Every Friday The Write Brain will put together the Ninja Writers Industry Report: a curated news feed specific to current happenings in the writing world.
We will always be sure to include a few links to some great writing markets and jobs to check out as well.
As a reminder: the industry report will be free for the month of April. Starting in May it will be a part of The Write Brain’s $7/month subscription program. Click here to see what else this subscription will include.
Why a writer traveled to a far-off Russian peninsula for her debut novel
As a child, writer Julia Phillips was enamored with Brothers Grimm fairy tales, famous for their recounting of dark, captivating stories such as “Rapunzel” and “Little Red Riding Hood.”
“Every tale was bloody and bizarre and hypnotizing,” Phillips recently told the PBS NewsHour, noting that she carried on reading her copy even after it had been dropped in the bath. “The collection gave me nightmares, for sure, but it also blew my mind and began to teach me how compelling fiction could be.”
It’s Hard to Teach Writing Online
We are in the midst of the most sweeping education experiment in history. The coronavirus pandemic has forced the majority of the U.S.’s 3.6 million educators to find ways to teach without what most of them consider the core part of their craft—the daily face-to-face interactions that help them elicit a child’s burning desire to investigate something; detect confusion or a lack of engagement; and find the right approach, based on a student’s body language and participation in the classroom, to help students work through their challenges.
Cultural clash: the trouble with writing about the lives of others
Novelists are being attacked for telling stories about experiences that aren’t their own. But isn’t that the point of using the imagination?
My Dark Vanessa author Kate Elizabeth Russell has been asked repeatedly to defend her right to tell a story that is not her own. Photograph: Sara Stathas/The Guardian
Billed as the big page-turner of the season, My Dark Vanessa, American author Kate Elizabeth Russell’s first novel, is a tale for the Time’s Up generation. Its involving drama invites readers to look back again at any treasured youthful memories they may harbour of a past relationship with an older lover and ask: was it really all so pure and so romantic?
12 writing tools to make COVID-19 coverage comprehensible. One stands above the rest.
This writing advice becomes now and then more urgent. I dragged it out to help reporters covering the Great Recession. I am sharing it again to see if it can stand up to the test of a great pandemic.
I don’t expect such advice to “go viral” — what a newly loaded phrase — but I hope it spreads in support of coverage that takes responsibility for what readers and viewers know and understand.
'A little literary family': Students finishing fiction and poetry theses write remotely
Though the COVID-19 pandemic disrupted the final weeks of the semester, creative writing honors students have maintained a strong sense of community as they finish their senior theses remotely.
The two creative writing senior thesis classes are taught by Director of Creative Writing Daniel Wallace for fiction and professor Alan Shapiro for poetry.
Wallace said his students have established close friendships throughout the fiction thesis class, and they’ve maintained these connections even as classes have moved online.
The Coronavirus Is Upending the Plot of My Novel
Here’s something I probably always knew, deep down, but never thought about: Writing a novel presupposes the existence of a stable reality that will remain basically the same until you’re done working on the book.
This is true, at least, of the kinds of novels I write. I’m the author of The Last Policeman, Underground Airlines, and most recently Golden State—all of which are shelved under “mystery/thriller,” but which incorporate some sort of science fiction conceit. My books are set in some recognizable version of the present day, but deviate in specific ways, controlled by me. This remains true for my next book, The Quiet Boy, which, as I write this, is slated to come out early next year.
Writing Market:
9 Publishers Seeking Pitches from Freelance Writers
12 Online Gold Mines for Finding Paid Freelance Writing Jobs
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