AmWritingTag
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December 20, 2023
The Transition to Short Stories (as a poet)
I’ve spent years now honing my craft as a poet. I know how to edit individual poems, as well as to approach and rewrite entire manuscripts. Why did the need to do the same in fiction seem so daunting ...
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December 12, 2023
7 Writing Lessons I Learned from Gardening
I am by no means a capital G Gardener, but planning and tending to my little patio garden brings me a lot of comfort and satisfaction. While getting my garden ready for winter, I found my mind wandering ...
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December 08, 2023
Interdisciplinary collaboration: The highlight of my writing year
Writing can be lonely—we hear that all the time. And though I generally love working alone, this year, I’ve been working with a dancer friend on a collaborative process and it’s been one of the ...
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November 30, 2023
7 Ways to Develop Secondary Characters
Many authors do a good job at developing their protagonist or POV characters. After all, readers will be in these characters’ heads throughout an entire book. But as many readers can attest to, sometimes ...
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November 27, 2023
I think I have a manuscript
This is what I said to myself about four years into publishing my poems in journals, magazines, and through chapbooks. Sifting through folders to put poems into a single Word document, I saw the page ...
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October 04, 2023
Tips for Writing in a Hybrid Genre
Hybrid genres are on the rise, but many writers feel unsure about how to manage expectations of the different genres while writing, and how to market their finished product. As a reader and a writer, ...
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September 14, 2023
The Pull of Two Needles
My first version of this essay was about how my two obsessions, knitting and writing, don’t compete with each other. I wrote at length about how they spin together in my brain in complicated steps, ...
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September 05, 2023
Something to delight in: Why I became a book publicist
From my bookish beginnings as an anxious kid who preferred the certainty of a good story to the probable humiliation of trying to make new friends, I always believed that making a career out of books ...
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August 28, 2023
How Much Do Book Tropes and Aesthetics Matter?
If you’ve spent time on Twitter or Instagram recently, you may have noticed authors and readers sharing graphics that outline a book’s major tropes, or the aesthetics of a book through mood boards.I’ll ...
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July 27, 2023
Things I Didn’t Know About Residencies
Before 2023, I could barely describe what “residency” meant in the realm of writing and art. A residency felt like it was reserved for someone with more writing experience, more books, and just more ...