Writer's Digest

joint central keynote

VIET THANH NGUYEN Viet Thanh Nguyen is a Pulitzer Prize winner, Dayton Literary Peace Prize winner, finalist for the PEN/Faulkner award, and finalist for the National Book Award. His writing has been called bold, elegant, and fiercely honest. Along with teaching at the University of Southern California, he works as a cultural critic-at-large for The Los Angeles Times. MAAZA MENGISTE Maaza Mengiste is an award-winning novelist and essayist whose work examines the individual lives at stake during migration, war, and exile. She was a runner-Up for the Dayton Literary Peace Prize for Beneath the Lion’s Gaze. Her work has appeared in The New Yorker, Granta, The Guardian, The New York Times, Rolling Stone, BBC Radio, and Lettre International, among other places. REGISTER NOW GET MORE DETAILS AND REGISTER AT: WRITERSDIGESTCONFERENCE.COM NOVEL.WRITERSDIGESTCONFERENCE.COM…

from our readers

Due to physical disability, I’m effectively house-bound. Even before the rest of you joined me on Team Stay-Home, I only got out for medical appointments and occasional (post-ATL-rush-hour) evening drives with my husband. For me, writing is a way to pretend normalcy. Whenever I write, and in whatever form it takes—poetry, prose, or something in between—it’s a chance to, by proxy of the character in the heart of my tale, just live out a single No-Pain-Do-Glorious-Things day. My goal is to share my story, as I know it could help other women to read what my life has been and to know that if they’re in any part of the same boat, they’re not alone. Once that book is set free, my heart craves to share all of the fables, fairy…

brighter days ahead

Welcome to our special double-sized September/October issue! Our theme, “The Future Is …” is open-ended, allowing each of us to consider where our writing fits in this strange world. As we put this issue together, it was impossible to ignore the events happening around us. We saw writers struggling to make space for their writing (both emotionally and literally) so we thought it was important to look forward and to remember the power of the written word. The first way this issue invites you to look to the future is with our annual agent roundup. Here we spotlight 20 agents who are open to submissions in a variety of genres. Perhaps your future lies in partnering with one of them. Then, novelist and Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist Connie Schultz revisits an essay…

contributors

NINA AMIR, the inspiration to creation coach, is a 19-time Amazon bestselling hybrid author of such books as How to Blog a Book, The Author Training Manual, and Creative Visualization for Writers as well as a host of e-book writing guides. She supports writers as an author coach and Certified High Performance Coach (CHPC)—the only one of 800 elite CHPCs working with writers. Additionally, she is the founder of the Nonfiction Writers’ University, the Author of Change Coaching Program, and the Write Nonfiction in November Challenge. An award-winning journalist and blogger, you can read her three blogs, Write Nonfiction NOW!, How to Blog a Book, and As the Spirit Moves Me, by visiting NinaAmir.com. DAVID CORBETT (DavidCorbett.com) is the award-winning author of the writing guides The Art of Character (“A writer’s…

the story of a book: writing without rules

I’d like to lodge a complaint. As a kid growing up, I imagined my career choice of “writer” would be filled with adventure and private jets, possibly an estate in Hawaii where my own personal private detective would routinely borrow my sports car.1 Every single television show and film that had a writer as a character typically showed them in full-on Castle mode, wealthy, and (for some reason) solving crimes, and I wanted that life.2 The reality of the author-agent relationship has turned out to be … different. CRIME-SOLVING CATS I found my agent, Janet Reid, wayyyyy back in 2002, utilizing stone tablets and smoke signals. OK, maybe it wasn’t quite that primitive, but I did mail her an actual paper query letter.3 The fact that she signed me as a client set…

framing life

As nonfiction writers, we know that framing this amorphous mess called reality is incredibly hard. What do we include? What do we leave out? Where do we begin? Where do we end? What goes in the middle, and in what order? These are key questions when one is arranging, say, 30 years of one’s life into 300 pages. In answering these questions, let me first defer to the empress of memoir herself. In her book The Art of Memoir, which consists of 24 chapters, Mary Karr writes only a one-page chapter on the subject of structure. She admits to using the same approach in all three of her memoirs: “I start with a flash forward that shows what’s at stake emotionally for me over the course of a book, then tell…