when you
ond-person POV (with you and acter from your base story—if this
changed the flow of your plot?
ILLUSTRATION © GETTY IMAGES: OSAKAWAYNE STUDIOS

your pronouns). different character didn’t exist in

2. Rewrite the base story start-
ing with the ending action and
working your way back through
the plot to end with the base’s
beginning.
4. Does your dialogue resonate
the base story, that’s OK.
just as strongly when stripped of
5. Rewrite the base story so that the
exposition?
main character ends up exactly
5. How important is structure to the
where they started (either physi-
main theme of your work? WD
cally or emotionally).

Moriah Richard is managing editor of WD. Follow her on Twitter @MoriahRichard93.

WritersDigest.com I 17
 INDIELAB
New rules. New strategies. New paths to success.
Write a Short Book Fast
M
y first indie book was
a short book written
in less than a month. I
claimed the title “author,” but my
saddle-stitched booklet made me
feel like an imposter. Then I discov-
ered similar short books—e-books,
perfect-bound paperbacks, and
stapled booklets.
As time passed, I noticed thought
leaders, bestselling authors, and influ-
encers publishing short books, like
Frank Kern (Convert), Lewis Howes
(The Millionaire Morning), and T.
Harv Eker (The Good Millionaire).
These were just as “real” as long ones,
and they were, indeed, authors.
Writers can use the short-book-
fast strategy to become authors,
grow their platforms, and sell more
books. Many can finish a short man-
uscript in less than 30 days and self-
publish shortly thereafter. Of course,
you also can launch in less time.
Short books run about 15–100
printed pages or between 2,500–
35,000 words long (give or take).
That equates to approximately
10–135 typed manuscript pages.
WHY WRITE A SHORT BOOK
FAST
1. THE THOUGHT OF WRITING A
LONG-FORM BOOK FEELS OVER-
WHELMING. Short books make
becoming a published author
seem easy and unintimidating.
18 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
Plus, each one boosts your con-
fidence, making writing a longer
book seem doable.
2. YOU WANT TO INCREASE
YOUR INCOME OR PLATFORM.
Whatever your genre, short
books can increase the size of
your income and audience.
One well-received book leads a
reader to purchase another by
the same author.
3. YOU WANT TO CLAIM THE TITLE
“AUTHOR.” If you have reason to
claim you are an author now—
not in six months or two years
—a short book offers a solu-
tion. In just a few weeks, you can
publish and launch a short book.
4. YOU NEED A BOOK FOR AN
EVENT. A short book will suffice
if you want to sell or give away
books at your next speaking gig.
Short books, especially booklets,
can be inexpensive and fast to
publish. E-books take less time
but can’t be handed out.
5. YOU WANT TO CREATE A PROD-
UCT. A book is a product. If you
have no products yet to sell from
your author website, a short
book fast fits the bill. Adding
it to an existing product, like a
course, increases value, too.
6. YOU WANT TO BUILD YOUR MAIL-
ING LIST. Your mailing list is an
essential part of your platform.
Offer potential subscribers a
BY NINA AMIR
valuable short book for free to
get them to “opt in.”
7. YOU WANT TO JUMPSTART YOUR
WRITING CAREER. Get your writ-
ing career moving by publishing
a small book. Or write a chapter
of a longer book and publish
it as a stand-alone. Do this for
every chapter in your book, and
then compile all the short books
into that big book.
8. YOU WANT TO PROMOTE A BOOK.
A short book serves as a leader
to your other books. Include
information that sends readers
directly to book sales pages
or mention your books in the
content.
10 SHORT NONFICTION
BOOK STRUCTURES
The following 10 book structures
lend themselves to writing a short
book fast.
1. TIP BOOK: A tip book features
10–101 tips. Include one tip per
page and a paragraph or two (or
more) of explanation. Or offer a
list with many per page and only
one sentence of explanation.
A quick look at Amazon finds
examples like Quick Tips for
Genealogists by Juliana S. Smith.
2. LIST BOOK: If you write lists
frequently, you can write a list of
10–101 things your readers need
 to know. Then, write a short
essay to go with each item. Or
publish the list with a sentence
or two of explanation for each
item as Scott Edelstein did with
1,818 Ways to Write Better &
Get Published.
3. QUOTATION BOOK: These inspi-
rational books feature 25–50
quotations grouped around a
theme. Start each chapter with
an epigraph, then write a short
essay to go with it. Elaborate on
the sentiments of well-known
people and the meaning you
find in their words. Or use quo-
tations from your books or blog.
An excellent example of this
short book structure is The Book
Lovers Treasury of Quotations
by Jo Brielyn.
4. RX BOOK: Prescriptive nonfic-
tion, or how-to books, pro-
vide guidance or direction—a
prescription for what ails your
readers. You could provide 10
steps for better relationships, 12
ways to build your business, or a
guide to container gardening. Be
the expert or interview experts
and provide steps, processes,
rules, or ways to solve a prob-
lem, answer a question, or ease
someone’s pain. Often called
handbooks, guidebooks, rule
books, or step books, a good
example is How to Manage in
Times of Crisis by Ichak Adizes.
5. ANTHOLOGY: This book
structure requires you to edit
and compile content solicited
from 10–25 contributors. Then
write a chapter of your own
and maybe an introduction and
conclusion. The contributions
should relate to one theme; thus,
it’s best to plan the content and
then ask experts to write on
specific subjects. Anthologies
are typical in nonfiction—think
of the Chicken Soup for the
Soul series. Novelists and short
story writers can do this, too,
as witnessed by the Timeless
Romance Anthologies.
6. ONE-CONCEPT BOOK: This type
focuses on one “big idea.” First,
introduce your idea, and then
explain it concisely. Think of your
book as one long chapter divided
into subheadings rather than
multiple chapters. Seth Godin is
a master at writing short one-big-
idea books, including Tribes and
The Dip.
7. Q&A BOOK: This book uses each
chapter to pose a question and
provide an answer. Make a list
of potential readers’ common
questions and answer them.
You might add an introductory
chapter or a conclusion. A super
example of this structure is The
Artificial Intelligence Question
and Answer Book by Ken
McCarthy. However, it is not a
short book.
8. BENEFIT BOOK: This book dis-
cusses the benefits of something,
such as an exercise method. You
could have five benefits or 101.
Write a short essay (or 1–2 para-
graphs) describing the benefit
for each. For an example, check
out Health Benefits of Black
Seed: Mediterranean Miracle
Seed by Dr. Cass Ingram.
9. PROBLEM/SOLUTION BOOK: A
problem/solution book addresses
common problems in a subject
area. List potential readers’ most
common or pressing challenges.
Next, create your manuscript
by providing solutions. For an
example, check out K9 Search
and Rescue Troubleshooting:
Practical Solutions to Common
Search-Dog Training Problems
by Susan Bulanda.
10. ESSAY BOOK: These are com-
posed of several essays on one
topic or related topics. For
instance, you could write a book
with 30 pieces on motherhood,
jogging, or gardening. A search
on Amazon provides many
examples, but most are lengthy.
Instead, write an essay book
comprised of short essays—
each two–five printed pages—or
include fewer essays.
TIPS FOR WRITING A GOOD
SHORT BOOK FAST
1. Write an outline beforehand.
2. Find a model to imitate.
3. Set a short deadline.
4. Write short chapters.
5. Keep track of your word count
so you don’t write more than
necessary.
6. Decide in advance how to pub-
lish—printed, e-book, booklet,
workbook, etc.
7. Have your book professionally
edited and proofread.
8. Get a professional cover.
Write your short book fast by
employing one of these 10 short-
book structures and in the process,
build confidence for writing your
“big” book soon. Or, if you like writ-
ing short books, knock out several
each year.
Nina Amir (NinaAmir.com), the 19-time
Amazon bestselling author of How to
Blog a Book, The Author Training Manual,
Creative Visualization for Writers, and a
host of e-book writing guides, founded the
Nonfiction Writers’ University and Inspired
Creator Community. She transforms writers
into authors by providing personal and
spiritual growth coaching.
WritersDigest.com I 19
INDIELAB | WORKSHEET

Writing a Good Short Book Fast

1. What would you hope to get out of writing a short book (or books)?

2. Brainstorm some topics about which you would like to write a short book or would be qualified
to write.

3. Considering the topic and your goal for your short book, what book structure would be best for
the content you intend to write?

4. Research and note some books to serve as models for your own short book.

5. In what physical or digital format would you publish your short book?

6. Create a tentative schedule/timeline for writing your short book.

7. Create a tentative schedule for editing, cover design, and publication of your short book.

20 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023


The Anatomy of a Best Seller: 3
Steps to Deconstruct Winning
Books and Teach Yourself Craft;
8 Steps to Side Characters: How
to Craft Supporting Roles With
Intention, Purpose, and Power; A
Game of Hearts and Heists
(Nonfiction writing craft; sapphic fan-
tasy romance; Atlas Black Publishing)
WHY SELF-PUBLISH? I wanted to keep
control and maximize the use of my
intellectual property. That doesn’t
mean I won’t work with traditional
publishers. In fact, my nonfiction
books were translated into Korean
through a publisher. But when you’re
an indie, you can choose which rights
you sell and which ones you keep. I
like the fact I can make these choices
based on the publishing route I think
would benefit the book best.
HAD YOU CONSIDERED TRADITIONAL
PUBLISHING? I have a sapphic young
adult book I’m editing. The YA
LGBTQ+ market is currently domi-
nated by the traditional market so
to give the book the best chance, I’d
like to query it.
BIGGEST CHALLENGE? When
you work in a team or corporate
environment, you have a team to
Sacha Black, Ruby Roe
support you if something goes
wrong. As an indie, everything
rests on your shoulders. That’s a lot
of troubleshooting and having to
work out how to resolve things on
your own. That can be grueling at
times, especially if you’re the kind
of person who likes to bounce ideas
around. It can also be confidence-
building when you do fix something
on your own and you realize you
can absolutely do anything you set
your mind to.
WRITING ADVICE: The best action I
ever took for my writing craft and
business was to learn how to decon-
struct what bestselling authors are
doing. What literary tools and devices
are they using, how long are their
books, do they have clean prose or
rich descriptions? What tropes are
they using and how pacey is the story?
I go to a forensic level and pattern
spot the commonalities across multi-
ple books in whatever genre I’m writ-
ing in. This helps me deliver a story to
readers that I know they’ll enjoy.
Then I do the same for author
platforms and marketing. Are
they running ads, and if so, on
what platforms? Do they content
market? Do they rapid release
INDIELAB | AUTHOR SPOTLIGHT
BY AMY JONES
books or do one a year? I sign up
for their mailing lists so I can see
the frequency of emails and content,
I look at their branding and color
schemes, the way they present
themselves online. This enables
me to build a business I know will
appeal to readers, create a platform
that attracts them and driving
advertising that I know works.
MARKETING STRATEGY: We are in a
pay-to-play market. There are a lot
of books out there and if you want
readers to see your books, you need
to find a method of driving traffic to
them. I do that through a combina-
tion of paid advertising, like AMS
ads, paid newsletters, and content
marketing. For content marketing, I
use TikTok, podcasting, interviews,
[public] speaking, and social media.
The most important part of my
marketing, though, is getting the
right reader magnet to encourage
sign-ups on my mailing list. Your
mailing list is always your best asset
because it gives you direct access to
readers who know and like you and
want to read more of your work.
You control your list, no one can
take it away from you, and even if
the big bookstores fall, you can still
sell books directly to readers.
DON’T SKIMP ON: I don’t think it
will come as news to anyone, but
do not, under any circumstances,
skimp on the cover. Don’t do it
yourself; just don’t.
WEBSITE:
SachaBlack.co.uk
RubyRoe.co.uk WD
Amy Jones is editor-in-chief of WD.
WritersDigest.com I 21
 WD101
Making sense of the publishing world.
BY GABRIELA PEREIRA
The Three-Act Structure
T
he three-act structure dates
back to Aristotle’s Poetics
and is the typical structure
for much of fiction, particularly in
Western culture. While Aristotle’s
framework focuses on writing tragic
plays and has specific recommenda-
tions tied to that form, a contem-
porary three-act structure is a bit
looser and boils down to a simple
formula: 3 + 2 = 1. Three acts plus
two pivot points (where one act
transitions to the next) equals one
classic story structure. Furthermore,
most contemporary stories include
two additional and important plot
points. These are the midpoint in
Act 2 and the climax in Act 3. Let’s
take a closer look at how the three-
act structure works.
The story begins with Act 1
where you establish the status quo.
Imagine this act as being like the
“before” picture in an infomercial.
We need to see the pre-transfor-
mation photo so we can appreciate
the change when we see the “after”
picture. Similarly, if we don’t see the
character’s regular life in Act 1, we
have no basis of comparison for the
transformation that comes later.
Act 1 is also where you set the
tone for the story, and this includes
making five specific promises to the
reader. These promises are: (1) the
main character(s), (2) the voice,
22 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
Act 1 Act 2
Pivot Point 1: Midpoint
Point of No Return
(3) the world in which the story
takes place, (4) a problem that sets
the tone for the central conflict, and
(5) an event that gives the story a
reason to start at this specific place
and time. Usually, these prom-
ises occur within the first chapter,
though you may choose to delay one
or more of them in order to create a
particular effect.
At the end of Act 1 we reach the
first pivot point in the story. This
turning point has two components
to it—an external event that shakes
things up for the character, and an
internal choice that the character
must make. Often the external event
is easier to spot than the internal
choice, but the latter is far more
important. After all, the character
should not be buffeted to and fro by
plot events. Rather, the character’s
choices must drive the narrative for-
ward. In the case of this pivot point,
the character’s choice should serve
as a point of no return; once they
make that decision they cannot go
back to life as they knew it.
Act 3
Pivot Point 2: Climax
Dark Night of the Soul
We are now squarely in Act 2
or what many writers call “the
muddle in the middle.” Act 2 is
usually the lengthiest of the three
acts—sometimes longer than Acts 1
and 3 combined, which can make it
feel like a long slog. One technique
to help you get through Act 2 is
to play up the supporting cast and
add subplots. This is the act where
the protagonist meets new friends
and faces off against enemies.
Adding new characters to the mix
can create opportunity for new
storylines, which can help add new
ILLUSTRATIONS © GETTY IMAGES: SUDOWOODO, GMM2000 DIAGRAMS © DIY MFA
layers to your protagonist’s journey
throughout the story.
Another technique to get you
through Act 2 is to use the Rule
of Three. This is a technique where
you create a pattern with three ele-
ments in it. The number three is key
because it is the smallest number
where you can both create a pat-
tern and break it. The Rule of Three
works best when you have two ele-
ments that are similar (thus establish-
ing the pattern) followed by a third
 element that breaks that pattern (as
in the story of The Three Little Pigs).
A variation on the Rule of Three
creates a pattern of extremes, while
the third item breaks that pattern by
finding a middle ground (think of
Goldilocks and the Three Bears). As
you work through Act 2 of your story,
ask yourself where you might create
a Rule of Three. Perhaps your pro-
tagonist meets three new supporting
characters, travels to three differ-
ent locations, or encounters three
obstacles.
As you consider techniques to
get you through Act 2, you may
also use the midpoint as an anchor.
Unlike the pivot points between the
acts which are driven by the char-
acter making a choice, the mid-
point is a moment of self-reflection.
Here, the protagonist looks in the
mirror—metaphorically or liter-
ally—and considers who they have
become and whether they like what
they see. The midpoint becomes a
“mirror moment,” not just because
it is a moment of self-reflection, but
because it can become a point of
reflection within the story itself. If
the character doesn’t like what they
see in themself, they may decide to
make a change and the second half
of the story can become almost like a
mirror image of the first half. While
not all stories have a mirror image
type of structure, most do have a
midpoint that serves as a moment of
self-reflection where the character
changes their outlook in some way.
When we reach the end of Act 2
and the beginning of Act 3, we get
to another pivot point. Here the
character must again make a choice,
but in this case the decision is more
subtle. The character will have
reached their lowest point in the
story and they must choose whether
Does the character reach their goal?
YES NO
Do they still want to pursue it?
YES
Happy Tragic
Ending Ending
“Be careful “Change
NO
what you of Heart”
wish for...”
Ending
Ending
they will continue on their path, Once the central conflict of the
give up entirely, or take a new path. story has resolved, all that is left is
As readers, we know the character the denouement, that end-of-story
will not give up (because that would wrap-up where we get a sense of
make for a terrible ending) but giv- closure and see a hint of what might
ing up must feel like a plausible unfold now that the central con-
choice for the character. As with the flict has resolved. This wrap-up can
first pivot point, there is usually an be anything from a simple closing
external event where it seems like all image to a “where are they now?”
is lost, and then the character must epilogue-style scene. Even if the
make a difficult internal choice. This story continues in a subsequent vol-
moment in the story is often called ume, the goal of the denouement is
the “dark night of the soul” because always the same: to give the story a
the character has reached their satisfying close, so that it feels like
darkest, lowest point. could not have ended any other way.
Now we get to Act 3 where the
While many works of fiction follow a
tension rises until, at last, the central
three-act structure, it is by no means
conflict of the story comes to a head.
the only possibility. Many works of
The climax is the scene or sequence
literature use variations on this form
of scenes where the central conflict
or different ones altogether. The
reaches its highest point of tension
reason the three-act structure is so
and eventually resolves in some way.
ubiquitous is because it has a clear
There are four main ways in which
beginning, middle, and end. Done
the story can resolve and they depend
well, this structure takes the reader
on the answer to two questions: (1)
on a satisfying journey. WD
Does the character reach their goal?
and (2) Do they still want to pur-
Gabriela Pereira is the founder and insti-
sue that goal? The diagram shows gator of DIYMFA.com and the author of
four possible endings based on the DIY MFA: Write With Focus, Read With
answers to these two questions. Purpose, Build Your Community.
WritersDigest.com I 23
WRITERSONWRITING
Julia Bartz
T
he Writing Retreat is my
debut novel, but it’s not
my first book. There were
two earlier novels I wrote, failed
to get published, and subsequently
“drawered.” When I got the idea
to channel my frustrations into a
story—about a disgruntled writer
invited to a horror author’s retreat—
I knew the only way I could write
it was if I could figure out how to
enjoy the process and avoid any
expectations for the book’s outcome.
Part of that enjoyment would
be in creating the exact book I
would want to read: feminist, dark,
and extremely suspenseful. To me,
there’s no better feeling than being
so drawn into a story that you’re
desperate to find out what happens.
Even though I’d written my first two
books without planning, I knew that
this time I would need to plot and
structure it carefully.
For those who might worry that
planning feels too mechanical, I have
good news: A strong plot always
stems from the characters. The typi-
cal three-act structure unfurls around
the protagonist’s goals and the some-
times-questionable decisions they
make to achieve them. I found this
structure so helpful that I broke The
Writing Retreat into four correspond-
ing sections. I also titled each section
with a location that both orients the
reader and offers clues about what
they’re going to experience.
Let’s start with Act I, which
shows the protagonist’s life—
particularly what’s going wrong. In
my novel, Part 1 (The City) details
24 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
Alex’s issues: a boring job, a best-
friend breakup, and a year’s-long
case of writer’s block. When Alex
receives the opportunity to attend
famed horror writer Roza Vallo’s
monthlong retreat, she of course
jumps on it. Her goal at this point is
to connect with her favorite author.
Act 2, for some reason, is always
split into two parts: A and B. Act
2A shows the protagonist leaving
their old life behind and enter-
ing into a new reality. Part 2 (The
The final Act 3 always starts with a
Estate) opens with Alex commit-
breakthrough. The protagonist must
ting to staying at Roza’s historic, and
regroup and come up with a plan,
possibly haunted, mansion. The sur-
then overcome the biggest challenges
prises have already begun, starting
of the book to achieve it—or fail.
with Roza’s announcement that the
Part 4 (The Attic—the metaphorical
attendees will need to write a new
consciousness, where things come
novel from scratch, with her chosen
to light) begins with Alex making an
winner receiving a lucrative book
important decision. Her new goal
deal. Alex’s goal narrows: win the
(no spoilers!) shows how much she’s
contest. Of course, there are obsta-
grown over the excruciating diffi-
cles: Roza’s mind games, the other
culties of the retreat, regardless of
attendees’ aggressions, and disturb-
whether or not she makes it out alive.
ing incidents that can’t be explained.
Act 2B is where, simply put, things A final note on plot and structure:
really go off the rails. The protagonist There’s no need to plan everything
faces growing challenges and, at a out beforehand. Part of the fun
certain point, must admit defeat. is setting up high stakes without
In the corresponding Part 3 (The knowing the outcome. This way
Basement—a nod to the unconscious, you’ll be right there with your pro-
where things are buried), Alex wakes tagonist, struggling to come up with
to find that one of the attendees has solutions, even as the walls close in
disappeared. Her goal shifts again: deliciously around you. WD
to find out what happened to her.
The missing writer was searching for Julia Bartz is the New York Times-
something in the basement, and when bestselling author of The Writing Retreat, a
Alex finally unravels the mystery, practicing therapist, and a creative coach.
Her fiction has appeared in South Dakota
she hits a wall. The truth is more Review, InDigest Magazine, and more.
horrifying than she could’ve imagined, Julia lives in Brooklyn. Connect with her on
and there’s seemingly no way out. social media @JuliaBartz.
 MEET THEAGENT
BY KARA GEBHART UHL

Cody Caetano
COOKEMCDERMID LITERARY MANAGEMENT

C
ody Caetano was born in Toronto. His mother’s fam- ABOUT ME
ily is from the Manitoba Interlake, and his father’s “Chronic multi-tasker.”
family emigrated to Canada from the Azores in the
“Relatively sensitive to sound
1960s. Caetano remains in Toronto today as a writer and liter- (big on noise-cancelling
ary agent at CookeMcDermid Literary Management. headphones/Loop earplugs).”
Caetano’s debut memoir, Half-Bads in White Regalia “Into eye exercises.”
(Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House Canada), was an
instant national bestseller, longlisted for Canada Reads 2023, FAVORITE
and named one of the best books of the year by The Globe and
DRINK: a mason jar of DEAD AUTHOR:
Mail and CBC Books. Excerpts from the book received the water Maya Angelou
2020 Indigenous Voices Award for Best Unpublished Prose.
PODCASTS: Huberman PLACES: Toronto, a big
Caetano earned an honors bachelor of arts degree in Lab, Storykeepers empty field, my rooftop
professional writing and communication (with distinction) Podcast, Cold Pod, garden patio, my brother’s
from the University of Toronto in 2017, and a master of arts Commotion, and backyard, or anywhere with
Media Indigena family and friends, really.
degree in English in the field of creative writing in 2019. He
began his publishing career at Transatlantic Agency in fall
2019, working as a contracts administrator, receivables clerk, MOST PROUD OF
agent assistant, editorial agent, and associate agent. Prior to “My clients and their projects—helping them achieve
their goals and dreams every day!”
Transatlantic, Caetano says he worked as a bartender, cattle
factory fabricator, line cook at a burrito chain, meat slicer, tote
washer, food runner, teaching assistant, and as a programming SEEKING PITCH TIPS
assistant at The Word on the Street Toronto in summer 2018. “High-concept “Find the right agent for
Caetano’s writing has appeared in Grain, Esse, The Globe literary fiction.” your work.”
and Mail, The Walrus, PRISM International, and elsewhere. “Simplified, emotionally “Revise your materials
“Within the publishing industry, I am most inspired by rich speculative novels.” more than once.”
those who look toward the future and remain loyal to their “Well-researched, “Remain patient and
engaging nonfiction kind with yourself (no
intuition,” Caetano says. “Role models are varied and include
from writers with literary matter how dim your
select colleagues, family, and friends (especially the ones who backgrounds.” prospects
especially don’t care about publishing), and the writers I work might seem).”
with as an agent, all of whom are brilliant people with fasci-
ILLUSTRATIONS © GETTY IMAGES: FLEAZ CAETANO PHOTO © KRIS CAETANO

nating, humble, and dynamic lives.” QUERY PET PEEVES

You can find Caetano online at CodyCaetano.com. “Undeveloped submissions.”
“A confusing pitch/synopsis.”
CLIENTS “Submissions from writers who are too
colloquial, impatient, or cynical.”
CONOR KERR , author of Prairie Edge (Strange Light Editions,
Penguin Random House Canada and University of Minnesota “Don’t love simultaneous submissions but understand
Press, forthcoming 2024) the hustle behind it.”

BILLY-RAY BELCOURT , author of Coexistence (Hamish Hamilton,

Penguin Random House Canada and Norton, forthcoming 2024) DREAM PROJECTS
JORDAN ABEL , author of Empty Spaces (McClelland & Stewart, “A fun, high-concept novel that continually surprises
and Yale University Press, forthcoming 2023) me. A story with a smooth pursuit.”

Kara Gebart Uhl is a writer, editor, and author of Cadi & the Cursed Oak (Lost Art Press).

WritersDigest.com I 25
BREAKINGIN
Debut authors: How they did it, what they learned, and why you can do it, too.
Shideh Etaat
Rana Joon and the
One and Only Now
(Young adult, July,
Atheneum)
“When her best friend dies
suddenly, Rana enters the rap
battle he dreamed of even though
she’s terrified of public speaking;
to get herself to the stage before
her senior year ends, Rana will
have to find the courage to speak
her truth, all while navigating her
grief, her sexuality, and her well-
intentioned but dysfunctional
immigrant Iranian family.”
WRITES FROM: Los Angeles. PRE-
RANA JOON: I had a few short stories
and novel excerpts published in vari-
ous anthologies of Iranian American
writers. … Rana Joon was my way
of coming back home, to a time and
place that felt incredibly familiar
and safe. TIME FRAME: Rana Joon all
started with a short story I wrote in
2014 after I’d finished my first manu-
script. … I went through various
intense and traumatic experiences.
For a whole year, I had zero desire to
write anything. But ultimately, Rana
Joon came knocking, and when I
came back to the story, because of
26 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
everything I’d been through, I was a
different person. ENTER THE AGENT:
… I reached out to another incred-
ibly generous Iranian writer, Marjan
Kamali, I’d met briefly at the Bread
Loaf Writers’ Conference. I queried
her agent and mentioned her name;
that got me to the top of the pile, I
think. I ended up working with the
assistant agent, Kim Perel. BIGGEST
SURPRISE: You read the manuscript
so many times. Too many times.
From working on edits with your
agent so you can get it ready to pitch
to working with editors and send-
ing multiple drafts back and forth to
copy edits. … Sometimes you just
need some space to be able to fall in
love with it again. WHAT I DID RIGHT:
You also have to almost have a delu-
sional sense of confidence to not
give up. You have to take the “nos”
with a little bit of grace and trust that
BY MORIAH RICHARD
the one “yes” you need will come
your way when the time is right.
WHAT I WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFER-
ENTLY: I think being less attached
to the outcome helps things flow a
little bit easier and faster. As soon
as I let go of the idea of a book deal
is when publishers started show-
ing interest. I don’t think it was a
coincidence. ADVICE FOR WRITERS:
Writing is a spiritual act. I don’t
know if anyone actually told me
this or if I was smart enough to fig-
ure it out all on my own, but I really
do believe it. I feel like stories and
ideas come through me and it’s my
job to stay open to them. NEXT UP:
I’m really excited for the book to be
ETAAT PHOTO © ALEXA LEIGH
out this summer and to actually be
able to engage with readers and not
just have these characters and this
world live inside my head. WEBSITE:
ShidehEtaat.com
 Lauren J.A.
Bear
Medusa’s Sisters
(Historical fantasy,
August, Ace)
“A vivid and moving reimagining of
the myth of Medusa and the sisters
who loved her.”
WRITES FROM: Seattle. PRE-SISTERS:
I was a middle school humani-
ties teacher who wanted to write
but was crippled by doubt and fear:
“Those who can’t do, teach.” But
one late night feeding my newborn
daughter, I had a sleep-deprived
thought: Medusa was one of the
Gorgons, so who were the others?
… I became obsessed with find-
ing out more about these women,
and when I couldn’t find anything,
creating for them a more empow-
ering narrative. TIME FRAME: I
decided to take one year off teach-
ing to give this Medusa idea a real
shot. … Two months into my Year
of Writing, I got pregnant with my
third child. Then four months after
that, COVID hit Washington state.
I wrote Medusa’s Sisters with a giant
belly and two preschoolers at home,
handwriting by day and typing at
night … ENTER THE AGENT: My
agent, Jane Dystel, was my moon-
shot. I sent my query and pages to
her on a whim and a wish. When
she immediately requested the full
book, I had a hard time processing
that such a legend was interested in
me. BIGGEST SURPRISE: There is a lot
of waiting, so you have to be patient/
keep yourself busy with other proj-
ects. Also, as my daughter likes to
BEAR PHOTO © HEIDI LEONARD
say, “Your job is boring because you
just read the same book over and
over.” She’s not wrong. You really
need to love your manuscript …
WHAT I DID RIGHT: There was another
manuscript (which will never see
the light of day) that I queried a few
years before Medusa’s Sisters. It never
got representation, and the process
broke my soul. But my husband
left a note on my desk: “Keep writ-
ing. I believe in you.” I pinned it to
the wall, and I tried again. WHAT I
WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY:
It’s such a gift to be able to say this,
but not a damn thing. ADVICE FOR
WRITERS: Listen to your editor. Anne
Sowards is a treasure, and her advice
is golden. NEXT UP: Mother of Rome,
my imagined history of Rhea Silvia,
the mythical mother of Romulus
and Remus, coming to you in 2024!
WEBSITE: LaurenJABear.com
Lauren Danhof
It’s Not a Cult
(Dark comedy/book
club fiction, August,
Alcove Press)
“Glinda must save her mother
from a dangerous cult, attempt to
reunite her dysfunctional family,
avoid falling in love (because who
has time for that), all while tripping
over herself and not dealing with
her own traumatic past.”
WRITES FROM: Fort Worth, Texas.
PRE-CULT: … I had several short
stories and poems published in small
literary journals. … TIME FRAME:
I started It’s Not a Cult in 2019. I
wrote most of it in about six months.
Then I let it sit for a long time while
I queried … sometime in 2021, I
got a revise and resubmit and then
spent another two months revising,
got rejected again, and then revised
some more. ENTER THE AGENT: … I
sent the revised manuscript to five
agents and got two full requests and
the amazing Cameron McClure
told me she wanted to call and
discuss things. … If I hadn’t taken
that first agent’s advice and revised
and made sure my manuscript was
better, I never would have found
the success I did. BIGGEST SURPRISE:
… Querying is less about rejection
and more about finding that right
fit. You want someone who is as
passionate about your work as you
are. When you do find each other, it’s
about collaboration. The star of the
show is the book, everyone else is
working together as colleagues to get
the book into the hands of readers.
WHAT I DID RIGHT: The number
one thing that helped me break in
was workshopping my book! I am
a member of the DFW Writers’
Workshop … [and] a smaller group
that meets once a month to discuss
our projects in more detail. Without
these fellow writers, I would not
have been published. Period. WHAT I
WOULD HAVE DONE DIFFERENTLY: …
It took me a long time to feel like a
“real writer.” The thing is, I am and
so are you. You are a real writer if
you are writing, if you are working
on your craft, listening to critique,
and striving to be better. ADVICE FOR
WRITERS: Read! You have to read a
lot! You can’t expect other people to
read your stuff if you aren’t reading
yourself. NEXT UP: I am working on a
book about a woman who accidently
brings a 19th–century ghost home
with her. WEBSITE: LaurenDanhof
.com WD
Moriah Richard is the managing editor of
Writer’s Digest. Follow her on Twitter
@MoriahRichard93.
WritersDigest.com I 27
CREATING
STRUCTURE

This Changes
Everything
Five steps to approach writing
your story’s inciting incident.
BY RAN WALKER

IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES: SHUOSHU

28 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

Y
ears ago, when I first began studying plot struc-
tures, I came across the Freytag Plot Pyramid,
a triangular structure that contained five ele-
ments: exposition, rising action, climax, falling action,
and denouement. Suddenly aware of this structure, I
began to notice it in various books and films I enjoyed. I
even noticed its usage in many of the comedies I watched.
The first time I saw the movie Friday, I marveled at how
seamlessly I was able to learn the backgrounds of the
characters, as well as their motivations, within the first
few minutes of the film, each of the elements of Freytag’s
Plot Pyramid falling neatly into place. I would later come
to understand that these elements are often expected by
the audience, so when they are absent, a viewer or reader
might say they didn’t really enjoy a story or film due to a
particular part of the plot that failed to measure up to their
expectations, or maybe there was something about the
ending that they felt just did not work.
When I began to employ this new-found (to me) plot
structure in my own writing, I quickly confronted a
question: How does a writer help the reader to navigate
from the exposition to the rising action? At best, that’s a
bit of a leap to go from setting up a story to cranking up
the conflict. I would later understand that this missing
component of the plot pyramid was something com-
monly referred to as an inciting incident.
In short, the inciting incident is the event that triggers
the shift from the exposition to the rising action. If the
exposition shows us a normal day in the life of the char-
acter, then the inciting incident serves as the catalyst for
when that normal day shifts into a world full of conflict
or a series of obstacles the protagonist must now con-
front. While some people consider the inciting incident
to be a part of the exposition, others view it as a missing
ingredient from the plot diagram. Either way, few, if any,
writers would disagree that it is a necessary component
to writing a good story.
After writing 30 books, many of them in which I had
to strongly consider this particular point, I have come
to understand that there are five key things that have
guided me and that I feel other writers should consider
when it comes to using the concept of the inciting inci-
dent in their own works.
1. Don’t rush to it.
As writers, we often have a strong idea of what we want
to happen in a story. We also understand that our read-
ers might not be particularly patient when it comes to
getting to the good parts of the book. As a result, we
use techniques like in medias res or the use of carefully
crafted, engaging first sentences that push the plot fur-
ther along. All of these things are wonderful techniques;
however, the plots, especially for longer works, tend to
come back around to the idea of setting up the core con-
flict of the story at some point, thereby requiring some
kind of inciting incident. Knowing that you have that
element to look forward to when you begin writing, you
might feel tempted to zoom past the other exposition
in the story to get to that moment. I whole-heartedly
understand where that notion originates, but the exposi-
tion allows us to understand and appreciate the charac-
ters enough to care about what they are going through.
As a result, you can pace yourself as you work to get to
that point of the story. We don’t want to unnecessarily
drag our feet, but we definitely don’t want to run toward
the inciting incident so quickly that we can’t appreciate
how we arrived there.
2. Don’t rush past it.
Just as you had to patiently navigate yourself toward
the inciting incident, you will also want to avoid run-
ning past it. The inciting incident is a pivotal part in the
story. The weight you are about to place on the shoul-
ders of your protagonist should be understood and
WritersDigest.com I 29
CREATING
STRUCTURE
appreciated by the reader. Full empathy for the charac-
ter comes when the reader is acutely aware of the stakes
involved in your story, from where the stakes arose, and
what choices the character will have to face to move
forward.
In the aforementioned movie, Friday, the inciting
incident occurs when the protagonist is offhandedly
dragged by his best friend into efforts to pay an ice
cream truck-owning weed dealer back a certain sum
of money. Prior to the dealer’s arrival, our protagonist,
Craig, was having a regular day (or as regular a day as
he could have, given that he’d been fired on his day off ).
The notion that Craig has been dragged into the hijinks
of his best friend, Smokey, immediately kicks off the
struggles that will propel his character through the rest
of the movie. Still, in that moment of discovering the
obstacles that lay ahead, the character is given a moment
to allow this alteration to his daily plans to sink in. One
might also view this breathing space as the opportunity
for the character to completely digest his situation
and get a glimpse at the obstacles that lie ahead. We as
viewers or readers get to share this moment, and that
shared recognition of the inciting incident is what allows
us to root for the character even more enthusiastically
going forward.
3. Use your exposition wisely to set up
your story for the inciting incident.
Just because we are aware of the need for the incit-
ing incident doesn’t mean we shouldn’t spend the time
carefully crafting how we arrive at this point. Carefully
crafting your exposition is akin to not only driving there
(which is essentially the focus of my first point), but also
doing this in style. It goes without saying that pacing
and style are not necessarily synonymous, but they do
impact each other. How you layer in the exposition can
affect the impact of the inciting incident when it does
arise. One of my favorite short stories to teach my stu-
dents, Charles Waddell Chesnutt’s “Baxter’s Procrustes,”
is an excellent example of this. The story is about a group
of literary aficionados calling themselves the Bodleian
Club and a mishap that happens with one of its mem-
bers. The story is narrated by one of its members, Jones,
who gives a detailed background of the club and its value
so that when we encounter the inciting incident, we can
appreciate the magnitude of the dilemma that will follow.
30 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
“Baxter’s Procrustes” might have one of the longest sec-
tions of exposition I have come across in a short story in
quite some time, as it is meticulous about establishing
the mood and tone of the story. In fact, a casual reader
might not even recognize the exact moment in which
the inciting incident occurs—or whom the protagonist
really is, for that matter. The inciting incident is far more
impactful, not just because of the pacing, but the manner
in which the exposition was developed while reaching
the inciting incident.
In my second novel, 30 Love, I used this technique to
establish the events of the novel. The inciting incident
of that book is when Dizzy asks Lailah, his best friend
of 30 years, to marry him, based upon an off-handed
agreement they’d made 10 years earlier. In building up to
this turning point, I establish the nature of their friend-
ship and how they have interacted with each other over
the years through the telling of how they celebrate their
joint birthdays (since they were born on the same day
to parents who were best friends, as well). By using the
exposition more efficiently, the inciting incident carries
much more emotional resonance when it occurs, espe-
cially since Lailah’s response is not a foregone conclusion.
Inciting incidents are more likely to hook the reader
when readers are invested in the characters, so make the
most of your exposition.
4. Recognize what that moment means for
your character.
Now that we have arrived at the inciting moment, how
does this moment affect your character? This is not
merely a question of what the character should do; it
must also take into account how the character’s person-
ality is equipped to deal with this turning point. Some
characters will willingly accept the charge and move
forward. Others might piddle around trying to make
sense of how to proceed. Whatever reaction the charac-
ter has to this inciting incident should be explored and
understood, as it will usually factor into how the charac-
ter elects to approach the obstacles of the rising action.
It is always good to know what makes your character’s
reaction unique in that moment, given what you have
developed about them in the exposition of the story. For
example, in Kate Chopin’s short story “The Story of an
Hour,” we meet a woman who has just learned her hus-
band has passed away in a train wreck. Her grief quickly
turns way to relief, as she has a chance to really consider
what his death will mean to her regaining her freedom to
be something other than his wife. Without giving away
The weight you are
the story’s conclusion, it is worth pointing out that the
protagonist’s reaction to this inciting incident is a big
part of the story’s plot. As you write your inciting inci-
about to place on the
dent, it would be helpful to keep in mind how your char-
acter will respond to this.
shoulders of your
5. Always understand what your inciting
incident is, even if you choose not to show
protagonist should
it in the actual story.
There are numerous stories, whether due to their
be understood and
length or the style of structure they employ, that sim-
ply do not illustrate the inciting incident directly to appreciated by the
the reader. Instead, the inciting incident is implied
and understood upon a closer reading of the text. A
good example of this is Ambrose Bierce’s short story
reader.
“An Occurrence at Owl Creek Bridge,” a classic tale in
will anchor your story. This harkens back to the theory
which a Confederate sympathizer is put to death. What
of the iceberg, where most of your story is underwater
he did, however, is never directly stated in the text, only
and never actually seen by the reader, yet it is incredibly
implied, yet those very actions have created the situa-
important to the writer, especially in terms of how they
tion in which he finds himself. Of course, this reading
choose to craft the portion of the story that is seen by
of the story only comes from considering the totality of
the reader.
the plot (including those things that occur “offstage”).
For readers who seek an inciting incident within the
Final Thoughts
text, they might turn to the snapping of the rope as this
My wife is fond of telling me that it’s important to know
turning point, but using the definition I stated earlier,
your why when it comes to doing things. Understanding
the point at which Peyton Farquhar’s life takes a turn
the purpose and the function of an inciting incident is
away from the normal is when he decides to help the
essentially having a complete grasp of your character’s
Confederate cause by taking the information shared to
why. Why is this situation important to your character?
him by an undercover federal scout and do something
Why does your character choose to react to this situa-
bold and punishable by death if he’s caught (which,
tion in this particular way? Why does the character feel
spoiler alert, he is).
compelled to follow this trail of conflicts in the quest for
As I consider my own microfiction, I realize that hav-
a resolution? There is a certain logic that arises when you
ing an understanding of where the inciting incident is
are acting from an understanding of the why, and this
will help me to write tighter stories. Many of my stories
understanding and appreciation of inciting incidents will
occur after the inciting incident would have, theoreti-
help you to deliver the stories you long to tell in a way
cally, occurred. This is by design, as much of microfic-
that has a greater chance of satisfying your readers that
tion is about implication. Still, in the absence of showing
much more. WD
it, my stories are much stronger because I still recognize
that it’s there, just like an implied “you” or implied “that.”
Whether or not you choose to actually have the incit-
Ran Walker (he/him) is the author of 30 books, including Spaceships
ing incident as a part of your story in a direct way, you Don’t Come Equipped With Rearview Mirrors: 50-Word Stories. He
should still have an understanding of what caused the teaches creative writing at Hampton University and lives in Virginia
change in your text and set in motion the conflict that with his wife and daughter.

WritersDigest.com I 31
CREATING
STRUCTURE

Structure
at the
Chapter Level
Keep ’em reading with
irresistible Big Bang-Cliff Hangs.
BY JANE K. CLELAND

IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES: SHUOSHU

32 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

Use Big Bang-Cliff Hangs to Create
Page-Turners
Identifying which of the two broad storytelling struc-
tures best suits your story, linear or nonlinear, is a key
to storytelling success, but it’s not the only structural
decision authors need to make. In addition to choosing
the best overall structure for your story, you also need to
consider structure at the chapter level.
Every chapter offers a new opportunity to hook your
readers’ interest. The most effective way to do this is
to start with a Big Bang, something that immediately
inspires reader curiosity. The incidents that follow the
Big Bang should satisfy that curiosity and seamlessly lead
to a Cliff Hang, an ending that inspires more curiosity.
This Big Bang-Cliff Hang structure keeps your readers
turning pages.
GLOSSARY
The following words and phrases are used to convey
specific meanings in this article.
• BIG BANG: Jane K. Cleland’s term for an approach to
starting a chapter that inspires immediate curiosity.
• CLIFF HANG: A shortened version of a “cliffhanger,”
which refers to a chapter ending that inspires urgent
curiosity. The term, by the way, came from Thomas
Hardy’s novel, A Pair of Blue Eyes (1873), which
ended with a character literally hanging from a cliff.
• THE MIDDLE: The section of your story that satis-
fies reader curiosity by moving the plot or storyline
forward and setting up the next Cliff Hang.
• STORY AND PLOT: Story refers to your overarching,
thematically based tale. Plot refers to the consecu-
tive series of incidents that, taken together, tell
your story. Your story is high-level. Your plot is
incident-based.
To work, Big Bangs and Cliff Hangs must be noncon-
trived, noncoincidental, and utterly unexpected. This
one key element—surprise—represents the essence of
suspenseful storytelling. As you develop the Big Bangs
and Cliff Hangs for your stories, it’s important to note
that not all Big Bangs or Cliff Hangs have to be loud or
shoot-’em-up spectacles. The guiding metric should be
whether the Big Bang or Cliff Hang inspires curiosity,
and that can be accomplished via emotion just as surely
as danger.
This tactic works because of the delay in satisfying
reader curiosity. As Lee Child, the author of the Jack
Reacher thrillers, explains, “The way to create suspense
is to ask—or imply—a question … and then not answer
it until later.” And it works whether you’re using a single
point of view or multiple points of view. The only struc-
tural difference is that when using multiple points of
view, satisfying readers’ curiosity is delayed, sometimes
for a chapter, sometimes longer, creating heightened ten-
sion and delicious anticipation.
Start With a Big Bang
Deciding where your story begins is one of the most
important and challenging decisions you face as a
writer. Your story’s opening can catapult your read-
ers into a thrilling situation or gentle them into an
intriguing experience. Whether you begin with action,
description, or dialogue, you need to surprise your
readers. Two effective approaches are to start each
chapter in your book with either an incident that
requires the protagonist to act or a character-driven
crisis. Both options allow you to use dialogue and
description, in addition to action, to generate curiosity.
Broadly, your Big Bangs need to be exciting and dra-
matic or mysterious and absorbing.
Big Bang Examples
DARKER THAN AMBER, JOHN D. MACDONALD. This Big
Bang thrusts you into the story.
We were about give up and call it a night when
somebody dropped the girl off the bridge.
With a dangerous and thrilling start like that, how can
you not read on?
OUR MISSING HEARTS: A NOVEL, CELESTE NG. Ng takes a
quieter approach to creating a Big Bang.
The letter arrives on a Friday. Slit and resealed with a
sticker, of course, as all their letters are: Inspected for
your safety—PACT. It had caused confusion at the post
office, the clerk unfolding the paper inside, studying it,
passing it up to his supervisor, then the boss. But even-
tually it had been deemed harmless and sent on its
way. No return address, only a New York, NY postmark,
six days old. On the outside, his name—Bird—and
because of this he knows it is from his mother.
Don’t you want to know more about the situation?
WritersDigest.com I 33
CREATING
STRUCTURE
PARADISE, TONI MORRISON. The matter-of-fact tone adds
a menacing chill to the terrifying words, an effective way
to create a Big Bang.
They shoot the white girl first.
The words tell us what happened, and we’re left want-
ing to know why and what will happen next.
THE POPPY WAR, R. F. KUANG. In this fantasy novel, world-
building is integrated into incident so organically, read-
ers accept the fantastical cultural mores. The first line
taps into a fear shared by legions of people—being
exposed and vulnerable.
“Take your clothes off.”
This fearsome Big Bang works because it’s unrelated
to fantasy or any other genre—it resonates because
we’re human.
End With a Cliff Hang
Cliff Hangs work when your protagonist is confronted
by a dangerous situation that requires immediate action.
When confronted by danger, which can be physical,
emotional, mental, or spiritual, something has to happen,
a dramatic shift in action or belief. Your readers decide
to read just one more page because they were caught
off-guard, and they want to know what happens next.
Delaying revealing the answer, next steps, or changes in
attitudes leads readers to turn the page.
Cliff Hang Examples
MY SWEET GIRL, AMANDA JAYATISSA. In this novel, the Cliff
Hang is terrifying, both literally and figuratively.
I had just reached the steps when I felt her fingers
around my neck. Felt her breathing in my ear. I
couldn’t fight her again. I let the floor open up and
swallow me whole.
The tension inherent in this situation is accentuated
through the use of short sentences and fragments.
THE HOUSE OF BROKEN ANGELS, LUIS ALBERTO URREA.
Urrea uses a more emotional approach to create a
gripping cliffhanger.
He held his hands to his head. The entire history
of his family, the world itself, the solar system and
galaxy, swirled around him now in weird silence, and
he felt blood dribble down inside his body and the
clock, the clock, chipped away at his existence.
34 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
“Can we leave now?” he asked. But he could not
hear his own voice. “Are we ready yet? Anybody?”
But nobody was listening.
The sensory descriptions bring this internal dilemma
to life.
THE OTHER BLACK GIRL, ZAKIYA DALILA HARRIS. This Cliff
Hang’s effectiveness relies on the character’s perception
of events.
And then, just like that, the hand, the scar, and the
girl were all gone.
Readers want to know whether the threat the charac-
ter feared is real or imagined.
Control the Information Flow
To create compelling and unexpected Big Bangs and Cliff
Hangs, you need to parcel out information thoughtfully.
Here are two effective approaches to creating a unified
Big Bang-Cliff Hang structure.
1. GO FOR THE DRAMA. Write the entire incident then
move the last few paragraphs to the next chapter,
being careful to tweak those remaining paragraphs
so that next chapter starts with a Big Bang. Then, if
appropriate, insert a section break, and get going
with setting up the next cliffhanger.
2. FOCUS ON AN INTERNAL CONFLICT. End the chapter at
the moment a character must confront an existential
question. Begin the next chapter with a consequence
of that dilemma.
While each option works well on its own, the best
approach is to combine them, marrying plot and character
so the Big Bangs and Cliff Hangs come not merely from a
dramatic situation or an internal conflict, but an internal
conflict driven by a dramatic situation. This connection
enhances the intensity and ensures a cohesive flow.
It’s important to note what makes for a dramatic inter-
nal conflict in one genre may seem ho-hum in another.
Readers of Regency romances, for instance, know that a
woman in early 19th-century England was supposed to
marry well, and to “disoblige her family” by refusing a
flattering offer was nearly unheard of. Given this reality,
when Lady Hester, the protagonist of Georgette Heyer’s
novel Sprig Muslin, learns that she is to receive an offer
of marriage she doesn’t want to accept, her reaction at
the end of the chapter is a compelling Cliff Hang, a dra-
matic internal conflict.
 The Lady Hester, once her maid was dismissed, the
candles blown out, and the curtains drawn round her
bed, buried her face in the pillow and cried herself
quietly to sleep.
Readers of this genre will be white-hot curious to see
how Lady Hester handles the situation. Does she stand
her ground? Can she withstand the pressure brought
to bear? Once you have proper context, this quiet Cliff
Hang is both dramatic and reflective.
So too is this Cliff Hang from Noah Hawley’s novel of
suspense Before the Fall.
This act of impossible hope, this routine suspension
of the physical laws that hold men down, inspires
and terrifies her. Flying. They are flying. And as they
rise up through the foggy white, talking and laugh-
ing, serenaded by the songs of 1950s crooners and
the white noise of the long at bat, none of them has
any idea that sixteen minutes from now their plane
will crash into the sea.
This Cliff Hang marries nail-biting intensity with
evocative description. By informing the reader that the
plane is going to crash, readers’ curiosity is assured.
Connect Big Bangs to Cliff Hangs
When you start a chapter with a Big Bang, readers ask
questions: What’s happening? Why? What does this
mean? Now what? When you end with a Cliff Hang, you
propel your readers into the next chapter, where, ide-
ally, another Big Bang awaits. This Big Bang-Cliff Hang
cadence generates a magnetic pull.
In Dick Francis’ traditional mystery Risk, you’ll see
how Big Bangs and Cliff Hangs link together to form a
gripping narrative arc.
Chapter 1
BIG BANG:
Thursday, March 17, I spent the morning in anxi-
ety, the afternoon in ecstasy, and the evening
unconscious.
CLIFF HANG:
As to how I’d got there … well … I would never for-
get Thursday, March 17.
The most shattering questions were those to
which I could think of no answer at all.
Why? What for? And … what next?
Chapter 2
BIG BANG:
That Thursday morning a client with his life in ruins
kept me in the office in Newbury long after I should
have left for Cheltenham races, and it seemed churl-
ish to say, “Yes, Mr. Wells, terribly sorry about your
agony, but I can’t stop to help you now because I
want to nip off and enjoy myself.” Mr. Wells, staring-
eyed and suicidal, simply had to be hauled in from
his quicksand.
CLIFF HANG:
Awake in the dark, I could make no sense of it.
Why should they take me? Did it have anything
to do with winning the Gold Cup? And if so, what?
It seemed to me that I had grown still colder, and
still sicker, and the peripheral noises of creaks and
rushing sounds had grown louder.
… The sickness suddenly identified itself into
being not the aftermath of ether, as I’d vaguely
thought, but a familiar malaise I’d suffered on and off
since childhood.
I was seasick.
On a boat.
Chapter 3
BIG BANG:
I was lying, I realized, on a bunk.
... Out at sea, I thought helplessly. It wouldn’t be
so rough on a river.
You can feel the protagonist’s discomfort, growing
anxiety, helplessness. Each Cliff Hang leads logically to
the next Big Bang, forming an interconnected, curiosity-
inspiring story.
By understanding the anatomy of Big Bangs and Cliff
Hangs, you’ll be able to apply this structural strategy to
your own work, creating edge-of-your-seat page-turners
that readers can’t resist. WD
Jane K. Cleland (JaneCleland.com) writes the multiple award-winning
Josie Prescott Antiques Mysteries and the Agatha–award winning
bestsellers, Mastering Suspense, Structure & Plot and Mastering
Plot Twists. She is a contributing editor for Writer’s Digest magazine
and the chair of the Wolfe Pack’s Black Orchid Novella Award in
partnership with Alfred Hitchcock Mystery Magazine. Visit Jane’s
website for details about free monthly webinars on the craft of writing.
WritersDigest.com I 35
CREATING
STRUCTURE

Building the
Essential Linkages
IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES: SHUOSHU

Ten ways to craft the connective

tissue your story needs.
BY ELIZABETH SIMS

36 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

I
f the human body were composed only of organs,
bones, and muscles, we’d merely be a bloody pile. We
need connective tissue, so we don’t fall apart.
Same with any structure, if you think about it. Put
up a brick wall without mortar and see how that works
out. Lumber won’t stick to itself. Nails, rivets, bolts—
the right connectors at the places make the whole
thing sound.
Fiction is a structured art form; therefore, it too needs
bonding elements. For the sake of simplicity, let’s call it
connective tissue: the small, subtle things, the adroit stuff
top authors do to make their stories feel seamless. Where
are the characters? What are they thinking? What are
they doing?
Here is a passage that could use some help:
They argued with no resolution. At work, Omar heard
a sudden sound.
Here’s a simple transition, embedded directly in the
third-person narrative:
After the argument with Frances, Omar went home
and ordered a pizza, though he didn’t enjoy it much.
The next day at work, he was running the macros on
the new database when a sharp crack interrupted his
concentration. A gunshot?
With this adjustment, we follow Omar from one piece
of action to another, from one place to another in time
and space, even from one mood to the next.
When a work of fiction feels choppy, it’s often
because the author has skipped from one place or
character to another without enough help for the
reader. And when a story feels labored or sludgy, it’s
because the author has put in too much connective tis-
sue: It’s overtold. This is one of those elements of fiction
that are subtle and unquantifiable, and best understood
by examples.
Let’s start with the simplest sorts of connective tissue
and move through to more intricate ones. (Spoilers from
real novels and stories ahead.)
1. Dateline
The dateline is the most basic connective tissue. At the
top of a chapter or section, you can use any combination
of place, time, even including a character name:
• June 30, Buenos Aires
• Buenos Aires, Wednesday, 2.45 p.m.
• Chief of Staff Victor Jung’s office, Washington, D.C.,
11:00 a.m.
• An open boat on Hudson Bay
2. Chapter Break
When you’re unsure how to go on but you feel you need
a change of direction, an easy answer is a chapter break.
Readers will expect a jump in time or place, so you don’t
have to do much extra writing to get them there. A profes-
sional secret of authors is to break a chapter when you’ve
finished writing a heart-clutching moment. This is a much
more natural way to create a chapter end, instead of try-
ing to manufacture a strong moment out of nothing. Don’t
worry about dropping in a micro-chapter here and there;
your chapters don’t need to be of similar lengths.
3. Section Break
If you’ve come to a place where you want an abrupt
change, but you don’t feel it’s significant enough to end
the chapter and start another, skip a line or two, omit
the indent, then get going on whatever’s next. A section
break is ideal for signaling an emotional shift.
This from Kazuo Ishiguro’s The Remains of the Day:
Such as, for instance, the matter of Miss Kenton’s
days off.
By the time she first arrived at Darlington Hall right
up until perhaps a month or so before that incident
in my pantry, Miss Kenton’s days off had followed a
predictable pattern.
The reader is intended to feel that little break. We are
to sense, perhaps, a shift in the thoughts of the narrator,
Stevens the butler. I fancy Stevens is taking a moment to
heave a weighty sigh before commencing to explain this
greatly troubling situation with Miss Kenton.
For the sake of interest in formatting, you can center a
neutral symbol or figure, such as a diamond or scroll, in
your section break. This makes it a little easier for read-
ers to apprehend that it’s intentional (and not a typo).
Publishers sometimes opt for this, and if you’re self-
publishing, you can do it too.
4. POV Change
Another way to do a simple, clear transition without much
fuss is do a point-of-view change. Thrillers are great for
this; think of cinematic jump cuts all over the place.
WritersDigest.com I 37
CREATING
STRUCTURE
Lt. Stone is racing through traffic, dodging elderly
pedestrians and baby buggies.
The bad guys are hustling their hostage out the
back door of the warehouse.
Back to Lt. Stone, now stuck behind a moving
van … He sees a hot dog vendor’s cart and gets
an idea …
By keeping the scenes close in time, as in the above
example, it’s easy for the reader to be comfortable with
what’s going on.
5. Spewed Opinion
An excellent way to buffer a couple of scenes while keep-
ing track of your characters is to have one of them spew
an opinion:
Geoffrey thought if he heard “Rhinestone Cowboy”
in that elevator one more time, he’d have a stroke.
Doesn’t have to be the slightest bit momentous. If
Geoffrey must ride in that elevator, let him keep it a little
bit amusing for us. We’re there with him!
6. Soliloquy
Shakespeare is the most famous writer of soliloquies,
though they’re found throughout literature. The Bard’s
tragic character Hamlet steps to the footlights to speak
his innermost thoughts aloud to himself, though of
course the purpose is to inform the audience. Each of
Hamlet’s seven soliloquies—jammed with the prince’s
swirling thoughts and feelings—develop the character by
letting us inside his head to watch the progression of his
ideas from chaotic to organized. The soliloquies are tre-
mendously successful connective tissue, bridging action
while letting us in on Hamlet’s sadness, exultation, calcu-
lation, and wit.
HOW TO DO IT: When you need to move from one
piece of action to the next—especially if you want to
slow the pace—let a character struggle internally with
the choices before them. Give them room to develop
their thoughts; don’t be in too big of a hurry to get to the
next scene, which will almost certainly be richer for what
you’ve just crafted.
7. Stream of Consciousness
The distinguished contemporary writer George Saunders
often lets his narrators connect the elements of his darkly
comic short stories with streams of consciousness. This
38 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
technique, while similar to the soliloquy, amps soliloquy
into more complex territory.
E.g.: The eponymous narrator of the Saunders short
story “Al Roosten” gives us perfect connectivity between
the events of the story, about a loser who lives almost
entirely inside his head. As Al judges others and rages
against them, he tells a story of petty revenge:
He could say he’d accidentally kicked the wallet
under there. Which was sort of true. He hadn’t
thought about it, really. He’d just felt like kicking it
and then he had. He was impulsive like that. That
was one of the good things about him. It was how
he’d bought the shop. Failing shop. He gave the
keys a kick.
Through the character’s own eyes, we perceive that he
is utterly lacking in honesty and courage; therefore, hap-
piness will forever be out of his reach.
HOW TO DO IT: Let your narrator imagine the thoughts
and feelings of others, and let those imaginings drive (to
one extent or another) her or his decisions. You’ll always
be able to move a story smoothly with this technique.
I might add that the novelist Henry James, himself an
important piece of connective tissue between the literary
realists and the modernists of the turn of the 20th century,
used this approach to superb effect.
A key is to let your narrator’s thoughts wander, but
keep the topics to anything that:
• Reveals the inner workings of the character (e.g. via
judgments and opinions)
• Describes action
8. One-Sentence Cornucopia
Take a close look at this single sentence from the O.
Henry award-winning short story “Defeat” by Kay Boyle:
That was the morning of the thirteenth, and they
rode all day in the heat, two what-might-have-been
peasants cycling slowly hour after hour across the
hushed, summery, sunny land.
We get a wealth of connective tissue in this sentence:
what day it is, what the weather is, how many characters
we’re seeing, what they’re doing, what the mood is.
The sentence occurs between a scene of the soldiers
disguising themselves and the next scene, of them reach-
ing their proximate goal, a place where they can find
safety and food. And we’re solidly with them.
 HOW TO DO IT: Challenge yourself every so often to
pack several paragraphs’ worth of material into a single
sentence. Such a sentence can serve beautifully to link
two distinct events.
9. Short Flashback
Short flashbacks can succeed as connective tissue when
used judiciously. Long flashbacks are different; they
essentially serve to deliver substantive backstory. But
short ones can add interest, help you control the pace,
and keep a little suspense going.
E.g.: You end a chapter at a moment of profound
impact, say a romantic proposal of marriage. The suitor
takes a knee, opens the gem box, and pops the question.
End of chapter!
Next chapter opens with the guy out hunting a day
later (with a proper game license and legal firearm, of
course). We see him stalk and successfully shoot an elk.
He rejoices inwardly that he and his bride will eat well
this winter. As he packs the field-dressed quarters to his
cabin, he thinks back to the moment he asked for her
hand, and we see her happy reaction through his eyes.
The elk hunt serves as both a transition and a bridge
forward (progression of the lives of the two lovers).
Because of the break in continuity, we get a little sus-
pense, and savvy readers will know and expect that the
payoff will come soon. And it does: She said yes! It’s fine
to craft something like this once in a while. If you make
a constant pattern of it, though, your readers will get
bored. As you gain experience as a writer, these things
will sort themselves out.
10. Mad Dog
A mad dog, for our purposes discussing connective
tissue, is a story element that is tiny but reaches way
beyond itself to pull together situations, themes,
moods, fates.
Zora Neale Hurston uses an actual mad dog in her
influential novel Their Eyes Were Watching God.
A series of intense moments occur late in the book.
One comes when the character nicknamed Tea Cake
saves the main character Janie from drowning in a post-
hurricane flood. What’s the flood for? Hurston wanted
to give Tea Cake a heroic moment. But she needed more;
she needed Tea Cake to die, and she needed much more
besides. It would have been simple to make Tea Cake
drown in the flood while saving Janie, but also a bit
cheap, easy. Moreover, Hurston wanted to give the two
characters a chance to have some discussion about their
past and future before the next cataclysm.
The author decided to craft a delayed, dreadful death
for Tea Cake: He’s bitten by a rabid dog during his rescue
of Janie. It takes weeks for the disease to manifest. When
the crazed, dying Tea Cake attacks Janie, she shoots him
dead to save herself, then finds herself in jail. The story
continues its energetic, compelling journey through the
relations between the sexes, servitude and subjugation,
loyalty, vengeance, forgiveness, and more.
Tea Cake’s encounter with the mad dog is entirely by
chance, and the moment of the bite seems almost insig-
nificant. Yet it becomes a multiplier of story, creating
bridges, transitions, and pinch points all along the way.
How to invent your own mad dog:
• Make a list of the biggest moments you’re going to
need as you think about wrapping up your story.
Make at least one of them bigger.
• Looking at those moments, what sort of tiny cata-
clysm suggests itself? You want something that will
have impact and reach far beyond the moment.
• Progressive diseases are good. Also consider a char-
acter who returns from exile with a grudge, a prank
that goes a wee bit wrong, a child who misunder-
stands an urgent directive …
Something to remember about connective tissue is
this: You’re intimately familiar with your own project.
You know it better than anyone; you breathe and sleep
it. For you to keep track of your characters and timeline,
well, that’s easy. Therefore, sometimes we neglect con-
nective tissue, because, hey, it’s already obvious, isn’t it?
We saw Tiffany steal that minivan in Chapter 4. Why do
I need to remind the reader in Chapter 12 that Tiffany is
still driving it, still on the way to Florida?
Just bear in mind that readers like to be refreshed,
occasionally, on where everybody is, what they’re doing,
why they’re doing it, and how they’re feeling. They need
these things a little bit more than you do, as the author.
The more you bring conscious choice to this element of
fiction, the better you’ll get at it, and the easier it will
come to you. WD
Novelist and contributing editor Elizabeth Sims (ElizabethSims
.com) has made a career out of studying fiction, writing fiction,
writing about the craft of fiction, and teaching. Her novels have
won a Lambda Literary Award, a Florida Book Award, a GCLS
Goldie, and the Tompkins Award for Graduate Fiction (Wayne
State University).
WritersDigest.com I 39
CREATING
STRUCTURE

Double the Fun

Writing a manuscript with dual points of view can be
a challenge, but it can also be rewarding for both
you and readers if it serves the story. Here’s how.
BY BRIAN D. KENNEDY
IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES: SHUOSHU

40 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

W
e’ve all heard it said before: There are two
sides to every story. Sometimes writers take
this adage quite literally when they decide the
novel they’re dreaming up would best be told through two
different perspectives. Writing from the vantage point of
two narrators, or dual points of view (POVs), can add a
richness and complexity to your story that a single point
of view may not. Imagine if we only had Nick’s side of the
story in Gillian Flynn’s Gone Girl. Or only Amy’s. Without
dual POVs in Alison Cochrun’s The Charm Offensive, we
might have only experienced half the humor, half the heat.
Of course, writing from two perspectives can also feel
like twice the amount of work. In order to successfully
pull off this kind of narrative, you’ll need to have two
separate character arcs, two plotlines that intertwine or
converge, and two distinct voices and personalities. So,
before putting in all that effort, it’s probably helpful to
ask yourself one very important question: Why?
Why would this story benefit from being told in
two points of view? Would a second perspective add
a layer of something that couldn’t be achieved with
just one? More dramatic suspense? More romantic
tension? A better exploration or depiction of the novel’s
overarching theme?
When writing his queer post-apocalyptic romance,
All That’s Left in the World, Erik J. Brown knew dual
POVs would make for a more gripping story: “When
there are two characters in a scene, who maybe don’t
trust each other or are hiding things from one another, it
heightens that tension.” He went on to add, “It’s easy for
one character to assume what the other is thinking, but
it’s a special kind of connection readers get when they
know the truth.”
Once you have your “why,” it’s time to figure out
your “hows.”
How do I decide who my two
narrators are?
At first glance, this might seem like a no-brainer. If you’re
writing a romance, it makes sense that your two POV
characters are going to be the ones who fall in love. But
the real “how” that you should be asking yourself here
is, How do these two specific narrators fit into the mold of
being a main character or protagonist?
For a reader to be fully invested in a protagonist, there
needs to be growth. The person your character is at the
beginning of the novel is not who they should be at the
end. If Love Interest A has a richly developed character arc
and Love Interest B remains flat, you’ll quickly run the risk
of readers skimming over Love Interest B’s sections.
While both narrators should have their own compel-
ling arc, that doesn’t necessarily mean they’ll take up
the same amount of space on the page. For a romance,
it usually makes sense to have co-protagonists. For a
thriller, perhaps your narrators are the protagonist,
who is your primary POV, and the antagonist, who
takes on a secondary, though equally engaging, role.
Perhaps you’re writing a novel with dual time lines,
where one character carries the bulk of the story in the
present, and the other gives us a glimpse into some-
thing that happened in the past. No matter the size of
the role, the key is to make sure each POV adds some-
thing to the story.
If you’re unsure who your primary POV should be,
three spots that can point you in the right direction are
the opening chapter, the climax, and the end. Does one
POV dominate those sections? That’s most likely your
primary protagonist. (Even when using co-protagonists,
like in a romance, one character usually has a larger
change to make, or greater obstacles to overcome, which
tie into the overall theme of the book.)
WritersDigest.com I 41
CREATING
STRUCTURE
How do I fuse my two separate character
arcs into one story?
Now that you know who your narrators are, welcome to
the hard part. Not only do you need two fully realized
character arcs, but they also need to fit into one
coherent plot.
If you’re a pantser (someone who writes “by the seat
of their pants” instead of outlining), you may be tempted
to skip this part. I envy your confidence and courage, but
suggest you still do some reflecting first. Whether you
use the three-act structure, beat sheets from Save the Cat,
or a strange alchemy of craft advice you’ve collected over
time, outlining each character’s journey—and thinking
about how they fit together as a whole—can save you
from trouble farther down the road.
The biggest concern most writers have while crafting
a dual-POV narrative is figuring out what character tells
which parts of the story. The first time I tried my hand
at it, I found it helpful to write each scene on a notecard.
If only one POV character was in that scene, their name
went on the card as well. If both of my POV characters
were involved, I had a decision to make. The general rule
of thumb is that whichever character has the most at
stake, or will be most affected by the scene, should be the
one to narrate. If my answer ended up being both char-
acters, they each got their own card for that particular
scene. Afterward, I laid out all the cards and put them in
sequential order, giving myself an overall view of my plot.
No matter how you end up visualizing your plot,
here’s where you can save yourself some trouble before
drafting. If you have one primary protagonist, they
should probably be the one to take us through the
major points of the novel, like the inciting incident
and the climax. If you have co-protagonist, they
should probably both be involved. If your outline isn’t
reflecting this, you may want to reconsider your plot, or
ask yourself if your story would work better as a single
POV narrative instead.
If you’re lucky, you might even find that plotting two
POVs is easier than one. Angela Velez felt like she had
a “secret cheat code” while outlining her contemporary
novel, Lulu and Milagro’s Search for Clarity: “My goal
with each chapter was for one sister to undermine the
other, either by unhappy accident or on purpose. This
ping pong approach forced me to constantly brainstorm
42 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
moments of humor and hijinks, because the sisters were
always making and cleaning up each other’s messes.”
How do I put my outline into practice?
If you’ve ever tried outlining a story before drafting, you
probably already know that things tend to shift and
change before you can type “The End.” (If you’re a metic-
ulous outliner who never deviates … congratulations,
what it’s like to be the sparkly unicorn of publishing?)
Staying malleable while drafting your manuscript is
a good thing. When I first started writing what would
end up becoming my debut novel, a dual-POV rom-com,
I was dead set on having my co-protagonists alternate
every other chapter. I quickly ran into a problem. Love
Interest B had major plot points happening in Chapters 2
and 4. Love Interest A, meanwhile, spent all of Chapter 3
driving around in his car, reminiscing about a failed rela-
tionship. It slowed the story down. Later, when I called
my agent for advice, she kindly but firmly reminded me,
“You’re the writer, you make the rules.” I tried to argue
with her: “But I like the symmetry! I’ve seen other books
make it work!”
Eventually, as I got further into my draft, I knew I
had to take her advice. Out went the chapter where my
character was driving, along with any other section that
didn’t move the story forward. Figuring out how to tran-
sition back and forth between POVs can be a tricky bal-
ancing act. You want to give the reader enough time to
feel grounded and invested in both viewpoints, but you
also have to make sure the story never becomes stagnant.
One aspect that can be particularly challenging is
when an important scene or plot point overlaps between
both POV characters. In a romance, this could be their
first kiss. Obviously, each protagonist is going to have a
strong reaction in that moment. But retelling the same
scene from two sides could easily get repetitive. (Though
it could work for some genres, especially if it reveals
something we didn’t get from the other POV.)
When in doubt, always give the scene to the character
with the most at stake. (If you’re still not sure who that is,
you might have to try writing the scene from both POVs
to figure it out.) Once you have your narrator, though, it
doesn’t let your other character off the hook. If the kiss
was from Love Interest A’s point of view, we’ll still want
Love Interest B’s reaction to it. Maybe their next chapter
picks up immediately after the kiss. Or maybe you show
them distracted at work the next day, daydreaming (if
the kiss was good), or still cringing (if it was bad).
While both narrators
While you want to keep your story moving and fresh,
it’s also important to maintain some continuity with the
emotional beats you hit. For her fantasy novel Revelle,
should have their own
Lyssa Mia Smith didn’t want her readers to feel too
jarred while transitioning between points of view. “If one
compelling arc, that
chapter ended on a point of tension/anxiety, I tried not
to start the next chapter on something light/upbeat … doesn’t necessarily mean
Readers will hardly notice the shifts in POVs if they have
a strong emotional thread to follow.” they’ll take up the same
How do I make my characters and their
perspectives sound different and unique? amount of space on the
One of the most dreaded critiques when writing dual
POV is readers not being able to tell which character
is narrating at any given time. There are a few choices
page.
you can make up front to help orient your readers: Tag
each section to show whose it is. Use a different tense Once you’ve dug deep into your characters’
for each character (if that works for your story). Write in backgrounds and identities, you can apply that to
third person, which will allow you to use the characters’ how they think, talk, and move on the page. In her
names more often. But even then, you still need to find a contemporary novel This Place Is Still Beautiful, XiXi
way to make both POVs sound unique or else you’ll run Tian let the divergent personalities of her narrators guide
the risk of not engaging readers. how they expressed themselves: “One sister was older,
The thing that will truly help set your narrators apart more serious, and reflective … she thought in shorter,
is voice. It’s your secret weapon and your biggest chal- sparser sentences. The younger sister was more reactive
lenge. How do you make your characters sound differ- and emotional, and her perspective came out as more
ent from one another? Mapping out their differences descriptive, less closed off.”
is a good place to start. What are their backgrounds?
Writing dual POVs might take a lot of planning and
Someone who lives in a rural environment is going to
work. But when done right, it can open up your novel
have a different outlook than someone who lives in an
and give readers a narrative that feels twice as exciting,
urban one. Someone who grew up with a lot of money is
twice as satisfying. After all, to quote another common
going to act different than someone who grew up with
adage: Two heads are better than one. So if it works for
very little.
your story, don’t be afraid to let more than one character
Not only will you want to examine differences like age,
have their say. WD
gender, sexuality, ethnicity/heritage, religious beliefs, and
socioeconomic status … you can also dig into their per-
sonality traits and interests/hobbies. An uptight botanist
who likes doing puzzles to unwind is going to have a dif-
ferent POV than a melancholic dogwalker who aspires to
break into screenwriting. The more differences you can Brian D. Kennedy (BrianDKennedyBooks.com) lives in New York
City with his husband and their miniature Schnauzer. When not
find for your characters, the easier you’ll make your job. writing, he can be found working at an LGBTQ nonprofit and
(Opposites attract is a popular romance trope to write for obsessing over all things Dolly Parton. A Little Bit Country is his
a reason.) debut novel.

WritersDigest.com I 43
CREATING
STRUCTURE

The Pocket Guide to

Pantsing
How to write a novel without an
outline (with confidence).
BY MICHAEL LA RONN

IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES: SHUOSHU

44 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

MAG DOWN LOAD.oRG

LATEST MAGAZINES
HIGH QUAllTY TRUE-PDF
MAG DOWN LOAD.ORG
I
began my writing career as a devoted outliner, but I
always felt like there was a better way. Despite develop-
ing a deep knowledge of the major outlining methods,
something about fleshing out my story before I wrote it
didn’t jibe with my personality.
My 10th book exhausted my patience with outlining
for good. I spent 40 hours on an outline, only to discover
that I was deviating from it with almost every chapter.
My characters ignored everything I planned. The outline
felt like wasted time.
After writing an outline that failed, I thought, Why am
I spending all this time on an outline, only not to use it?
Suddenly, I found myself trying the pantsing method
(also known as discovery writing, or, more simply, writ-
ing without an outline). It terrified me, but I knew that
outlining wasn’t the answer.
I wish I had done it sooner. Twenty novels later, I can
say that mastering how to write a novel without an out-
line was the best thing that ever happened to my writing.
I am a serial pantser now, and I can’t imagine going back.
To help writers unlock their inner pantser, I wrote a
book called The Pocket Guide to Pantsing. I also pub-
lished several videos on writing without an outline on
my YouTube channel, “Author Level Up.” These resources
have helped thousands of writers master this unique and
often-misunderstood writing method.
Here are the two most common problems I see with
new pantsers:
1. They’re terrified of the process.
2. They’re not sure if they’re doing it right.
The focus of this article is not to stoke the fires of that
great plotting versus pantsing debate, but to empower
pantsers with practical tips so they can write their next
novel with confidence.
Let’s Talk About Fear
It’s easy to become overwhelmed when writing your first
novel without an outline.
What if you get stuck? What if the plot goes down a
rabbit hole? What if readers don’t like the book?
These questions stem from fear. We fear what we do
not understand.
When new writers attempt pantsing for the first time,
they’ve never done it before, so it’s natural to be afraid.
It’s also natural to think they will fail. As with all things,
yes, there is a chance you might fail, but there is also
a chance that you might succeed beyond your wildest
dreams. You’ll never know until you try.
The more you practice, the better you will become.
Just as you must practice your writing craft, you must
also practice the art of writing without an outline. The
more tools you have in your writer’s toolbox, the better-
equipped you will be to handle rough spots in your novel
when they arise.
Success while pantsing takes a strong belief in your-
self. It takes courage to step outside the conventions of
outlining and simply trust yourself to tell a story.
You already have all the tools you need to write an
amazing novel. You already intuitively understand story
structure and how to write characters because you have
been an avid reader all your life. With practice, you will
subconsciously follow the craft lessons you’ve learned;
the trick is to suppress your fear so you can get out of
your own way and tell the story.
Awareness is the antidote to fear. When I look back
on my first forays into writing without an outline, I wish
I had had a mentor to tell me that the fear I was experi-
encing was normal and that every pantser goes through
it. I also wish someone had told me that the first novel is
the hardest, and that the next one is exponentially easier
because you will understand the process.
Now that we’ve addressed fear, let’s explore some tech-
niques successful pantsers use to write their novels.
Cycling: The Ultimate Tool
Here is a useful technique that will give you structure for
every writing session.
WritersDigest.com I 45
CREATING
STRUCTURE
In his excellent book Writing Into the Dark: How to
Write a Novel Without an Outline, Dean Wesley Smith
explains a technique called cycling. Cycling is the sys-
tematic process of reviewing your work.
To do it properly, stop after every 500 words and
read what you wrote. Look for plot holes, spelling and
grammar issues, and anything else that needs to be fixed.
Then, start writing and repeat the process after the next
500 words.
Cycling has many practical benefits. It helps you spot
more spelling and grammar errors because you review
your work more frequently. It also keeps you in touch
with what you wrote.
Cycling also allows you to address problems as they
arise. If you discover in Chapter 37 that you forgot to
plant a weapon in Chapter 30, you can immediately cycle
back to Chapter 30 and fix the problem. You can jump
around your novel any way that you choose—it need not
only be every 500 words.
Most importantly, however, cycling can help you beat
writer’s block and minimize fear. Let’s say you find your-
self stuck and unsure what to write next. The root cause
of the block may be nearby. Cycle back 500–1,000 words
and figure out what went wrong. Chances are, you did
something recently that caused your block, and once you
fix it, you’ll be writing at regular speed again. As they say
on airplanes, “The nearest exit may be behind you.” That
has been true for me many times while writing without
an outline!
As great as cycling is, you can fall into a perfectionism
trap. Resist the urge to endlessly tinker with your work.
Cycling is best done at a brisk pace. If you find problems,
fix them quickly and move on.
Outlining as You Go
Another secret to pantsing is to outline as you go.
It might sound counterintuitive that I would recom-
mend outlining in an article about pantsing, but con-
sider this: You still need to remember what happens in
your story. Why not outline your chapters after you write
them? This type of outline is called a reverse outline.
You create a reverse outline the same way you create a
regular outline. You can create it in your chosen writing
app, a dedicated outlining app like Plottr, or a Microsoft
Excel spreadsheet. Every time you finish a chapter, add it
to your outline.
46 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
Items you should track include:
• Chapter number
• Point-of-view character
• Setting
• What happened
• Any details that you need to keep track of, such as
character traits or wardrobe changes
Your outline should have enough detail to help you
remember what you wrote, but you shouldn’t spend too
much time on it. Focus on getting the right details down
and move on. Whenever you need to remember some-
thing, don’t reread the chapter—use your outline instead.
Reverse outlining also has an unexpected practical
application. Many outliners do not revisit their outlines
after drafting them. The outline is merely a tool to help
them tell the story, and once written, they don’t need it
anymore. If outliners deviate from their outline, then it
becomes even more obsolete unless they remember to
update it. However, when you create a reverse outline,
everything you write ends up in the outline. It is always
100 percent accurate and up-to-date.
If your book is the first book in a series, you’ll be
amazed at how often you’ll need to refer to the outline
when you write book two, especially if you take time off
between books.
It took me approximately 10 novels to perfect my
reverse outline process. The best way to learn is to out-
line your first book and see how well the outline serves
you when writing your next book. Any weaknesses in
your process will immediately be revealed.
Outlining while pantsing is one of the best things you
can do to stay organized and keep your details in order.
Just because you’re writing by the seat of your pants
doesn’t mean readers should know about it!
The Most Dangerous Area in Every Novel
When Pantsing
Every novel is different, but one spot almost always
causes trouble, even for experienced pantsers. If you can
make it through this spot, your chances of finishing your
novel will increase dramatically.
The spot? The dreaded one-third mark, which is
somewhere around 25 percent to 33 percent in the story.
Here’s how it happens. When you start your novel,
you’re going to feel amazing. You’ll be satisfied with your
writing sessions. Your characterization will look right.
The prose won’t be perfect, but it will be good enough. I
call this the “honeymoon phase.”
Success while pantsing
Then, somewhere around the 25 percent mark, you’ll
encounter trouble. It could be anything: a plot hole, a
character problem, or writer’s block. You’ll lose confi-
… takes courage to step
dence in the story and doubt everything you wrote.
When this happens, resist the urge to do anything
outside the conventions
drastic. As discussed in the fear section, your brain is
playing tricks on you. The one-third trouble happens to
many writers, but it is more pronounced with pantsers
of outlining and simply
because they don’t have a safety net (read: outline).
Push past your fear and keep writing, even when it
trust yourself to tell a
feels hard. Cycle often, keep your outline up-to-date, and
make progress every day. Fear and loss of momentum story.
are your biggest enemies.
What no one told me about the one-third mark is calm and push through the discomfort. When you step
that the trouble doesn’t last for very long. At most, you’ll into the sunshine, you’ll realize that you’re capable of
struggle for a few thousand words, and things will return anything. Never again will the cave scare you.
to normal again. Now, let’s take the analogy one step further. Imagine
Why does this happen? I have a theory. The first that your readers are with you in the cave, and they’re
quarter of your novel is the foundation, and you must following you in the dark. As you discover what hap-
establish your story, characters, and settings. By the 25 pens in the story, so do they. They’re just as terrified as
percent mark, most of your major story elements have you, but when they follow you into the sunshine, they’ll
been established, and now you must figure out how to never forget how you made them feel. They’ll be waiting
make them work together. eagerly to follow you into the next cave.
I have spoken with many writers who languished at That’s just one of the many rewards of learning how to
the one-third mark, but when they realized that every write without an outline. To reap it, you’ve got to make it
writer struggles there, they kept going and succeeded. through that first cave.
That’s why awareness is so important. Whatever prob- Practice the tips in this article, and you’ll be surprised
lem you’re experiencing, remember that pantsers every- at what you can achieve. WD
where have faced it too, and they persevered!
WANT MORE HELP WITH PANTSING? Michael has
You Can Do This recorded a helpful 25-minute video that answers
Writing without an outline is a journey. It’s not for the writers’ most common questions. Learn more at
faint of heart, but if it’s for you, it offers never-ending AuthorLevelUp.com/pantsingvideo
rewards.
Let me leave you with an analogy from Writing Into
the Dark that helped me see the true potential of master-
ing this method.
Imagine you’re exploring a dark cave. It’s pitch black,
and you can hardly see. Everything is new and fright-
ening. There are creepy stalagmites and hidden bodies Michael La Ronn is the Amazon bestselling author of more than
80 science-fiction & fantasy novels and self-help books for writers.
of water. At every turn, you run into a dead-end. A few His book The Pocket Guide to Pantsing helps writers through the
times, you want to quit and run out of the cave, back into murky process of writing a novel without an outline. It is available
safety. But you’ll eventually find the exit if you remain wherever you purchase your books.

WritersDigest.com I 47
CREATING
STRUCTURE

The Literature of Comic Books

Trace the rise of comic
books from “disposable
entertainment for children”
to graphic novels telling the
most important stories of
our time.
BY DON VAUGHAN

IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES: SHUOSHU

48 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

C
omic books today are a revered and often fanati-
cally collected medium, but that wasn’t always
the case. In fact, almost from the beginning, the
popular four-color magazines gave parents, teachers, and
church leaders fits.
The most common lament: Comic books put danger-
ous ideas in children’s heads and turned them away from
more respectable forms of literature. By the mid-1950s,
the outcry had become so vociferous that the indus-
try created its own self-censoring body, the Comics
Magazine Association of America, and with it a lengthy
list of what comic books could and could not contain,
known as the Comics Code Authority (CCA).
Writers were hobbled by the restrictions of the CCA—
it even banned the words horror and terror—so their sto-
ries became trite, repetitious, and boring. The situation
changed dramatically in the early 1970s when the CCA
finally loosened its chokehold, freeing comics to tackle
the issues of the day, including drug addiction, racial dis-
parity, political corruption, and poverty.
In the decades that followed, comic books experi-
enced a remarkable transformation. Superheroes still
dominated sales, but talented writers such as Alan
Moore, Neil Gaiman, Brian K. Vaughan, Ed Brubaker,
Garth Ennis, Brian Azzarello, Alison Bechdel, Colleen
Doran, and many others eagerly took comic books to an
exciting new level in terms of story and storytelling.
For many, Will Eisner was a guiding influence.
Considered by most comic-book historians to be the
father of the modern graphic novel, Eisner explored the
literary potential of comic books as early as the 1940s
with The Spirit, which appeared weekly as a newspaper
comic-book supplement. Eisner’s stories were cinematic
and unconventional, playing with characters and plot in
ways never seen before. Beginning in the 1970s, Eisner
again took the artform to new literary heights with
groundbreaking graphic novels such as A Contract With
God and A Life Force, stories that explored the Jewish
experience in 1930s New York City.
The graphic novel was officially legitimized as
an important literary form with Maus, written and
illustrated by Art Spiegelman. Published serially in Raw
magazine then collected in book form, Maus explores
Spiegelman’s parents’ experiences during the Holocaust
and after, with Jews portrayed as mice and the Germans
as cats and pigs. The book was awarded a special
Pulitzer Prize in 1992, the first graphic novel to receive
such an honor.
An Explosion of Creativity
Today’s comic book creators are pretty much free to
explore any topic and express themselves however they
wish. The result has been an explosion of unparalleled
creativity in both storytelling and art as creators push the
literary envelope.
Ed Brubaker, like many comic book pros, read a lot
of comics as a kid, and even wrote and drew his own
primitive books. In high school, he discovered alterna-
tive comics such as Love and Rockets by Gilbert, Jaime,
and Mario Hernandez and Harvey Pekar’s American
Splendor. He wrote and drew a few stories for a hand-
ful of small publishers, and got his big break penning
a story for Dark Horse Presents titled “An Accidental
Death,” illustrated by his friend Eric Shanower, which
was nominated for an Eisner Award. Today, Brubaker is
best known for his Criminal and Reckless series of dark
crime stories for Image Comics, in collaboration with
artist Sean Phillips.
Brubaker has written a small amount of prose, but
considers comic books his favored medium of storytell-
ing. “I learned to read by reading comics and I think of
stories in the form of comics,” he explains. “Whenever
I’m thinking about what I want to write, it’s usually in the
form of a comic book. Like all things with writing, it’s just
gut instinct. If for some reason Sean and I couldn’t work
together anymore, I might try writing crime novels, though
I suspect they’re much harder than writing a comic book.”
Garth Ennis is another writer driven to write comic
books after discovering them as a kid in Northern
Ireland. “I was fortunate to grow up in the 1980s, when
comics made the quantum leap in their evolution that
fulfilled the medium’s inherent potential,” he notes.
Ennis was gobsmacked by British writers such as Alan
Moore, whose works include Watchmen, V for Vendetta,
From Hell, and Batman: The Killing Joke, and American
writers and artists such as Frank Miller, creator of 300,
Ronin, and the Sin City series. “There was a feeling at
the time that comics could now pretty much tackle any
subject and say whatever their writers and artists wanted,
just like any other creative medium, and that was some-
thing I picked up on,” Ennis observes. “It seemed like
such a fascinating period. There was a sense that any-
thing was possible and you were watching the medium
grow to maturity, exploring possibilities that film, prose,
and so on took for granted.”
One of Ennis’ most popular series is Preacher, illus-
trated by Steve Dillon and published by Vertigo, an
WritersDigest.com I 49
 CREATING
STRUCTURE
imprint of DC Comics. It tells the story of Jesse Custer,
a preacher possessed by an entity known as Genesis,
the result of an unholy coupling between an angel and
a demon. The original series ran 66 issues, and was
adapted for television by AMC.
What to Write
“When it comes to writing, I really proceed on instinct,
but the starting point for any story is usually either long-
standing ambition or spur of the moment,” Ennis says.
“If the former, it’ll be something that’s intrigued me for
years, that I’ve always known I wanted to write about—
most of my war stories fall into this category. If it’s the
latter, it could be something that suddenly occurs to me
when I find myself laughing about something or angry
at something … I wrote a Punisher story for Marvel
Comics about human trafficking; that came from read-
ing an article on the subject and being so appalled at the
level of cruelty involved that I had to write about it.”
For Brubaker, stories commonly spring from the char-
acters he’s writing about or the gist of a premise. “Sean
and I did a graphic novel a few years ago titled My Heroes
Have Always Been Junkies,” he says. “When I had that
initial idea, I couldn’t figure out how to crack it. Then
I decided to set it in the world of Criminal [an ongo-
ing series of noirish crime stories], and suddenly it was
like, Oh, now all these parts make sense. For years, I had
wanted to write a story in which I could talk about me and
several friends who had grown up the children of alco-
holics and drug addicts, so when I started the book, I put
these experiences into a teenage girl’s character.”
Brubaker often starts a story by jotting down a list of
scenes, the basic thrust of the story, the main characters
and their path through the narrative. “My notebooks
are where I do most of my work,” he says. “I fill 20 or 30
pages with chapter titles, notes about different characters
and where their stories will overlap, things like that. I’ll
start writing when I know how I want to begin the story,
or I’ll roughly outline the first two or three chapters, then
I’ll start writing. By the time I start scripting, I know
what the ending is, and what the major movements of
the story are. But I don’t know every chapter or scene on
the way; I leave myself wiggle room. I’ll outline the story,
but I like to leave myself some freedom because stories
and characters shift as you’re writing.”
Comic books are a collaborative effort, with the artist
tasked with bringing the story to life visually. “Essentially,
it’s scriptwriting instead of prose, so it bears more of a
50 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
resemblance to a TV or film screenplay,” observes Ennis.
“The difference is that where the latter two are broken
down by scenes, comic book scripts are broken down by
page and panel. You tell the artist what you want drawn,
what the reader will see, which characters will appear,
how they’ll act. Then you write the captions and dialogue
for each panel. You have to think visually—not that
prose writers don’t, but where the prose writer tells the
reader what they need to imagine seeing for the scene
to work, the comics writer is using the artist as a go-
between, the same way that a screenwriter uses the direc-
tor, scenery, actors, costumes, and special effects.”
The artist usually doesn’t participate in scripting a
story, though they can influence a narrative in other
ways. “Every now and then, Sean will draw a charac-
ter in a way that I wasn’t picturing in the script,” notes
Brubaker. “I’ll like the character so much that I’ll want to
use them more in the story. Or the way he draws a scene
will make me want to spend more time in that location.”
For Ennis, the best artists are good storytellers with
a strong sense of character. “You want someone who
instinctively picks up on what you’re doing, like an actor
in a film who recognizes what the writer intends and
finds some degree of empathy with them that they can
then use to inform their performance,” he says. “As for
input, generally we leave each other to get on with it.”
Determining Literary Legitimacy
Can comic books truly be considered literature?
Brubaker believes so. “I never think that I’m not in the
same league as all of my crime novelist friends,” he
explains. “I don’t really differentiate between a good
novel and a good graphic novel anymore. I write genre
stories but they are aimed at a more literary general audi-
ence. My goal … has always been to write comics that
people who aren’t into comics will read and enjoy.”
Ennis takes a different view. “I don’t think of comic
books as literature any more than a film or TV director
would think of what they do as literature, just because we
all work in completely different media; the term litera-
ture really only applies to prose. Comics have a visual
component that both differentiates them from prose
and renders them unique. Preacher is different from any
prose story of any length because it has that visual com-
ponent. And because the visuals are static, it’s different
from film or television stories as well.”
All writing has its challenges, and comic-book writ-
ing is no different. “It’s very easy to fall into just doing
 GETTING STARTED
Today’s comic books and stand-alone graphic novels feature much more than just Spandex-clad superheroes pummel-
ing each other. In recent years, there have been numerous titles that have explored their intricate stories more literarily.
If you’re new to comics, here are a few titles and series to get you started.
1. Preacher (Vertigo/DC Comics). A preacher with
supernatural powers sets out to find God after He
abandons Heaven. Written by Garth Ennis, illustrated
by Steve Dillon.
2. Scalped (Vertigo). Dashiell Bad Horse returns to the
Oglala Lakota reservation of his childhood as an under-
cover FBI agent assigned to take down a corrupt but
powerful tribal leader. Written by Jason Aaron, illustrated
by R.M. Guéra.
3. Y: The Last Man (Vertigo). A plague kills every male
mammal on Earth—save for Yorick Brown and his
monkey, Ampersand. Suddenly, Yorick is the most
important individual on the planet. Written by Brian K.
Vaughan, illustrated by Pia Guerra.
4. Maus (Pantheon). This Pulitzer Prize-winning graphic
novel uses anthropomorphic animals to tell the harrow-
ing story of the author’s parents’ experiences during the
Holocaust. Written and illustrated by Art Spiegelman.
5. The Contract With God Trilogy (Norton). Contains
three graphic novels written and illustrated by Will
Eisner: A Contract With God, A Life Force, and
Dropsie Avenue. A remarkable exploration the Jewish
th
experience in mid-20 –century New York.
what you’re good at over and over,” notes Brubaker.
“I’m always trying to push myself by trying different
approaches to storytelling, playing around with the way
we use narrative and things like that. Right now I’m writ-
ing a story that’s much more experimental in how it’s
told. In some places it’s characters telling you the story,
in others it’s an omniscient narrator, and you also see bits
and pieces acted out by the characters with no context
whatsoever. I’m always trying to do something that’s a
little bit different from what I did last time.
“Comic books are almost my first language,” Brubaker
continues, “but for friends who are screenwriters or nov-
elists who come into comics, the biggest problems they
have is figuring out how to isolate the moments, what to
put in each frame.”
Comic books, once derisively viewed as cheap,
disposable entertainment for children, have in
recent years found broader public acceptance as the
6. Katusha: Girl Soldier of the Great Patriotic War (Dead
Reckoning). A work of fiction based on historic fact,
this 572-page graphic novel follows a teenaged
Ukrainian girl named Katusha who joins a Soviet tank
unit during World War II. Writer/artist Wayne Vansant
did extensive research to ensure historical accuracy.
7. 100 Bullets (Vertigo). A mysterious organization offers
individuals who have been wronged the opportunity for
revenge by providing a gun, 100 untraceable bullets,
and information on the person who wronged them.
Written by Brian Azzarello, illustrated by Eduardo Risso.
8. My Heroes Have Always Been Junkies (Image Comics).
A daughter of drug addicts holds romantic ideals
about her past until the bad people in her life send
her on the run. Written by Ed Brubaker, illustrated by
Sean Phillips.
9. The Night Eaters: She Eats the Night (Abrams). Chinese
American twins Milly and Billy receive help with their
failing restaurant from their parents, Ipo and Keon. But
when Ipo forces the twins to help clean up the dilapi-
dated house next door, supernatural horrors show
there is more to the family than meets the eye. Written
by Marjorie Liu, illustrated by Sana Takeda.
next generation of creators enthusiastically express
themselves without restriction.
“I believe the market is moving more toward graphic
novels than single-issue comic books,” Brubaker says.
“Marjorie Liu and Sana Takeda, for example, published a
new graphic novel last year with Abrams titled She Eats
the Night [voted one of the best graphic novels of 2022
by the Washington Post]. More and more creators who
are writing for the mainstream reader rather than just
the alt comics reader will create graphic novels aimed
at general audiences because that’s where the bookstore
market is. Readers want a complete story.” WD
Don Vaughan is a freelance writer and comic book collector based
in Raleigh, N.C. His work has appeared in Boys’ Life, Writer’s
Digest, Military Officer Magazine, Encyclopedia Britannica, and
MAD Magazine. He’s the founder of Triangle Association of
Freelancers (TAFNC.com).
WritersDigest.com I 51
CREATING
STRUCTURE
Praising Connection in
Poetry, Family, and Life
Purvi Shah, winner of the 17th Annual Writer’s Digest
Poetry Awards, shares the story behind her winning
poem, “Helix of the gift, lineage song.”
BY ROBERT LEE BREWER
P
icking the winner of the Writer’s Digest Poetry
Awards is always a delight, and this year was no
exception. There were more than 800 entries in
2022 covering a range of forms, subjects, issues, and
themes—and a full spectrum of emotions. In the end, I
selected Purvi Shah’s “Helix of the gift, lineage song” for
the first place prize of $1,000, publication in WD, and a
20-minute consultation with yours truly.
What spoke to me in the poem was the sense of
connection and distance that many of us have felt since
2020—but also pairing that with the connection and
distance of family migration, whether it’s migration from
one country and culture to another or even from one city
to another. Then, add to that the sense of connection and
distance between generations who love each other but
see the world in different ways. For me, this poem does
so much.
52 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
Here’s a quick Q&A with poet Purvi Shah:
What inspired this poem?
In March 2014, I was in a generative Cave Canem
Writing Across Cultures workshop led by the inimitable
Eduardo C. Corral with a number of beloved writers,
including Saretta Morgan, Paul Hlava Ceballos, Miguel
Ángel Ángeles, Aziza Barnes, Mahogany L. Browne,
Amanda Calderon, Sarah Key, Benjamin Krusling,
Ansley Moon, Timothy Ree, and Jenny Xie. “Helix of the
gift, lineage song” emerged nearly 10 years ago from my
IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES: SHUOSHU
actual experience FaceTiming with my father and Ba.
Almost every year from 2004–2020, my parents—
especially my mom—would go to India for 2–4 months
at a time to take care of my maternal grandparents. In
our early years in the States, we didn’t have this technol-
ogy to stay in regular—and visual—touch. Phone calls
were expensive, difficult to make, unreliable. “Helix of
the gift, lineage song” is my praise song for connection—
and that lingering of resonance even when there is so
much absence.
Did you have to revise the poem before
submitting?
[It] came out of me like a waterfall—in its present form
and with much of the language that it bears today.
Writing’s not always so easy. Even yet, in the nearly 10
years since I wrote this poem and its publication, I chis-
eled the poem and made small but invigorating shifts:
“Phrases of migration” became “silts of migration”; “syl-
lable” became “groove”; “mineraled” became “spun”; “sta-
tions” became “continents”; “unlettered” became
“original”; and, I added the spacing in “home but you
have.”
As a poet, I’m always asking: Can this phrase be more
clear, more potent, more evocative? Does the form reflect
the sense of aliveness, spaciousness, movement, emotion
I aspire to convey? Poetry is writing at an atomic and
anatomic level—and I love that I can see how this poem
shifted over the years in minute and magnificent ways.
If you could pass on one piece of advice to
other poets, what would it be?
Write in community and for community. I find writing
challenging—and I love it most when I’m collaborat-
ing with others and creating and sharing in community.
THE 2022 WD POETRY AWARD
WINNERS
1. “Helix of the gift, lineage song” by Purvi Shah
2. “Letter to Myself to be Secreted Away Until” by
Suellen Wedmore
3. “Palimpsest in Purple & Sun” by Ilari Pass
4. “I Married in the Year of Assassinations” by Judith
Chibante
5. “Our Scars & Souvenirs” by Taylor Feuss
6. “I Said I Wouldn’t Talk About God (A Haunted
Sestina)” by .chisaraokwu.
7. “september session” by Nicole Adabunu
8. “an eggshell” by Lorraine Niboro
9. “Morning- Feb 24, 2022 A Bop* for Ukraine” by
Robin Holland
10. “If I grieve at all” by Maryn Boess
I feel grounded when I know my work will be read by
my family, friends, and beloveds. I am enlivened when
I know other women of color, immigrant folks, activists
for equity, and changemakers engage my work and feel
resonance.
Writing can be solo but it does not have to be lonely.
Especially for writers of color, engage with community
literary organizations, collaborate, and support other
writers and artists you cherish. Especially because the
publication process can be so grueling, you can be a life-
line for someone—and they can be a lifeline for you.
Helix of the gift, lineage song
Maslow made a pyramid out
of a heart, I discover as my father
discovers FaceTime. A teenager can’t
see over 40 and grandma
can’t picture the size of your
new shoes. We all visit
amnesia, hoard silts of migration. A walker
scrapes across floor. My father
says, “Aiyo – pick it up & move it.” Age
grates in our ears the way unclean
laundry shudders in our corners. I laugh
and they both hear
my mischief, this salt
of generations that returns
from our own Atlantis. You,
with the walker, have never been to my home but
you have crossed that floor so many times
it has become a groove
spun as two opposing oceans glide
to their continents, as altars trellised in our original names –
a spirit marking
as if the song always starts from the scratch. WD
Robert Lee Brewer is senior editor of WD and author of The
Complete Guide of Poetic Forms.
WritersDigest.com I 53
THE
WD INTERVIEW
Luis Alberto Urrea
W
hen I reach novelist and poet Luis Alberto
Urrea, he and his wife and research partner
Cindy are fresh off another Zoom call with
his book marketing team in New York, working out the
plan for his newest novel, Good Night, Irene. As Cindy
helps him position the camera, a painting of his mother
in uniform on the wall behind him, he tells me it was
“kind of scary” but also that “the pregame excitement is
really moving to me because I think a lot of my books
have had to be explained a lot. It’s given them challenges,
me with my border stuff, and here we are—it wasn’t a
devious plot on my part to do a World War II book about
an American woman ...”
For Urrea, who is best known for his writing about
the people living near and crossing the U.S./Mexico
border, including the 2005 Pulitzer finalist The Devil’s
Highway, his novel Good Night, Irene ventures, in one
way, into new territory. It follows two American women,
Irene and Dorothy, as they enlist in the Donut Dolly
Clubmobile program of the Red Cross during the later
years of World War II and are sent to the front lines
in Europe to provide food—namely donuts—and a
reminder of home to American soldiers. Yet the story
also remains firmly in Urrea’s wheelhouse of writing
about his family history—Irene is based on his mother
who was a “Donut Dolly.”
Family is the throughline for much of our conversa-
tion. When I ask about how he drafts his novels gener-
ally, Urrea connects it to his family. The Hummingbird’s
Daughter and Queen of America are based on his great
aunt Teresita Urrea, the Saint of Cabora. “After 25 years
of research, I had the timeline of her life. It was a skel-
eton upon which I could extrapolate details in my own
style.” Likewise, the 2018 bestseller, House of Broken
Angels “was about the last weekend of my big brother’s
life and so again, that gives you a kind of outline in a way
historically that you can then lie around.”
Given that writing about these personal events, like
his brother’s final days or the undiagnosed PTSD his
54 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
mother faced as a result of her service, means having to
talk about them extensively in public, I’m curious about
how Urrea takes care of his own mental health. His
answer was surprisingly uplifting: “Not to be too pre-
cious, but it does get to you sometimes. But if you could
go with us on the road, you’d see how astonishing it is
for me. People that I would’ve never been able to talk
to come and they’ll share something with you or they’ll
just want a hug or they’ll cry or they’ll pull you aside and
whisper something about their lives to you. It’s so great.”
But it isn’t just readers that Urrea gets to know in
unexpected ways through his writing. When I ask him
to tell me more about the research that went into Good
Night, Irene, he shares how he learned to see his own
mother through a different lens.
You spent decades researching one part of your fam-
ily. Now, with Good Night, Irene, you’ve got a story
inspired by this whole other part of your family. How
has the research and the writing differed with this
new novel?
It’s not research in a way because it’s my mom, and I grew
up with this story. I grew up with the ramifications of the
story but not really understanding it. I think the great
crime we commit is thinking, Oh, it’s just Mom. … I didn’t
really understand what she had gone through or what she
had survived and who she really was. I’ve said this a cou-
ple of times to people because I’m talking to interviewers
often or addressing groups, but it hit me suddenly that my
mom was the only American in my whole family. She was
in exile from New York and from everyone she knew, and
I didn’t even realize how lonely that must have been for
her. She was suffering the ramifications and echoes of her
very hard experiences in combat.
URREA PHOTO © JP CALUBAQUIB
You met Cindy earlier here. She’s a reporter and it’s
helped me a lot doing some of the research in the books,
because she’s a queen of research. We were talking one
time and I started telling her more about my mom
because she never met her. As soon as I started talking
The bestselling novelist shares
the forgotten “fated” true
story behind his new novel and
why he encourages writers to
find joy in what they do.
BY AMY JONES

WritersDigest.com I 55
THE WD INTERVIEW Luis Alberto Urrea
about these Clubmobile women, she was like, “Wait,
what did you say?” “You know, Donut Dollies.” And she
said, “What is that?” So, when I found myself telling
Cindy, I started realizing, This is a really astonishing story
actually. And we started trying to research it. It was really
difficult because they were forgotten. …
The other part of it was finding her truck partner, her
wartime best friend, the last of the Donut Dollies. That
really opened the story for me.
I read in your letter in the advanced reader copy
of Good Night, Irene about going to Europe and
tracing their footsteps, but also that the records of
these women had burned in a fire in the ’70s, and
I thought that was incredible. How do we let this
huge piece of our history just disappear?
It’s hard to comprehend. I think the Red Cross lost a lot
of stuff. It was a warehouse. The women who went were
super patriotic. They weren’t going to gain anything from
it. They had reasons, obviously. I tried to hint at some of
them in the book—some were escaping something—but
most of them just wanted to go serve, wanted to go do
something for their country. Certainly Jill, the woman
who was the inspiration for Dorothy, she said she wasn’t
going to stay in the back. She wasn’t going to be in the rear.
She wanted to be up at the front. The only thing she could
see that would take her to there—she wasn’t any kind of
nurse, [but] she could drive a truck. And off they went.
We learned going through the papers that Jill left
and my mother left, part of their training was to forget.
Part of their training was to not actually know where
they were headed so that if they were captured—and
they were given provisional officers ranking in case the
Germans caught them to try to avoid atrocity—but they
were trained not to know where they were going, and
they often didn’t know.
In the first 80 pages, the characters go from their
homes to D.C. to New York City to Liverpool to
London to Cambridge, with many more locations to
come. What kind of challenges did that present for
you and for your editors in terms of plotting or even
just remembering where they were at a given time?
It was quite the challenge actually, and I obviously got
things wrong. In fact, when we took the trip to Germany,
we rented a badass BMW and off we went down the
Autobahn. I had all my notes about the trip, and
[thought], Wow, this is great. We went to Buchenwald,
56 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
and we did all this stuff, but it hadn’t occurred to me that I
was going the opposite direction of the way they went. My
editor is a stickler on detail, and he’d say, “Wait a minute.
That’s not possible because this is however many hundred
kilometers away from where you’re talking about.” I had
to curb my enthusiasm and try to get precise. This actually
happened in the real world. We’re not in Narnia. …
As far as the challenge for me, it was intense. But I
had a lot of help. Everywhere we went, people flipped
out because they didn’t know the story. For example,
the National World War II Museum in New Orleans—
incredibly helpful. The young docent we got in touch with
took us in, and they didn’t have much, but they did have
the actual uniforms. … If you see the black and white
pictures, they look like they’re brown or gray, but they’re
not. … It’s a beautiful blue. Eisenhower, that style monster,
had haberdasheries in England make them, every one of
their formal uniforms was a bespoke pattern. But they
were all this beautiful blue. Who would’ve known?
I would not guess that at all, especially given some
of the circumstances they find themselves in, having
a bespoke uniform would seem a little frivolous.
But that’s for the formalities. In work they wore dunga-
rees and white blouses, and they had aprons and so forth.
Jill, the Dorothy character, she was, “To hell with this!”
She wore coveralls with a wrap around her head. She
wasn’t kidding around with that garbage. In their sup-
plies, they were given silk stockings, and Jill gave hers
away: “Who wants some stockings? I don’t want ’em!”
I hoped those details about Dorothy were true
because I just loved her character.
Me too. I have to say, I’m in love with Dorothy. It was
an extrapolation on the woman. My mom talked about
her. … She always talked about “Darling Jill.” We knew
that by the time I was starting to work on this, they [the
Donut Dollies] were probably all dead. We thought that
Jill had passed away. We were doing research from the
“Urrea Research Center” here in the library, and Cindy
found a video on YouTube. It’s called “Miss Jill Goes to
War” [YouTu.be/eAwCMIiVdyA]. It was a local news
report, but astonishingly from Champaign-Urbana, 90
minutes away from our house. And here’s Miss Jill, tough
old woman, talking about the war. We flipped out. There
was, in my mom’s stuff, a thing Jill had written, and there
was an address tag on it. We thought, Oh my God, she
may be alive.
 We wrote her a letter, and she called us immediately
when it got there. She was 94 years old, and she always
called me Louis. None of that Luis business—Louis. I got
on the phone with her: “Miss Jill, I can’t believe we got in
touch with you and found you.” She said, “I’m 94 years
old, Louis, you must get down here to see me. Don’t try
to wait till I turn 95, if you get what I’m saying.” So, we
drove down there, and we knocked on her door. When
she opened the door and let us in—a portrait of my mom
on the wall. It was fated.
We spent years with her. She died at 102. We hung
out with her a lot. We interviewed her for hours and she
shared her photo album. We had the photo albums of
hers and my mom’s and both of their writings and her
stories. It was so great. It was so moving to me. She still
had the actual map that she had draped over the wheel as
she drove the truck with her little writings all over it. She
had drawings my mom had done. …
She really was this amazing vivid, vivacious soul who
took the war in stride. Unlike my mom, she was not undone
by it. She introduced me to my mother when she was 27, if
you know what I mean, because she saw her in action. She
saw that my mother was the source of joy for them all.
There’s some great banter in Good Night, Irene, and
it reminded me of a Katharine Hepburn film—very
sharp and funny and smart. How did you channel
the conversational style of that time period that the
Donut Dollies would have had?
I think it’s lost to us now, but American English was so
different back then, and it was snappy. All you have to do
is look at those old movies. Bogart was the slowest talker,
but everybody spoke fast, and they had a certain inflec-
tion in what they said—it was just the American voice.
Miss Jill still had it—not so much in general, because she
was 84, 85, 86, so she was getting slow and frail.
This is partially where it came from—my mother, when
she was on a higher note, being giddy and happy, and
Miss Jill, because she liked to go out. She was a member
of the country club, and she also very much enjoyed being
on a date. We would go to the country club, and then she
would put her arm through mine. I would walk her up the
stairs, and we were clearly on dates.
The waitresses all knew her, and they’d sit her down
and say, “Miss Jill, you look like you need a little glass
of joy juice,” which would be a Manhattan. She would
demure and she’d say, “Oh, I don’t think so, maybe
make it a double.” So, she had this timing. They would
bring her joy juice and she would sit there frail and old,
and she would take a sip or two. Then you’d see her get
naughty. Her eyebrow would go up and she’d start look-
ing around and she’d start zinging people at the table.
Total transformation. And I thought, It’s like a time
machine. … I just fell in love with it. It felt organic to me.
I could almost hear them talking.
So, I won’t try to claim any literary genius thing, but
it was just listening and seeing remnants of that style and
being a fan of those old films.
I’ve laughed a lot in your books. They’re about some
heavy topics like war, death, what happens at the
U.S./Mexico border, but they’re all infused with such
wonderful moments of humor. What’s your approach
to that?
I don’t know what it is. It may just be some kind of weird
failing on my part. I want to be moody. I want to be Jim
Morrison or something and I think I end up being Steve
Allen or one of those ’50s comics.
I don’t want to convey a lack of joy. I think life has so
much joy and so many people are suffering so often. I
teach at the University of Illinois, which is not necessar-
ily the literary joy capital, but in my workshops, one of
my main points is the joy. I mean, you’re getting to play
with words and you’re getting to possibly change the very
existence of someone you don’t know.
One of my writing rules that I tell the students—and
they look at me a little oddly—but I tell them, “Laughter is
a virus that infects us with humanity.” Once you can break
through whatever your worries or barriers are with a good
laugh or at least a feeling of community with somebody
who’s “other” to you, then it’s hard to hate them. It’s hard
to look down on them. And certainly, because so much of
my work was representing border people and the undocu-
mented, when you start to realize that we too, all of us,
love our children. All of us feel hunger the same way. All
of us want a better job, we can share laughter together. I’m
proud that my readership is kind of mixed.
What has working with students taught you about
your own writing?
It’s taught me about what the sheer joy of what we do is.
If you get together with writers, you hear a lot of com-
plaining and people have a lot of bourbon. [Laughs] But
it’s such an astonishing thing. And especially for me, I
didn’t think I was going to go anywhere, do anything. I
spoke Spanish before I spoke English, and to be teaching
WritersDigest.com I 57
THE WD INTERVIEW Luis Alberto Urrea
all these writers at all these American universities feels
like a little bit of vindication to me for the barrio. But I
just think it’s a super blessing all the time.
Also, I had to do some gnarly back-breaking work for
years and now I teach. I roll into a class, and I pontifi-
cate for an hour and a half, and we all say, “See ya.” Those
people I work with are working all night, every night—like
I have all my life—on their work. All of a sudden, you real-
ize that the good stuff that’s happening now allows me to
make connections for them and get their books published.
Which is happening right now with one of my great grad
students. You can’t beat that. I know that I’m just reenact-
ing what Ursula [Le Guin] did for me. I’ll never be the leg-
end Ursula is, but those things are good.
That’s the kind of feel-good story I love to hear in the
writing community. Someone giving you that opportu-
nity and now you’re doing that for your students too.
I feel as though it’s our job to remember where we came
from and how it felt. If we get any place on the stairway, I
believe we need to turn around and tell the next one that
we know, “Come on, get up. I’m going to help you get up to
where I’m at.” Because we have to look out for each other.
Let’s face it, there are people who want to be famous.
There are people who want to be rich. And I always warn
them, neither of those is likely to happen. It could hap-
pen, but this is a hard way to do it. You should learn to
play guitar and go burn your amps on stage. It can be dif-
ficult, but we can’t stop ourselves. When you know some-
one who cannot not do it, that’s some sacred thing. That’s
some incredible indwelling of the spirit and it’s nice to
reach out to them.
You write nonfiction and novels that are historical,
novels that are contemporary, poetry, and short sto-
ries. Do you have a preference among those differ-
ent styles? How do you decide what you’re going to
write next?
I have a really glib answer for that, and forgive me, but it’s
kind of true. If I had my way, I’d be writing haiku day and
night, little Richard Brautigan-style blurts about nothing.
I’m starting to see that as my calling in life—just these lit-
tle marvelous moments we don’t see that we should see. If
you showed me a little spider on a dewy web, I could just
sit there and write about that.
People ask me that question and I tell them, if I get
this idea of a morning, of a sunflower still wet with the
overnight rain, probably haiku. But if I get the idea of
58 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
writing a new history of World War II, probably a book.
But to me, it’s all of a process. And I, being self-taught,
didn’t understand there were people who specialized. Jim
Morrison sang for The Doors and wrote books of poems.
I thought, Cool, man! Leonard Cohen—I worshipped his
records until I saw his novels and his short stories and
his poetry. So, I thought, OK, that’s the secret. We are cov-
ering as many bases as possible here.
I thought I was a generalist like my dad. My dad was
a blue-collar worker against his will. He worked in a
bowling alley, and I learned from my father: This is how
you shellac the bowling lane. This is how you clean out
the toilets and the baskets of dirty stuff from the bath-
rooms. This is how you rebuild broken pins on a lathe.
This is how you climb around the Brunswick machines.
I thought, OK, my dad can do anything, so in writing,
that’s what I thought. I was like a handyman carrying a
box of tools. I had to try to figure out how to use it all.
What are you working on next?
There’s a lot more coming. At the same time that this
mind-boggling experience is starting to happen of the
Irene Machine, I have a book of poetry coming out from
a little tiny press no one’s ever heard of. That’s the soul
work. It’s just me being honest to the muse. …
Then my next book for Little, Brown is a kind of a
deeply mythologized and fictionalized history of Tijuana.
It’s called The Zebras of Tijuana. It’s a wild picaresque romp.
I just wanted to reassure my Mexican readers, I’m still here.
Do you have any last advice for the readers of WD?
Don’t miss any of the interviews. I learned so much from
what other writers have to say, to this day.
Wear the bastards down. Just keep coming back.
You’ll be told no. You don’t know when someone’s going
to say, “Maybe.” …
My first book, Across the Wire, was rejected non-
stop for 10 years. … It was published in 1993 after years
of stuff like, direct quote from an editor in New York,
“Nobody cares about starving Mexicans.” I told her,
“That’s why I wrote this book.” … I’d been working with
people actually starving 10 minutes from downtown San
Diego. I wanted somebody to know. So, you just have to
be really stubborn. WD
Amy Jones is editor-in-chief of WD. Follow her on Twitter
@AmyMJones_5.
32 LINES. ANY FORM. $1,000 PRIZE.
We’re looking for your best poems of 32 lines or fewer—
free verse, odes, pantoums, sonnets, villanelles, and even
haiku—for the 18th Annual Writer’s Digest Poetry Awards!
This is the only Writer’s Digest competition exclusively for
poets. Win cash and an article about you in the July/August
issue of Writer’s Digest.

EARLY-BIRD DEADLINE: OCTOBER 2, 2023

Discover the full prize list and entry details at

WRITERSDIGEST.COM/POETRYAWARDS
YOURSTORY
Captive Audience
Write a drabble—a short story of exactly 100 words—based on the
THE CHALLENGE:
photo prompt below.
A Book for Sam
By April Coker of Lindale, Texas
Trixie paused in the hallway outside
of Jacob’s room. Her youngest boy
sprawled on the floor, his new pic-
ture book propped open on a pillow
in front of him. Next to him on the
floor, Sam the goldfish swam around
in his bowl.
She stopped herself from scolding
Jacob for moving the fishbowl from
the windowsill. Never mind that he
could have spilled the water and fish
or broken the bowl and been injured.
In a flash of motherly wisdom, she
decided to savor the moment.
60 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
Jacob was reading to Sam.
There had never been a more cap-
tive audience.
A Thimple Thpell
By Gretchen Mayer of Mansfield, S.D.
When they bring him home from
the hospital, Emily is upset. He is
not at all what she wants. The sec-
ond her mother leaves the room,
Emily points a finger at her brother
and says, “You are a puppy.”
But Emily is only three and has a
lisp. Suddenly there is a guppy in a
bowl beside her.
CONTEST #121
Out of more than 250 entries,
Writer’s Digest editors and readers
chose these three winners.
Her parents will be angry and
might take away her magic book.
She opens it, reads the unfamiliar
words, then again points her finger.
The word brother, forms on her lips.
A feather flutters in the air, then
floats out the window.
Untitled
By Chris McComb of Louisville, Colo.
Our daughter starts at the end.
When she reads, she starts at the
last page. When learning to tie her
shoes, she started with the knot.
An album on shuffle makes
her crazy.
We brought home a goldfish.
She took it out of the water, it died,
she put it back in the water, it did
not revive.
“I will build a time machine, so I
can see the end of life,” she said.
We thought she meant the
goldfish.
IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES: D3SIGN
She came back, she said she saw
her 40-year-old self. Unhappy; bad
parenting.
We’ll do better.
“You tried.” WD
 ENTERYOURSTORY
THE CHALLENGE: Write a short story of 650 words or fewer based on the photo prompt below. You can be funny, poignant, witty, etc.; it is,
after all, your story.

TO ENTER: Send your story via email to

yourstorycontest@aimmedia.com with the
CONTEST #125 subject line “Your Story 125.” Entries must
be pasted directly into the body of the email;
attachments will not be opened. Include your
name and mailing address. Entries without a
name or mailing address will be disqualified.

NOTE: WD editors select the top five

finalists and post them on our website
(WritersDigest.com/Your-Story
-Competition). Join us in August, when
readers will vote for their favorite to help pick
IMAGE © GETTY IMAGES: THOMAS JACKSON

the winner! Follow @WritersDigest on Twitter

for Your Story updates.

The winner will be published in a future issue of Writer’s Digest.

DON’T FORGET: Your name and mailing address. One entry per person.
DEADLINE: August 21, 2023.

Editing Publicity
Design Affordability
Distribution 90% Royalty
WE'LL GET YOUR BOOK OUT THERE
theInvisibleImprint.com | info@theInvisibleImprint.com
WritersDigest.com I 61
IMPROVE YOUR WRITING
ONE COURSE AT A TIME.
Whether you’re writing for Our workshops cover a wide range of subjects, including:
publication, extra money, or to
• Fiction Writing • Nonfiction Writing
tell personal stories, Writer’s
Digest University has courses • Freelance/Copywriting • Preparing for Publication
that can help get your writing
• Genre/Specialty Writing • Short Story/Essay Writing
career underway. Our expert
instructors provide advice, • Getting Started • Screenwriting Workshops
specific instruction, real-world at Script University
• Marketing/Building a
experience, expertise, and the
Platform
motivation and drive to enable
you to achieve your goals.

Visit WritersOnlineWorkshops.com
to take your writing education to the next level.
First
F
Fii t Draft
afft NEXTDRAFT
Revision and editing advice to take your first draft to the next level.
BY AIGNER LOREN WILSON
Charting Your Novel’s Structure in
a Spreadsheet
I
t’s an understatement to say that
novels are wild creatures with
amorphous shadows and more
appendages than we can often see
when we look at stories head-on.
A novel may have so many moving
parts that a writer will find it impos-
sible to catalog and mark not only
the critical storytelling elements like
resolutions, subtext, and characters,
but also the actual story’s props like
a murder weapon, setting, and sto-
len money or artifact.
Even books that aren’t overly
complicated have more elements
working simultaneously to create
the story’s world and atmosphere
inside the reader’s mind. These
moving parts go beyond what can
usually be covered in outlines, plot
devices, or beat sheets. It takes a
tighter lens or focus to really get all
the parts of a novel in one place so
you can fix the wonderful metadata
of your story that makes it work.
Metadata, by definition, is infor-
mation about other data. Essentially,
metadata is the small matter infor-
mation that makes up something
else. Regarding your novel, your
metadata allows you to see your
story in its separate parts.
Using a spreadsheet to chart
your novel’s elements, you’ll be
able to analyze your novel’s scenes
and structure in a way that helps
troubleshoot what may be holding
it back.
BENEFITS OF CHARTING
A NOVEL
Charting a novel requires breaking
a story into its metadata scene by
scene, then fill in that information
in a spreadsheet that summarizes
the story’s structure or movement.
You can use the term scene as
loosely as you’d like, especially if
you write more experimental fiction
without easily defined scenes.
For writers who have difficulty
recognizing scenes, think about
it like this: A scene is a small
fragment of a larger story that
happens whenever a character or
the narrative slows down to focus
on action or dialogue. Most scenes
revolve around a conflict or focus
point that helps advance the story.
By breaking down your novel
into its working parts and meta-
data, you can identify areas that
need improvement and better
grasp how your book is progress-
ing. Pacing issues are often attrib-
uted to things like beats and story
progressions. But when writers try
to actually identify their beats and
story progressions, they don’t fix the
pacing issues but change the atmo-
sphere and tone of the scene. With a
spreadsheet, you can examine all the
elements of a scene or section that
feels too fast or slow and pinpoint
what aspect is out of whack.
The actual practice of decon-
structing each scene in your novel
for the metadata that makes it up
forces you to examine your story in
a way removed from the emotional
narrative and into the technical.
Let’s say, for example, your novel
focuses on friendship, but when you
place the scenes into a spreadsheet,
you realize none of the scenes have
themes, characters, or focus points
that represent that. You just have
a bunch of people doing things in
some make-believe town.
Eureka! Now, you know why
your critiquers have complained
about not connecting with your
characters or the theme. You realize
you haven’t been giving it to them.
Maybe you’re plotting a locked-door
mystery where the characters keep
moving the actual murder weapon
from room to room without real-
izing it. When writing the story,
you’re not paying attention to where
the antique lamp is going; you’re
focusing on the romantic charge
WritersDigest.com I 63
NEXTDRAFT
between the investigator and the
recent widow. With the spreadsheet,
you can add a column for your
weapon and any other essential item
that charts its movements through
the story. The power of the spread-
sheet is how it gives me the space
and freedom to focus on my novel
while saving the more complex
technical stuff for the editing stage.
YOUR NOVEL’S METADATA
I’ve mentioned metadata and the
moving parts of your story, but what
exactly is that? When talking about
novels in this context, the metadata
are elements like:
• SCENE NUMBER: the numerical
order of the scenes
• SCENE NAME: a short name that
characterizes the scene
• POINT OF VIEW: whose perspec-
tive the scene is in
• CHARACTERS: how many promi-
nent or talking characters are
present in the scene
• WORD COUNT: the number of
words that make up a scene
• SETTING: where the scene takes
place
• VALUE SHIFT: the scene’s move-
ment between positive and
negative
• SCENE DESCRIPTION: a small
paragraph summarizing the
scene’s events
• IMPORTANT OBJECTS: the impor-
tant or plot-related objects that
appear in the scene
• MC MOTIVATION: what drives the
POV character in your scene
• WORLD MOTIVATION: what drives
the greater world outside the
character in the scene
• OPPOSITION MOTIVATION: what
is working against the POV
character
64 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
• PROBLEM: the problem or con-
flict at the heart of the scene
• COMPLICATION: what aspect
makes solving the problem
harder
• INTERNAL CONFLICT: the problem
the POV character is dealing
with on the inside
• RESOLUTION: how the scene’s
problem is resolved or advanced
• PREVIOUS SCENE CONSEQUENCE:
the problem being carried over
• CONTINUING CONSEQUENCE: the
problem from the current scene
that is going on to the next
• CHARACTER CHANGE: the change
the main character or POV char-
acter has gone through
• TURNING POINT: when the scene
shifts or changes, revealing
something new
• CONCLUSION: how the scene ends
• QUESTIONS ASKED: the plot or
character questions you are
bringing up
• ANSWERS GIVEN: plot or story
answers given to the readers
• FIXES: proposed plot or scene
fixes
• NOTES: any notes you have about
the scene
• READER FEEDBACK: if critiquers
have read the scene, include any
of their remarks here
The metadata sections above
are the ones I use, but you can get
even more detailed. You could
add sections for deaths, sickness
progression, ticking time bombs,
clues, miles, etc. Writers should
use whatever metadata helps their
stories move and work in the ways
they want.
Your metadata on a spreadsheet
will make up each column, and the
scenes will take up the rows. That
way, each row or scene corresponds
to the columns of metadata. I like
starting my spreadsheet columns
with the scene number and then
the scene’s name. That way, I have
a sense of the story’s scene order
before I start moving things around
to troubleshoot the plot. You don’t
have to do this, but seeing where
scenes have moved throughout the
story is always fun.
USING YOUR SPREADSHEET
TO TROUBLESHOOT YOUR
NOVEL
To use your metadata and spread-
sheet to fix the issues in your novel,
plug in all the information for each
scene. Here is where you’ll be able to
figure out your novel’s structure. Use
the fill color tool to break your book
into its parts by grouping the scenes
by color. For simple three-act struc-
tures, you’ll highlight the beginning,
middle, and end sections in their
colors. More complicated structures
get the same treatment, but it will
take the writer extra care to find the
scenes that group together.
Once you have your scenes
grouped by color, you can begin
moving through the narrative to
see how each scene builds to craft
the story. You can see if there are
parts of the story that are taking up
more space than they should. For
example, maybe the middle opening
of your story is 5,000 words longer
than all your other sections. On top
of that, perhaps you’ve gotten reader
feedback that a lot of the scenes in
that section were noted as being
slow, or some readers felt you lost
the thread of the story.
If you got those reader comments
without using a charting spread-
sheet, you may think you need to
make more things happen, up the
 Scene number/
name Point of view
Important
Scene description objects
Internal conflict Resolution
Conclusion Questions asked
conflict and excitement. But with
the spreadsheet and your color-
coded system, you see the issue
might be that you’ve added too
much to that section, and you need
to cut it back or break it up into
two sections.
It doesn’t take a lot of writing
technique knowledge to trouble-
shoot your novel with a spread-
sheet—just some story sense. You’ll
need to be able to see that scenes
with a lot of characters may end
up being too wordy or that half the
characters aren’t talking. The most
significant aspect of your novel you’ll
be able to troubleshoot is whether
Characters Word count
World/opposition
MC motivation motivation
Previous scene Continuing
consequence consequence
Answers given Fixes
you’re making good on the questions
and conflicts you bring up.
For example, maybe you raise a
question in an opening scene about
why a character attacked another
character. But as you’ve mapped
your novel, you realize the care-
fully built tension between the two
characters’ families you thought you
were designing never happens on the
page. So, the answer is never given,
and that big fight scene’s crucial
turning point in the story falls flat.
For me, charting my novel in a
spreadsheet absolutely changed the
way I revise my stories. It gave me
insight I didn’t have before. When
Setting Value shift
Problem Complication
Character change Turning point
Notes Reader feedback
I explain my process to some,
they call it overkill. This mapping
technique isn’t for every writer. It is,
however, for the writer who wants
to dig into how the narrative parts
of their story function together as
more than a creative work, making
a more enjoyable experience for
the reader. WD
Aigner Loren Wilson (AignerLWilson
.com) is a literary speculative fiction writer
and editor. She is a senior fiction editor
for Strange Horizons and her work has
appeared or is forthcoming in Interzone
Magazine, The Magazine of Fantasy and
Science Fiction, The Writer, and more.
WritersDigest.com I 65
 CRITIQUE AND
EDITING SERVICES
SEND YOUR WORK TO WRITER’S DIGEST
2ND DRAFT CRITIQUE SERVICE!

2nd Draft provides a high-level review of your writing,

pointing out reasons your work may be getting rejected or
may not meet the standards of traditional publication.
After an evaluation of your submission, one of the
professional 2nd Draft critiquers will provide feedback and
advice. You’ll not only learn what’s working in your writing,
but what’s not, and—most importantly—how to fix it.

WHAT CUSTOMERS ARE SAYING ABOUT 2ND DRAFT...

“I was extremely pleased with the results I got from 2nd Draft. As a
new writer, I was dying for some professional advice after finishing
my first novel. The critique I received was invaluable. My editor, Terri
Valentine, sent me a personal letter giving me advice on everything
CRITIQUE SERVICES from POV flaws to grammatical mistakes to ways of making my book
1-Page Query Letter more of a page turner. In addition, she left comments, corrections,
Short Story and suggestions throughout the pages I sent her. I will be forever
Manuscript grateful. Thank you, 2nd Draft!” — KIM CHAVEZ
Picture Book
Agent Plot Critique “2nd Draft offered me a professional pair of fresh eyes and the
2-Page Synopsis spit shine my manuscript needed. I can now submit my first three
Personal Essays chapters without hesitation.” — LYNNE ELLIS MARINO

EDITING SERVICES
Line Edit
Developmental Edit FOR MORE INFORMATION, VISIT
Proofreading www.WritersDigestShop.com
2023 VIRTUAL CONFERENCES
Genre-Specific Instruction From Award-Winning
Authors, Plus Agent Feedback
SECRETS OF HORROR
PUBLISHING October 14
July 15
NONFICTION
SCIENCE FICTION/ November 11
FANTASY
August 26–27 HISTORICAL
FICTION
MASTERING December 9–10
STORYTELLING
September 23

Visit WritersOnlineWorkshops.com
scan the QR code to find
out more and register.
 AGENTSPOTLIGHT
Seasoned literary agents on the business of publishing.
BY KRISTY STEVENSON
E
rnie Chiara started with
Fuse in 2017—as a writer
and client. He recalls want-
ing to learn as much as he could
about what was happening behind
the scenes with publishers, editors,
their likes and dislikes, what books
they were acquiring, etc. And the
more he absorbed, the more his
interest in the agenting side of the
business grew.
Today, Chiara tries to be the type
of agent every writer hopes to find.
“And that’s different for everyone,” he
says. “But it starts with open commu-
nication so we’re working together
toward the same goal. I want my cli-
ents to know exactly what’s happen-
ing with their projects as we prepare
them to submit to publishers, which
acquiring editors we’ll be sharing
them with, and what’s happening at
every point along the way.”
What do you look for
in clients?
Writers whose work jumps off the
page, and stories that grab me and
force me to keep reading. I need
68 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
Ernie Chiara
Fuse Literary | Boston, Mass.
GENRES: Fantasy, science fiction, and horror in the adult, young adult (YA), and
middle-grade age categories, as well as YA contemporary
CLIENTS INCLUDE: Katharine J. Adams, Cassandra Newbould, Aman J. Bedi,
Meredith Mooring
to care deeply about what happens
to their characters. I need them to
feel real to me, with genuine wants,
needs, troubles, and beliefs. I also
tend to look for immersive stories
with propulsive plots and richly lay-
ered world-building, and I’m always
on the lookout for stories that bring
something original and fresh to the
genre, that either haven’t been done
in that particular way or from that
perspective.
What are you seeking?
Sci-fi and fantasy have always
been close to my heart because
they stretch the boundaries of our
imaginations. They can shine a light
on our society and envision paths
toward change. I’m seeking unique
stories in fantasy, science fiction,
and horror, as well as YA contempo-
rary novels. I prioritize work by tra-
ditionally underrepresented voices
with an aim toward correcting the
enormous imbalance in whose sto-
ries end up on shelves. My complete
manuscript wish list can be found at
ErnieChiara.com/mswl.
What are your pitching tips?
Keep your query letter to
around 250 words. Start with a
personalized greeting, along with
why you feel your work matches
the agent’s wish list. Next, include
your title, genre, age category, word
count, and comparison titles. Then
give us 2–3 paragraphs written like
what you’d envision for the back
cover copy of your book. Start with
who the main character is at the
start and what happens to alter
their status quo and set the events
of the book in motion. Give us
what they must do to achieve their
goals, what stands in their way, and
what the consequences of failure
would be.
That last part is important as it
ILLUSTRATION © GETTY IMAGES: FRANK RAMSPOTT
establishes the stakes of the story.
It’s not enough to say they must do
a thing. We also need the what hap-
pens if they don’t? so your query
ends with the stakes as heightened
as possible. Making an agent abso-
lutely need to know what happens
is a surefire way to hook us into
requesting your pages.
What are your querying
pet peeves?
If the query is much too short or
much too long, if it doesn’t follow
our submission guidelines, or if it’s
sent via email rather than Query
Manager, our agency’s preferred
method. Also, if it tells us more
about why the writer wrote the
book than about the book itself, it’s
not going to get our attention. This
is a complete shame and a wasted
chance for that writer. Take the time
to give yourself the best possible
chance to succeed.
looking to fill. Writing with some-
thing new and fresh to share shows
through on the page. Those are the
books I’d love to see.
What are you reading?
A great blog I’d recommend to any
aspiring author is at Michael
Mammay.com. Aside from being a
superb writer, Mammay is passion-
ate about sharing his personal expe-
riences along his publishing journey
and helping to keep that ladder up
for writers who are up-and-coming
or just starting out.
their first books don’t find homes
with publishers. I prefer to form
lasting relationships with positive,
talented writers who are in it for the
long haul and want to keep writ-
ing and working toward putting out
incredible books for years to come.
Follow and connect:
ErnieChiara.com
FuseLiterary.com/erniechiara
Twitter.com/erniechiara
Instagram.com/erniechiara
Facebook.com/erniechiara WD

What are your writing tips? What makes you unique?

Write from your heart. Write the
book you’d love to read. And never
try to chase trends or fit into what-
ever box you think publishers are
I look to sign writers for their whole
careers, not just for one book. I’m
not the type of agent who will sign
dozens of clients and let them go if
Kristy Stevenson (KristyStevenson.com) is
an independent contributing writer, editor,
and storyteller. A native Cheesehead, she
currently resides in central N.C. with her
husband and two children.

Script has been the leading

source for information on the
craft and business of writing
for film and television since
1995. With inside information,
articles written by working
writers and filmmakers, and in-
depth interviews, Script is the
resource on every scriptwriter’s
must-read list.

s at
r m a tio n, visit u
e info
F or m or
riptm ag.com
www.sc

WritersDigest.com I 69
ONNONFICTION
The art and craft of writing nonfiction.
BY ALISON HILL
All Human, All the Time
T
o distinguish myself from
robots, I’ve decided to label
my work “all human, all
the time.” It will be my hallmark, a
stamp of authenticity.
Sophisticated AI applications like
ChatGPT could negatively impact a
large portion of the world’s work-
force (although some claim it also
creates jobs). We’re already seeing a
deluge of online content either fully
or partially created by AI, and it will
only increase as more people take
advantage of this powerful yet user-
friendly technology.
This makes “real” writing as valu-
able as gold in 2023. Our unique
abilities should be celebrated, and
readers deserve to know whether
text is AI-generated or not. We’re
living in extraordinary times, and
disclosure and transparency are
vital. We must protect our liveli-
hood, our work, and—more impor-
tantly—advertise our worth.
So how can nonfiction writers
navigate this new frontier?
First, let’s look at this shiny new
toy that has techies salivating, con-
tent creators chomping at the bit,
veteran writers biting their nails,
and tech leaders worried about a
robot rebellion.
Launched in November 2022,
ChatGPT (Generative Pre-trained
70 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
Transformer) is a conversational AI
chatbot that amassed an astounding
100 million active users in just two
months. It can generate text in sec-
onds, produce answers to questions,
explanations to complex topics, and
write content such as blogs, essays,
poetry, and even novels. This tech-
nology is not only impressive, but it
could also push automation forward
so fast that it’s hard for society to
keep up. Even tech leaders like Elon
Musk are concerned and have called
for a six-month moratorium on fur-
ther development.
Should we feel threatened by
the influx of ChatGPT generated
content? Will bot writers replace
humans? I’m picturing visor-wearing
robots furiously tapping on key-
boards, cigarettes dangling from their
metal mouths. One of them jumps
up yelling, “Hold the front page!”
Most of us already use AI pow-
ered apps. I just asked Siri: “syn-
onyms for monotonous,” and as
usual, “she” can’t understand my
Welsh accent, so I end up having to
type it myself. But it saves me from
having to dig out a thesaurus. We
use automation tools to help with
many tasks and some writers use
typing assistants like Grammarly
and transcribing services for inter-
views. So, can ChatGPT be seen as
just a natural step in the technologi-
cal progression?
I would say it’s more like a
giant leap. There’s a huge differ-
ence between using technology to
spell-check something you wrote
and AI writing the whole piece for
you. And these tools are unreli-
able, with inconsistencies, bias, and
inaccuracies commonly reported by
users. However coherent, copy also
comes across as dull, wooden, and
formulaic.
AI tools like ChatGPT learn from
human-created content, scraping the
internet and ingesting articles, books,
and websites—but without the con-
sent of creators. This raises serious
issues regarding plagiarism, owner-
ship, and copyright. A group of
artists have taken legal action against
AI art generators, claiming their
work is being used without com-
pensation and attribution. In March
2023, the Copyright Office launched
a new initiative to examine copyright
law and policy issues in relation to
AI. Under current laws only humans
can claim authorship, but new guide-
lines are being developed.
So, who’s using this technology
and for what purpose? Business-
people use ChatGPT to complete
tedious, repetitive tasks. Many
digital marketers, content creators,
copywriters, and bloggers utilize
AI tools to create a first draft or for
help structuring and outlining a
piece. AI written e-books are now
available on Amazon, and “authors”
are unabashedly selling these works
on the site.
Can AI benefit writers who
need help with some of the pro-
cess? Maybe, but it’s still disingenu-
ous, especially if they get a byline
or an author title. Writers write.
I would feel uncomfortable tak-
ing credit for something I didn’t
create from scratch. Every part
of the writing process is impor-
tant, from idea stage to the sixth
rewrite. But the first draft is when
magic happens and ideas flow freely.
Writing the opening paragraph
after hours of procrastinating is
the breakthrough for me. As New
York Times-bestselling author Rich
Cohen explains, “Writing a nonfic-
tion story is like cracking a safe. It
seems impossible at the beginning,
but once you’re in, you’re in.”
AI-written text is basically a
rehash of other people’s work. You
didn’t do the research, and these
are not your original thoughts. As
one writer friend put it, it’s cutting
and pasting from existing articles.
And even if you rewrite it, the
magic that occurs during the pro-
cess is lost.
Writing isn’t easy, and most of
us procrastinate under a loom-
ing deadline because we know the
struggles involved. Writing from
the heart is exhausting, and see-
ing our work in print exhilarating.
Good writing comes from practice,
training, hard work, and experience.
Even the naturally gifted writer
has issues. Sometimes the words
flow easily and effortlessly. Other
times just writing the first sentence
takes hours. We improve our craft Strong writing evokes
through doing and we learn through
reading, studying, and from the visceral responses in
advice of other writers. The greatest the reader, drawing
teacher of all is trial and error. on authentic lived
Many content creators are happy
to let AI do their writing for them.
experience that
They care little about learning the no robot can ever
craft and the creative process, just the replicate.
volume of monetized content. Now
even more clickbait will be churned
But there are safeguards in place
out and dumped onto the digital
for writers, the writing industry,
scrap heap. Who knows if they even
and readers who value integrity.
review the work before posting.
Some publications will not pub-
As a professional freelance writer
lish text generated by AI and are
and journalist, I find this new
asking for disclosure on any use of
“trend” naturally worrying. If every-
these tools in the process. Others
one claims they’re a writer (without
require AI-generated work to be
doing the work), the title becomes
clearly labeled. There are also tools
meaningless.
now available to opt-out of future
We can look at this from two
AI training. AI may also create so
angles: as a danger to our profession
much mistrust, that people will start
or as an opportunity to distinguish
begging for human-only writers.
ourselves and shine like golden glit-
I could use help with many
ter on a cowpat. (That zinger was all
things, but I’d rather keep my actual
mine, eat your heart out ChatGPT!)
writing pure. I’ve been doing this for
Writing is so much more than
more than two decades, and when
stringing words together and relay-
I’m stuck, I have human writing
ing information. Strong writing
friends and mentors to lean on for
evokes visceral responses in the
guidance and advice.
reader, drawing on authentic lived
It’s time to revel in our unique
experiences that no robot can ever
abilities and advertise our well-
replicate. How can AI even begin
earned expertise.
to express the intangible? It has
My writing will always be origi-
no capacity for feeling, it can only
nal. And yes, it will also be flawed
describe and mimic ours through its
and raw, with a misplaced comma
programming.
or two—but it will be beautifully
Technology is improving by the
human and 100 percent real. WD
hour, so who knows how adept it will
become at impersonating human
emotions and describing our lives.
Alison Hill is a Welsh-born writer, jour-
But ChatGPT will never be able to nalist, and Emmy-nominated producer. A
write a genuine piece about losing 25-year media veteran, she’s done every-
a baby, falling in love, or childhood thing from hosting PBS shows and live BBC
radio, to filming undercover. She writes
memories. Only we can do this.
for various print and online publications,
However sophisticated it becomes, including a monthly column for Writers
AI is a machine, not a living being. It Digest.com, and is also a New York
has no life to write about. Times stringer.
WritersDigest.com I 71
PUBLISHINGINSIGHTS
4 Shelter Magazines
C
reating structure makes me
think one of two things:
First, I think of writing
structure, whether we’re talking
poetry, prose, email messages,
or whatever else can be written.
Second, I think of actual physical
structures—like houses and other
buildings. In magazine publishing,
these are often referred to as “shelter
magazines” (or home-and-garden
publications).
Many of these shelter magazines
thrive on high-impact photography
and beautiful homes and buildings.
The editors usually wish to have
exclusive rights to cover these struc-
tures and connect the editorial and
photography to a certain lifestyle—
whether that’s cutting-edge archi-
tecture or a more earthy, country
aesthetic.
Since shelter magazines are often
focused on the home and people
live in homes, this is a category that’s
been strong for a long time and
shows no signs of weakening in the
near future—and that’s always a good
thing for writers. Here are a few shel-
ter magazines open to submissions.
ATOMIC RANCH
(Atomic-Ranch.com)
Atomic Ranch is published six times
per year. Based in Durham, N.C.,
the magazine is focused on mid-
century modern (MCM) design and
72 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
décor. Each issue
includes house
tours, design
tutorials, and col-
lectibles tips.
The editors
say, “Love mid-
century modernd style? Then kick
back at Atomic Ranch, your desti-
nation for MCM design, architec-
ture, and history, plus all the build,
renovation, preservation, décor, and
lifestyle coaching you need to make
life in this century optimally groovy.
Whether you’re restoring a period-
perfect mid-century house or infus-
ing mod style into an abode built
in another era, we’re the ultimate
community for inspiration and the
practical tips you need to turn your
dreams into reality.”
The editors of Atomic Ranch are
looking for contributors who are
passionate about architecture, col-
lectibles, and history. Potential writ-
ers can submit a short description
of why they’re interested in being a
contributor, qualifications that show
expertise (with writing and photog-
raphy samples), and contact infor-
mation via email to contributor@
atomic-ranch.com.
The editors say, “We’ve got our
eyes out for people who have their
finger firmly on the pulse of trends
in the world of mid-century mod-
ern and love to write about them.
BY ROBERT LEE BREWER
Ideal experts may include MCM-
era homeowners, lifestyle bloggers,
professional interior designers and
decorators, history buffs, vintage
collectors, retro-loving jet setters,
renovation or preservation gurus,
creative crafters, and DIY mavens.
Potential contributors should show
expert knowledge in their topic/field
as well as exemplary writing and
photography skills.”
DWELL
(Dwell.com)
Dwell is a
bimonthly maga-
zine. While rates
can vary, this
publication’s rates
start at $1 per
assigned word for
print and $.50 per word for the web-
site. Print assignments and exclu-
sives often fall within the $1,000–
$2,000 range.
The editors say, “For more than
20 years, Dwell has championed
home design that improves people’s
lives. We feature new ideas about
what a home can and should be,
offer expert advice for making your
own space a better place to live, and
provide a marketplace for the best-
designed products available.”
Potential writers can submit
their ideas to editors in a range of
verticals.
 • DESIGN (Mike Chino, mike
.chino@dwell.com; Duncan
Nielsen, duncan@dwell.com)
featuring “outstanding homes
and spaces from all over the
world that have noteworthy sto-
ries about their creation.”
• CULTURE (Sarah Buder, sarah
.buder@dwell.com) exploring
the “intersection of architecture
and design as they relate to cul-
ture at large.”
• IDEAS (Kate Dries, kate.dries@
dwell.com) focusing on the
“issues and ideas that affect our
homes and how we live, and
explores the intersection of
design and social justice.”
• GUIDES (Megan Reynolds,
megan.reynolds@dwell.com)
sharing “everything from step-
by-step instructions for DIY
projects to all you need to know
about hiring and managing the
team of pros that will build your
dream house.”
• SHOP (Julia Stevens, julia
.stevens@dwell.com; Kenya Foy,
kenya.foy@dwell.com) offering
“buyer’s guides, product reviews,
gift guides, and shop-related
how-to articles.”
The editors say, “In everything
we do, we advocate for design that
is … Humanistic: It responds to the
needs of real people and frames new
ways of living. Forward-looking: It
embraces new building methods
and enhances its social and ecologi-
cal context. Optimistic: It embodies
Dwell’s core belief that design can
shape a better world.”
FINE HOMEBUILDING
(FineHomebuilding.com)
Fine Homebuilding is a bimonthly
magazine for builders, architects,
contractors,
owner/builders,
and others who
are involved
in building
new houses or
reviving old ones.
They pay a starting rate of $150 per
published magazine page—plus,
reimbursements for preapproved
expenses for materials and
incidentals.
The editors say, “What makes
Fine Homebuilding unique is that
most of our articles are written by
people who actually do the work
they write about. Our chief contrib-
utors are home builders, architects,
and other professionals.”
The editors have identified a few
categories that most articles fall into:
Technique articles covering a spe-
cific method or skill; design articles
covering completed houses, addi-
tions, or renovations; and project
articles focused on specific building,
remodeling, or home-improvement
projects. Potential writers can send
pitches and digital images via email
to fh@taunton.com.
The editors say, “We’re inter-
ested in almost all aspects of home
building, from laying out founda-
tions to capping cupolas. Whether
the subject is a fundamental method
for framing a second-story addition
or a complex technique for veneer-
ing cabinet doors, we look for high-
quality workmanship, thoughtful
designs, and proper procedures.”
MIDWEST HOME
(MidwestHome.com)
Midwest Home is published six
times per year. This magazine is
focused on fine homes and gar-
dens in the Twin Cities and around
Minnesota.
The editors
say, “Midwest
Home inspires
its readers with
design trends,
entertaining
ideas, tips from
decorators and gardeners, and fea-
tures on new homes and renova-
tions. The print magazine has been
recognized with numerous awards
for its fine editorial content and
beautiful design over the years.”
Prospective writers should include
the following information about their
project: name and role in the project;
project location, completion date, and
description; digital images; homeown-
ers’ contact information (and whether
permission for publication is secured);
contact information for contributors
(and whether there are any conflicts
with writer). Pitches can be sent via
email to editor Katelyn Bloomquist at
kbloomquist@greenspring.com or
by snail mail to: Katelynn Bloomquist,
Midwest Home, 9401 James Ave S Ste.
152, Bloomington MN 55431.
The editors say, “Midwest Home
features beautifully photographed
stories about well-designed spaces
both inside and outside area homes.
We’re always looking for examples
of outstanding architecture, remod-
els, interior design, and landscape
and garden design. Keep in mind
that projects you submit must have
been completed within the past two
years to be considered for publica-
tion. They must also be located in
Minnesota or have a strong connec-
tion to Minnesota.” WD
Robert Lee Brewer is senior editor of
WD and author of The Complete Guide of
Poetic Forms.
WritersDigest.com I 73
 LEVELUPYOUR
WRITING(LIFE)
Advice and tips to boost your writing skills.
BY SHARON SHORT
Overcome the Pantser vs.
Plotter Dichotomy—And Improve
Your Prose
H
ang around any gathering
of prose writers, and soon
you’ll hear the question:
“Are you a pantser? Or a plotter?”
Pantsers write, per the old
bromide, “by the seat of their pants.”
Meaning, they plop down in a seat
with a glimmer of an idea, staring
at a blank computer screen or
sheet of paper, and start writing—
letting whatever comes out of their
imaginations unfold, making up
each character and scene as they
go along.
Plotters, on the other hand, cre-
ate outlines, synopses, and character
descriptions before they start writ-
ing the actual project. Visions arise,
from grade-school days of yore, of
rigid Roman-numerated outlines.
But there’s a myth that drives these
definitions: pantsing as a creative
free-for-all; plotting as a rigid proce-
dure. The myth continues: Pantsers
cannot imagine the constrictiveness
of being a plotter; plotters cannot
imagine the meandering that’s surely
inherent in being a pantser.
Do you like schedules, plans,
to-do lists, itineraries, maps? Then
74 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
you might lean more frequently
toward plotting.
Or do you prefer a looser idea
of what a week, or a trip, might
entail? Then you might lean more
frequently toward pantsing.
(Of course, writers can be some-
what, ahem, contrarian. I’m sure
there are plenty of writers who are
plotters in their everyday lives, but
once they sit down to write, give
themselves a break by going into full
pantsing mode—and vice versa.)
I referred to “pantsers versus
plotters” in my last column.
But full disclosure: Though
pantser and plotter are convenient
shorthands that I’ve used in writing
and in conversation, I don’t believe
the dichotomy is real. Emphasizing
it too much creates a false binary
that tosses writers into one of two
silos. And thinking of yourself and
other writers as either one or the
other can do harm to your creative
process and your writing projects.
Instead of viewing pantsing and
plotting as either/or, it’s healthier
for your creativity and your writing
to think of them as yes/and. Each
mode has its uses, and each has its
pros and cons.
And every writer best serves
themselves and their projects by
keeping both modes handy in their
writerly toolkits, and learning how
to use each effectively, switching
between the two whenever needed.
How?
CONSCIOUS AND
SUBCONSCIOUS
Well, first let’s start by correlating
plotting to the conscious mind and
pantsing to the subconscious.
The Merriam-Webster Dictionary
online defines conscious as “per-
ceiving, apprehending, or noticing
with a degree of controlled thought
ILLUSTRATIONS © GETTY IMAGES: FRANK RAMSPOTT, WILDPIXEL
or observation.” For example, those
times when a writer might stop and
think something like: Wait, if Sue
and Joan are going to meet at the
corner of Maple and Vine at 2 p.m.,
then I need Sue to leave the coffee
shop three miles away earlier than
1:50, which means …
The dictionary’s definition
of subconscious, on the other
hand, is “existing in the mind
but not immediately available
to consciousness … the mental
activities just below the threshold
of consciousness.” For example,
those times when a writer runs
across, say, a news item about a new
bakery opening, one that focuses on
dog treats.
One writer might barely process
that news. Another might feel that
visceral internal leap of an idea—
perhaps immediately or days or
months later: What if a lonely single
woman who takes in stray dogs sud-
denly quits her secure job to open a
bakery for dog treats?
In this way, we’re all pantsers
when it comes to initial ideas. Plotters
would do well to embrace this notion,
and thus be more open to how their
subconscious sometimes grabs onto
external news, observations, or expe-
riences to turn those into something
new, or at least unique to their per-
sonality and viewpoint.
KNOW WHEN TO PANTS,
KNOW WHEN TO PLOT
Eventually, all writers hit a wall in
their projects—in every project.
This isn’t the same as writer’s
block—that dreaded feeling of being
unable to bring oneself to write at
all. True writer’s block stems from a
faltering of will or of self-confidence
or of desire to write.
Hitting an inevitable wall in your
project, though painful (because
when is hitting a wall ever not pain-
ful?), is much easier to manage.
The first step is to admit to your-
self that, well, you’ve hit a wall.
Let’s say you lean more toward
pantsing and you’ve zipped along
for 30, 50, 100 or more pages with
scenes and dialogue and ideas bub-
bling up from your subconscious.
Wheee! But suddenly, you realize
you need to know a lot more about
baking dog treats for your dog-treat-
bakery-inspired romance/cozy mys-
tery/horror story. (Yes, any of those
genres—and all the others as well—
could work. It just depends on the
writer’s preferences, world view, and
so on.) You must know, for example,
if some dogs might be allergic to,
say, cornstarch in dog treats, for the
sake of the plot you’ve concocted
thus far. Or, you suddenly realize
you don’t know exactly why your
protagonist quit her cushy corporate
job to start a dog treat bakery.
That’s fine. Take a deep breath.
Pause. Cast a sly glance over to the
plotters you know—and adapt their
techniques:
• Write an outline of what you
have drafted thus far.
• Create a bio and character
sketch for your protagonist.
• Make a big old chart or list of
how each character relates to
the others: antagonist? Ally?
Gatekeeper?
Keep going until your pantsing
self emerges again, ready to draft
more pages.
Let’s say you lean more toward
plotting, and you have a detailed
synopsis, in-depth character descrip-
tions, and basic research noted,
annotated, and indexed! And now
you’re 30, 50, or 100 or more pages
into the project. Wheee! But sud-
denly, you realize that the character
motivation you worked out weeks or
months ago just … isn’t working.
That’s fine. Take a deep breath.
Pause. Cast a sly glance over to the
pantsers you know—and adapt their
techniques:
• Try writing a letter from one
character to another without
planning it or thinking too long
and hard about it.
• Or write an existing scene again
from another character’s point
of view.
• Or even jump ahead—and write
a scene from the middle or end
of your book.
Keep going until your plotting self
emerges again, ready to revise your
outline for the balance of your proj-
ect to see you through to the end.
PROS AND CONS
The pro of pantsing is the creativity
and freedom that come from trusting
the subconscious and letting words
flow onto the page, reassured by
knowing that you can revise later. But
the con is that pantsing can’t provide
the objective logic needed to sort out
thorny plot conundrums, character
motivations, or research needs.
The pro of plotting is that it can
be applied to take care of those
issues. But the con is that methodi-
cal, conscious plotting can’t provide
the inspiration, flights of imagina-
tion, and even whimsy that breathe
life into writing projects.
All writers are both pantsers and
plotters. And all of us prefer one
mode over the other. But all of us
also, at some point, need to use both
modes to get the most satisfaction
out of our writing lives, and the best
finished projects possible. WD
Sharon Short (SharonShort.com) is
the award-winning author of more than
a dozen novels, most recently in her
Kinship Historical Mystery Series, inspired
by Ohio’s true first female sheriff in
1920s Appalachia, published as Jess
Montgomery (JessMontgomeryAuthor
.com) by Minotaur Books. Find Sharon on
Facebook @SharonShortAuthor or
@JessMontgomeryAuthor.
WritersDigest.com I 75
BUILDINGBET TERWORLDS
Tips for making your story concrete.
BY MORIAH RICHARD

Clothing

W
hat your characters
are wearing might
seem like a small
consideration in the grand scheme
of your story—and you may very
well be correct. But there are many
books where fashion is integral
to the world-building. One of my
favorite examples of this is how
the difference in clothing between
the districts and the capital in The
Hunger Games series is a tangible
way to show the corruption of their
government and differences in
social status.
But like with all world-build-
ing, you don’t want to get trapped
into hours and hours of designing
clothing for your characters and not
actually writing their story. To avoid profession. Miners will have repaired are all small considerations
this, it might be helpful to focus on different clothes made of different you might face as you write.
the following details. fabrics than schoolteachers. Does You’ll also want to think about
your character’s lifestyle require manufacturing here. If your story
FABRIC them to wear something light and is set in a medieval-inspired fan-
This will largely be determined by open, allowing for a wide range tasy setting, it would be a stretch if
where your characters are located. If of movement and flexibility? Or your characters were wandering the
they live in a very hot, sunny, arid do they live somewhere where countryside in rubber-soled shoes
climate, they’ll probably be wearing it’s necessary for them to hide (the earliest rubber-soled shoes were
something light-weight and breath- valuables on their person, with made in the late 1800s). Likewise, if
IMAGE © GETTTY IMAGES: ATHIMA TONGLOOM

able, with longer lengths to protect
their skin from burning. Or if they
live somewhere colder and rainier,
they’ll have thicker, less absorbent
materials to keep them warm but
won’t get saturated by the elements.
Another consideration around
fabric will depend on the character’s
hidden pockets and thicker fabric to
conceal items? What about if they’re
going to be traveling long distances
(even as far as space travel)?
Whether their job requires them
to be outside or inside, if the fabric
itself is easily replaceable or not, and
if it’s something that can be easily
your story is set far, far in the future,
they probably won’t be wearing
t-shirts and blue jeans (I’m no for-
tune teller, but just looking at how
style has changed in the last 100
years, I’m hazarding a guess).
Here are some go-tos for avail-
able materials: cotton, linen, hemp,

76 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

wool (from various animals), silk,
leather, fur, synthetic fibers, and
precious metals (like gold strands).
COLORS
The type of fabric you’re using or
your character’s profession might
make this an easy choice for you.
If your character is in the medical
industry or works in law enforce-
ment, they might need to wear
particular colors that identify them.
Or if they’re from a culture that
uses animal skins for clothing, they
might not find it necessary to dye
the materials, especially if they
need to blend in better with their
surroundings.
But color can be used in a lot of
ways. A lot of the time, colors are
associated with specific holidays,
celebrations, or things like sports
teams and even resistance move-
ments. When you think of The
Handmaid’s Tale, don’t you imme-
diately think of the color red? If
your story includes descriptions of
clothing, it might be worth men-
tioning the kind of colors they’re
wearing and the particular signifi-
cance to the character.
You can use color as an oppor-
tunity to showcase other aspects
of your world-building in a more
subtle way. If a color is rarely seen
in clothing and one family in town
has several pieces in that color, it
could signify to the reader that
this family has greater wealth or
connections than almost every-
one else around them. It would be
even more interesting if this fam-
ily wasn’t necessarily involved with
local politics or industry, which
would be easy explanations for
how they came to own such rare
materials.
When thinking about dyes, it’s
important to do some research on
what would or wouldn’t be available
in the kind of world you’ve built.
Before synthetic dyes were invented
in the mid-1800s, it was extremely
difficult to dye something a true
black, and a brownish-black would
have been much more common.
Likewise, white was not a traditional
wedding dress color until the 1840s
because white was such a hard color
to keep clean, and most people
didn’t just wear a dress once. A lot
of the time, the popularity of a color
was more about what was readily
available rather than what people
actually preferred.
CULTURE
Clothing can be used to signal
things like gender and social class.
Plainer clothes might indicate a
lower economic status while more
intricate detailing might identify the
opposite. But even in stories where
social class isn’t the focus, finer
clothing is still important—consider
that most of us have one or two
things in our closet that we wear to
weddings, funerals, job interviews,
etc. and they’re usually separate
from our day-to-day wear.
But culture goes beyond these—
it can reflect the values that are
important to people. Think about a
concept like modesty (does it mat-
ter in your story? What does being
“modest” look like? Who is held to
this standard and why?), and does
this cultural ideal clash with another
culture’s in your narrative? Or if
your society is focused on hard
work, their clothes might be more
durable, rustic, made with natu-
ral fibers, etc. These people might
look down on another culture that’s
focused more on beauty, where the
clothing might be more flimsy and
discardable but brighter, softer, and
more focused on comfort.
Tangential to clothing, jewelry
is something else that falls under
the umbrella of cultural clothing.
Piercings, for example, might be
completely common in one culture
and might appall people from a dif-
ferent culture. Pieces like necklaces,
rings, and bracelets can all have dif-
ferent cultural meanings, especially
if things like ceremony and religion
are involved. And if the resources
to make the jewelry are expensive,
then your characters might be wear-
ing them to set themselves apart
from others in their community.
Makeup and hairstyles could also
fall under this subcategory of adorn-
ment. If your character’s culture
dictates that smooth skin with little
to no blemishes are a beauty ideal,
how do people create this look? Is
makeup and hairstyle gendered, as
some people think of it now, or are
they gender-neutral? Are things like
wigs important or is natural hair
more widely accepted? Knowing
where these ideas stem from in your
character’s culture is something else
you might want to consider.
Regardless of whether fashion is
something that’s important to your
world-building or not, having a
basic idea of what your characters
will be wearing and how they get
their clothes will be a small detail
that can make your story that much
more realistic for your readers. WD
Moriah Richard is managing editor of WD.
Follow her on Twitter @MoriahRichard93.
WritersDigest.com I 77
FORALL AGES
Writing and publishing advice for picture books, middle-grade, and young adult storytelling.
BY LIVIA BLACKBURNE
From Magic to Meet-Cutes
Switching Genres Within YA
W
hen I sold my debut
Midnight Thief in 2012,
I thought I’d be writing
young adult fantasy forever. After all,
I’d grown up reading Tamora Pierce,
Lloyd Alexander, and C.S. Lewis. I
reveled in magic powers and high-
stakes action. As a reader and writer,
what more could I ask for?
But as I sat down to outline YA
fantasy number five, I felt restless. I
found it easy to fall into autopilot.
Also, while I loved the books I’d
written, they were limited to a small
portion of my personality. In other
aspects of my life, I was the quirky
gal. I wrote funny family newsletters
and joked around with friends on
Facebook. My novels, however, were
largely serious—more Lord of the
Rings than Zoolander.
“I worry I’m writing the same
book over and over,” I told my agent.
My agent assured me that wasn’t
true, but he also voiced his support
if I wanted to branch out.
“Now that you’re four books deep,”
he said, “I think you can take some
chances with your brand.”
His words were liberating.
Then, the stars aligned. Jennifer
Ung at HarperCollins wanted to
collaborate with a writer on a YA
romantic comedy, and I jumped at
78 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
the chance. One conversation led
to another, and soon we’d inked
a deal for Clementine and Danny
Save the World (And Each Other),
a story about two teens falling in
love while fighting gentrification
in Chinatown—only to realize that
their online personas had been ene-
mies for years.
It was a fantastic experience. I
had a great deal to learn, but Jen
was a patient and insightful guide.
Here’s a rundown of some adjust-
ments I had to make when switch-
ing from YA fantasy to YA rom-com.
STAKES
My biggest worry going in: How do
you keep a reader’s attention if you
can’t throw in knife fights when-
ever things got slow? I was used
to writing books where nations
clashed, and entire populations
risked extinction. How now could
I write a story where the only thing
in mortal peril was a tea shop?
My first draft had charming dia-
logue and humor, but not nearly
enough tension. Since mortal peril
wasn’t an option, I unwittingly left
out conflict altogether. My editor
gently pointed out that my story still
needed tension, even if it was not
the kind I was used to.
What I had to do was to find
the stakes in everyday interac-
tions. There were still battles to be
fought. They were just conducted
with dialogue and loaded interac-
tions instead of swords and spears.
Characters still could and should
have opposing views and goals.
They needed to butt heads and
argue. The stakes might not be as
glaringly visceral as a sword poised
to strike, but they were there if
I had the empathy to look for it.
After all, coffee shop bankruptcy
might not be dire as Sauron’s
impending advance, but it can still
feel like death to a boy whose fam-
ily had invested their whole lives
into it.
WORLD-BUILDING
Occasionally while writing
Clementine, I’d need a name for a
side character. So, I leaned back in
my chair, mentally sifted through
the names of my friends and
acquaintances, and picked one that
suited my fancy.
That’s right. I just chose a name.
There was no messing with natu-
ral language generators. No Google
rabbit holes involving ancient lan-
guages. I simply picked something
out of my everyday experience.
 That is to say, having my novel’s
world ready-built for me was a huge
timesaver. My characters communi-
cated with cell phones and lived in
apartment buildings, not messen-
ger crows and rose plague colonies.
They traveled by automobile. I didn’t
even have to invent the make and
model of Clementine’s car.
As I wrote, though, I encountered
the flipside of writing about the real
world. Now that I’d given up the
right to make things up, I actually
had to get things right.
So, the research started in ear-
nest. To write authentically about
gentrification, I volunteered with
activist organizations. To portray
my Nigerian American side charac-
ter, I had a long conversation with a
Nigerian friend from grad school.
I did end up indulging in a bit
of fantasy in the end. Getting the
ins and outs of Los Angeles zon-
ing laws and ordinances proved too
difficult, so Clementine and Danny
takes place in the fictional Southern
California metropolis of Jasper City.
VOICE
I certainly paid attention to my
linguistic style while writing YA
fantasy. But I find that voice plays
a greater role in YA contemporary.
While exceptions certainly abound,
there’s a certain YA style that ren-
ders many instances of the genre
instantly recognizable.
Knowing this, voice held a
much more prominent position
in my mind as I wrote. I paid a
great deal of attention to how I
said things, not just what I wanted
to say. I was already searching for
jokes and turns of phrase in the
first draft, something that came
much later in the revision process
with my YA fantasies.
LIFE STAGE
My YA protagonists are 17 years
old across all genres. But being 17
in a bronze age or medieval soci-
ety is very different from being 17
today. My fantasy teenagers lived as
adults in all but name. Tristam was
a knight. Zivah was a healer. Dineas
was a traumatized soldier. They had
jobs and a great deal of indepen-
dence. Most lived separately from
their parents.
My contemporary teens, on the
other hand, lived more restricted
lives. They went to school. They
lived with their parents. They didn’t
even have cars.
Therefore, the scale and type of
adventures undertaken by my pro-
tagonists varied greatly between
genres. My fantasy characters spoke
with kings and traversed empires,
while my contemporary teens wrote
blogs and stayed in their neighbor-
hood. Despite that, many young
adult milestones stayed the same.
There were first loves and first kisses
in both fantasy and contemporary.
And importantly, my protagonists
all undertook the fundamental jour-
ney of discovering their place in the
world. Whether in contemporary
Southern California or in ancient
China, my teens defined who they
were and came into their power. It
might have looked very different
from the outside, but their interior
journeys were remarkably similar.
WHAT STAYED THE SAME?
That last point about life stage brings
up an important truth about young
adult as a category. No matter the
genre, YA stories are coming-of-age
stories. They are about the transi-
tion from childhood to adult, a uni-
versal journey that the vast majority
of humans undergo.
What I had to do was
to find the stakes in
everyday interactions.
There were still battles
to be fought. They
were just conducted
with dialogue and
loaded interactions
instead of swords
and spears.
Beyond that, there are other
aspects that stayed constant for me
across genres, such as faster pacing
and less description than adult. The
mechanics of writing, from outlin-
ing to plotting to revisions, also
stayed largely constant. Finally, my
YA books all carry a note of hope
that I find to be more common in
children’s literature than adult.
Clementine and Danny Save the
World (And Each Other) launches
this July, and I’m a stronger writer
for having written it. Like cross
training in sports, writing in a dif-
ferent genre strengthened new skills
and opened my eyes to new aspects
of my craft.
As for what’s next? It’s hard to say.
I’ve been dabbling in middle-grade
and casting an eye toward adult.
We’ll see where the muse leads. WD
New York Times-bestselling author Livia
Blackburne wrote her first novel while
researching the neuroscience of reading at
the Massachusetts Institute of Technology.
Since then, she’s switched to full-time
writing, which also involves getting into
people’s heads but without the help of a 3
Tesla MRI scanner.
WritersDigest.com I 79
 FRONTLIST/BACKLIST
Whether hot off the presses or on the shelves for years, a good book is worth talking about.
BY AMY JONES
Family Ties
W
hile these two books
may seem light-years
apart at a quick glance,
they have more in common than it
seems. They each follow generations
of related women as they learn more
about their families and themselves.
Each story has a secret (or secrets)
that reverberate down through the
years with lasting impacts. They’re
paired together here as a study in
how the same or similar themes
can be explored in entirely different
ways based on conventions of the
intended genre.
Frontlist
The Vibrant Years by Sonali Dev
(Mindy’s Book Studio, Women’s
Fiction/Romance, December 2022)
SYNOPSIS: The Vibrant Years fol-
lows three generations of women in
the Desai family: 65-year-old Bindu
Desai, the matriarch, moves into a
glamorous and active retirement
community after a surprise inheri-
tance of $1 million from a former
lover she’s kept secret from her family
for decades. Aly, Bindu’s 47-year-old
daughter-in-law, has been work-
ing toward her own regular segment
on the local news in the Florida city
where she lives, but is consistently
passed over for someone “more
80 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023
relatable,” (i.e. white)—a contribut-
ing factor to her divorce from Bindu’s
son. Aly’s daughter Cullie is a tech
wiz known for developing a life-
saving mental health app, but she is
tasked with coming up with a dating
app to help generate revenue to keep
the first app free—except she’s never
been on a real date. Cullie enlists the
help of her mother and grandmother
in researching (read: testing) dat-
ing apps to see what works and what
doesn’t. Bad dates, self-discovery, and
family bonding ensue.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT IT: First, the
relationships between these three
women. It’s uncommon to see a book
where the mother-in-law and daugh-
ter-in-law have a friendly relation-
ship, let alone one where they actively
choose to continue living together
after the breakup of the marriage that
made them family in the first place.
But in this story, Dev writes them
more like mother and daughter, or
even friends of different generations,
which is refreshing. Likewise, Cullie’s
mother and grandmother are protec-
tive of her as expected from a mother
and grandmother, but they’re also
close enough that they all push each
other—gently—outside of their com-
fort zones in an effort to find love,
happiness, and closure.
Secondly, the secrets have a sexy,
glam, first-love feel about them.
Bindu’s family wonders about her
surprise inheritance (and unex-
pected second surprise inheritance!)
and slowly through the story readers
learn of her connections to one of
the biggest stars in Bollywood when
ILLUSTRATION © GETTY IMAGES: FRANK RAMSPOTT
she was a teen.
Finally, the humor. While the
novel certainly has its serious
moments, it’s also filled with rom-
com-style humor that reminds the
characters—and readers—that one
of the best parts of finding love is
finding someone to laugh with.

Backlist
The Love Songs of W.E.B.
Du Bois by Honorée Fanonne
Jeffers
(Harper Perennial, Literary Fiction,
August 2021)
SYNOPSIS: As Ailey Pearl Garfield
comes of age during the 1980s and
’90s, she contends with the lasting
effects of the sexual assault she
experienced as a child, which she
kept secret from her family, the
disappearance of an older sister she
looked up to, and the near daily
racism she experiences as a Black
person living in the American
South. Using a nonlinear timeline,
the narrative switches from
telling Ailey’s story in the present,
flashbacks of her childhood, and the
stories of the family members she’s
closest to—her mother and sisters—
to the interstitial stories of her
enslaved ancestors and the sacrifices
they made to keep their families
alive. Gradually, after several
directionless years post-undergrad,
Ailey eventually finds her way into a
master’s program where she ends up
researching her family, Chicasetta
(the small Georgia town they’re
from), and the undergraduate
university she attended, which has
surprisingly deep connections to
her family.
WHAT I LOVE ABOUT IT: It’s an
immersive epic that so clearly
demonstrates the unintended
consequences of how trauma can
be passed from generation to
generation, even when it’s hidden
and not spoken of. While the novel
doesn’t shy away from describing
the traumatic events, it doesn’t dwell
on them either, instead focusing
on the way Ailey’s family members
and ancestors forge meaningful
relationships in an effort to
persevere. This is part of the reason
the novel won the 2022 Dayton
Literary Peace Prize for fiction.
Although the book is clearly
literary fiction and deals with serious
topics in a serious way, there’s an
element of mystery solving as well.
Readers are privy to the family’s
history by way of the Songs—
the chapters tracing how Ailey’s
ancestors got to America and the
often-uncomfortable truth of how
65 high-quality cards
the family grew—but Ailey only Endless story possibilities
knows bits and pieces of that story.
From figuring out how and why her Eliminate writer’s block
older sister Lydia disappeared to how
her beloved Uncle Root ended up
Great for all genres
owning and caretaking an important Created for writers by writers
historical property in Chicasetta,
Ailey takes on the role of historian,
piecing together her family’s Available Exclusively on
untold story. WD
Amy Jones is editor-in-chief of WD. Follow
her on Twitter @AmyMJones_5.
WritersDigest.com I 81
CONFERE NC E GU I DE

CALIFORNIA
ANNUAL GREATER LOS ANGELES
WRITERS CONFERENCE, produced
by West Coast Writers Conferences. A
hybrid event with virtual workshops July
21–23, and in-person all agent access
one-on-one pitch meets July 28–30 at
the Embassy Suites LAX South. Writers
of all genres and disciplines benefit
from this popular educational and
inspirational event on the craft and
business of writing. Our 35th conference
will feature programs for the 3-A’s™
(Aspiring, Active, and Accomplished)
writers of fiction, nonfiction, and
screenplays. Topics are presented by
40+ literary agents, editors, veteran
educators, bestselling authors, and
industry professionals in progressive
streams of seminars, workshops,
and panels. Live critique workshops
include Great Beginnings for Novels
& Screenplays, Query Letters, and
more. Take advantage of one-on-one
pitch sessions with literary agents
and publishers looking for new talent
with polished manuscripts. We also
offer unique informative sessions with
the “agents du jour” to help prepare
for your actual meeting. You can also
participate in Advance Read Submission
ProCritiques™ to have a portion of your
work read/reviewed/edited by literary
agents and/or professional editors
who will meet with you at the event to
review. Open to all levels of literary and
screenplay writers. Early-bird discount
pricing and same as cash financing
available. See website for details and
special hotel discounts.
Contact:
PO Box 2267
Redondo Beach, CA 90278
Ph: 310/379-2650
info@wcwriters.com
WCWriters.com/aglawc
NEW YORK
WRITER’S DIGEST ANNUAL
CONFERENCE, presented by Writer’s
Digest. Registration is open! August
17–20, 2023 at the Hilton Midtown
in New York City. The Writer’s Digest
Annual Conference offers everything you
need to advance your writing creatively
and professionally. Gain invaluable tips
to improve your craft, explore publishing
options, and learn how to establish
a sustainable career—all while being
inspired by successful authors and your
fellow attendees. Brought to you by
Writer’s Digest, the experts at nurturing
and developing writers at every stage
of their career for more than 100
years. Programming you won’t want to
miss! Three pre-conference workshops.
Register as a standalone or add it onto
your basic conference registration.
Keynotes: Chuck Wendig, Elizabeth
Acevedo, and Jason Mott! Pitch Slam:
New day of the week—Friday, August
18! With a virtual Pitch Perfect a couple
of weeks before the conference, you’ll
have more time to prep your pitch. Add
it onto your basic conference registration.
Stay tuned for more information and
announcements. Register now for the
best price!
Contact:
writersdigestconference@aimmedia.com
WritersDigestConference.com

WritersDigest.com/customerservice
ONLINE SUBSCRIBER SERVICES
View your account information | Renew your subscription
Pay your bill | Change your mailing address or email address

CUSTOMER SERVICE PHONE: 800-333-0133 weekdays

SUBSCRIPTIONS
Customer Service
2143 Grand Ave.
Des Moines, IA 50312
subscriptions@aimmedia.com

EDITORIAL
Writer’s Digest
4664 Malsbary Road
Blue Ash, OH 45242
Writers.digest@aimmedia.com

82 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

CLASSIFIEDS: READING NOTICES

COACHING EDITORIAL SERVICES EDITORIAL SERVICES

BLOCKED? STRUGGLING? I'LL HELP YOU
WRITE, EDIT, PUBLISH! Breakthrough coaching 9th Annual
with published author, experienced editor and
teacher, compassionate mentor. Breakthrough
Stories That Need to Be Told
individualized intensives, MD/DC/VA area. writing contest
Carol Burbank, MA, Ph.D. StoryWeaving.com,
cburbank@storyweaving.com
There are stories that only you can
tell, and TulipTree wants to share
them with the world. We are
CONTESTS looking for great stories with
FOURCONTESTS,$-246->)7%8
diverse voices. Open to fiction,
WinningWriters.com[H nonfiction, or poetry.
Wergle
Flomp
Humor
Poetry
Contest
(No
fee!) First prize is $1,000 and a
Tom
Howard/John
H.
Reid
Fiction
&
Essay
$POUFTU 2-year subscription to Duotrope.
Tom
Howard/Margaret
Reid
Poetry
Contest Five additional merit winners
will receive $200 each.
North
Street
Book
Prize
(GPS
TFMGQVCMJTIFE
BOE

Winners and honorable mentions are
IZCSJEQVCMJTIFE
CPPLT Unlock the potential of your manuscript! published in the award-winning
Stories That Need to Be Told anthology.
Want to write a good book? I can help. $20 entry fee.
EDITORIAL SERVICES Helga Schier, PhD. Deadline: August 9, 2023.
Published author and Submission guidelines at
publishing executive offers tuliptreepub.com/contest.html
Lazaris Editing and powerful, comprehensive,
personalized and effective
Copywriting Services editorial services.
FULL SERVICE BOOK EDITING “When Helga entered the picture, my manuscript CLASSIFIEDS:
went from promising to a published and critically
Helping authors achieve their
acclaimed book.” W E T Y PE M AN US C RI PTS
best writing with professional – Ed Driscoll, award-winning comedian and writer
editing services. To obtain information or advertise,
withpenandpaper.com 310.828.8421
• Copyediting contact: Pam Stine, Ph: 540/773-8052
helga@withpenandpaper.com
• Developmental Editing pstine@aimmedia.com
• Proofreading Services
CLOSING DATE FOR THE NOVEMBER /
eugenia@lazarisediting.com DECEMBER 2023 ISSUE IS AUGUST 15,
lazarisediting.com 2023.

ARIZONA
BARBARA ALLEN WRITERS' SERVICES
9462 N. Albatross Dr., Tucson, AZ 85742
Ph: 520/744-9318, allen9462@comcast.net
Web Page: BAWriterServices.com
Manuscript typing; editing; forwarding to
agents and publishers.

COLORADO

PROFESSIONAL EDITOR, award-winning author JEANNIEMAY ENTERPRISES

(Bantam, Berkley/Ace, others) offers extensive
critiques, in-depth editing. Fiction, nonfic-
tion, juvenile/YA. Carol Gaskin, 941/377-7640.
Carol@EditorialAlchemy.com;
EditorialAlchemy.com
635 W. Jefferson St., Trinidad, CO 81082
720/416-5208, geniemay2001@yahoo.com
Manuscript & screenplay typing, copyediting.
Experienced, fast, accurate, dependable.
Cash, checks, Paypal.

Looking for ideas? EDITORIAL SERVICES from a nurturing but

whip-cracking, well-connected author (Bang
the Keys, The Great Bravura) who will help you
unleash the true fabulosity in your projects
Check out our weekly and bring them to fruition in the real world
before depression or drink destroy your nerve!
writing prompts at Fiction, nonfiction, scripts, poetry, theses. Ten
writersdigest.com/prompts percent discount if you mention WD ad. Email:
jilldearman@gmail.com, JillDearman.com
WASHINGTON
CADMUS PUBLISHING TYPING SERVICE
PO Box 2146, Port Angeles, WA 98362
360/565-6459, info@cadmuspublishing.com
Manuscript typing, editing, and more. We can
type anything you need! Check, M/O, PayPal,
Visa/MC/AmEx. Contact us for rates/brochure.

WritersDigest.com I 83
2023 WEBINARS
WITH JANE FRIEDMAN
SAVE THE DATES!
JULY 13
Establish (or Improve) Your Email Newsletter:
Every Author’s Most Important Marketing Tool

AUGUST 17
Will Your Nonfiction Book Sell?
How to Evaluate the Strength of Your Project

SEPTEMBER 28
Effective Book Marketing for Any Author

OCTOBER 19
Social Media Bliss

NOVEMBER 16
Create an Author Website in 24 Hours or Less

Visit WritersOnlineWorkshops.com
or scan the QR code below to find
out more and register.
 Expert Instructors, Real-World Advice
POPULAR COURSES

Copyediting Certificate Program

This course will provide training for aspiring copy editors in order
to give them practical and marketable workplace skills. As a student
in this certification course, you will progress from the fundamentals
of grammar, form, and composition to advanced copyediting
skills. Students who complete all the assignments and pass the
comprehensive test will receive documentation from Writer’s Digest
of their completion of the Copyediting Certificate Program.

Advanced Novel Writing

Push yourself beyond your comfort zone and take your writing to
new heights with this novel writing course, designed specifically
for novelists who are looking for detailed feedback on their work.
When you take this online course, you won’t have weekly reading
assignments or lectures. Instead, you’ll get to focus solely on com-
pleting your novel. By the end of this course, you will have the
tools and know-how you need to write a great novel.

Writing the Personal Essay 101:

Fundamentals
This course guides beginning and intermediate writers through
elements of how to write a personal essay, helping them identify
values expressed in their stories and bring readers into the
experiences described. Writers learn how to avoid the dreaded
responses of “so what?” and “I guess you had to be there” by
utilizing sensory details, learning to trust their writing intuitions,
and developing a skilled internal editor to help with revision.

Other courses include:

Short Story Fundamentals | Outlining Your Novel | Grammar and Mechanics
Creativity and Expression | Freelance Writing | Build Your Novel Scene by Scene

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO REGISTER, VISIT

ADVERTISEMENT

WritersDigestUniversity.com
 Online Screenwriting Classes
With Industry Professionals

POPULAR COURSES
The Fundamentals of Screenwriting
Have an amazing idea for a movie, but don’t know how to begin
writing it? This four-week class is the perfect introduction to the fan-
tastic world of writing a script, from the fundamentals of the story
down to the revision process. You will gain the tools to structure
your scenes, your acts, and your plots. Plus, receive comprehensive
feedback on assignments targeted to develop the skills you need to
thrive as a screenwriter.

Comedy Pilots 101

Comedy Pilots 101 teaches you how to create a TV comedy outline—
the critical first step in writing a strong half-hour comedy pilot script.
Learn how half-hour comedy shows work, study main characters,
and identify the core elements central to writing character and story.
Then focus on your own script, finding the story and identifying the
comedy in it, learning how to pitch it, and creating a workable outline.
Instruction also covers business aspects of the current TV landscape
and writer’s room basics.

Writing the Series Bible

It usually goes like this: the pilot is all that network execs are really
interested in at first. That’s because the pilot demonstrates basic writ-
ing and gives them a sense of where things will go (the season’s “map”
is built into any good pilot). Once they’ve decided they like a pilot,
they want to see more—your series bible, particularly the first season’s
sketch. A strong series bible is a crucial sales tool for your series. This
course will help get your TV series ready for executives by developing
the series premise, honing the pilot, and writing a series bible.

Other courses include:

Scriptreading Certificate Program | Story Development and Outlining
Your Creative Journey | Proper Formatting Technique | Beginning Television Writing
Creating the Viral Web Series

FOR MORE INFORMATION OR TO REGISTER, VISIT

ADVERTISEMENT

ScreenwritersUniversity.com
 SHOP
POPULAR WRITING RESOURCES

Step back in time and listen to THE WRITER’S VOICE , a collection of 28 historic
Writer’s Digest recordings originally available as cassettes in the 1970s. Now a USB
drive cleverly disguised as a cassette tape, this product contains nearly 30 hours of
wide-ranging content from blockbuster interviews to panel discussions to timeless
writing instruction. It’s a fascinating snapshot of the publishing industry in the 1970s
and will add invaluable insight about legendary writers to the historical record.

STRUCTURE: THE BUILDING BLOCKS OF STORY | You’re ready to write but you
need more than just words on the page to tell a cohesive story. You need struc-
ture—or building blocks—to help bring your story together. Elements like the
inciting incident, rising action, conflict, falling action, and the resolution are
critical to writing a great story. With this bundle, you’ll find the resources you
need to understand those elements and put them to work in your story.

The challenging thing about writing advice is that what works for one person
may not help the next person at all. Different types of advice resonate differently
with each type of writer. With A YEAR OF WRITING ADVICE digital guide, writ-
ers will find 365 pieces of advice from 365 authors, any one of which may pro-
vide the ah-ha moment they’ve been waiting for.

The WRITING SCIENCE FICTION AND FANTASY BUNDLE is your opportunity to

learn from the wisdom of successful SFF authors. It includes a collection of five
historical WD issues featuring articles from legends like Stan Lee, Ray Bradbury,
and Terry Brooks, as well as eight OnDemand webinars with published SFF
authors, and the November/December 2021 WD issue on magical writing.
ADVERTISEMENT

TO DOWNLOAD THESE RESOURCES, VISIT

WritersDigestShop.com
CREATIVEQUILL
A playground for your pen.

DAN HARMON’S STORY CIRCLE

INSTRUCTIONS: Use this story structure from TV writer Dan Harmon on a current work-in-progress or to
plot something new! Write a sentence or two directly in the circle slice.

8. The protagonist
is now capable of 1. A protagonist in a
change … zone of comfort …
7. The
protagonist
goes back to
where they 2. The protagonist
started … wants something …

8 1
7 2
6 3
5 4

6. They pay 3. They enter an

a price for unfamiliar situation …
achieving their
goal …
IMAGE © GETTTY IMAGES: ARIF_VECTOR

5. The protagonist 4. They adapt to the

finds what they unfamiliar situation …
wanted …

88 I WRITER’S DIGEST I July/August 2023

 Self-publishers need a trusted printing
partner and outstanding results.
With 48 Hour Books, you get both.
Not to mention...

Fast Turnaround Unmatched Service

We’re the fastest book ~ƭƑĚNJƎĚƑƥƙƥîIJIJĿƙĺĚƑĚ
printers in the world! Premium Options for you at every step. We
Production time for standard actually answer our phones!
Fast printing doesn’t mean
perfect bound books is 48 Don’t take our word for it
skimping on options! Elevate
hours or less, with same-day - check out our incredible
your book with features such
service available. independent reviews.
as Diamond 3D covers, foil
stamping, hard cover books,
dust jackets, and cloth and
leather covers.

FREE Self-Publishing Guide Easy Pricing & Ordering

Visit 48HrBooks.com to order Select all the options you want and
your copy today! Paper and cover ǶŠēūƭƥĚNJîČƥŕNjDžĺîƥNjūƭɫƑĚƎîNjĿŠij
samples included. when you place an order.

Call us today for FREE HELP 800-231-0521

getting your custom book printed info@48HrBooks.com
2249 14th St. SW
www.48HrBooks.com Akron, Ohio 44314
 Writers helping writers
improve their craft,
achieve their goals, and
recognize their dreams—
since 1920.

F E ATU RI N G
WritersDigest.com | Writer’s Digest Shop
Writer’s Digest Writing Competitions | Writer’s Digest Events
Writer’s Digest University | Writer’s Digest Presents Podcast | 2nd Draft