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November 19, 2024
A City Teenager Sells Weed with a Side of Egg Rolls to Keep His Family Afloat in Johnny Delivers
Award-winning author and avid world traveler Wayne Ng has found success on the literary scene with his previous works of fiction, using elements from the lived-in experiences of Chinese-Canadian immigrants ...
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July 30, 2018
The Part of It You Don't See
If you’ve been reading my dispatches over the last month, you might have inferred that making a go of it as a writer is hard. Bending reality, memory, knowledge and experience into believable fiction, ...
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July 16, 2018
Make It New (Again)!
I was shocked a few years ago when, in a workshop I attended, a thirty-something writer who had already published a book (and has since gone on to publish two much more successful ones) dismissed the ...
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July 21, 2018
You Just Need to Write a Bestseller
If you’re a writer and you’re not rich and famous—so what I mean is, if you’re a writer—you’ve heard this one, often enough from someone who doesn’t write fiction or maybe even read it.Have ...
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October 29, 2020
On Listening to Your Gut Instinct When Editing Your Work
First, there’s that twisty churny feeling that crawls across your skin when something doesn't feel right. It’s similar to the feeling that can arise when you are walking home late at night and you ...
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October 11, 2017
Happy (Our) Birthday To You! Enter our Gigantic Anniversary Book Giveaway Contest!
In honour of our tenth birthday here at Open Book, our generous OBPO publisher partners have donated a HUGE prize package of amazing books. So for our birthday, we want to give one of you a present!You ...
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May 01, 2019
On Perfectionism: Stop it Right Now Thank You Very Much*
“Once you have realized what you need to improve in your piece—either from a writing partner's helpful responses or your own insights—you're ready to begin revising, a process you would be well ...
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July 26, 2018
What I Talk About When I Talk About Talking Points
When a publisher agrees to publish your book—or at least, when both of my publishers agreed to publish my two books—the author is presented with a questionnaire. If you don’t overthink it, the questions ...
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July 13, 2018
Writing What You "Know"
I’m one of countless writers who found his way thanks to this old standby, and having just published a book of stories set in small Southwestern Ontario towns a lot like the ones where I grew up, it’s ...
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July 10, 2018
Did You Really Go Through All That?
I stole the title of this post from a scene late in the film Sideways, but I could’ve taken a similar line from nearly anywhere—for instance, the second of Orhan Pamuk’s Norton Lectures (collected ...