Writer Unboxed

So I went to Madison to speak at the University of Wisconsin’s Writer’s Institute and to launch my latest novel, Lucy in the Sky, which is set in hippie times of Madison and Milwaukee in 1969, and thus seemed like the right place to officially introduce the book to the world. I was in for [...]

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Over the past year, there’s been a self-publishing experiment taking place in the Calgary branch of the Romance Writers of America. (CARWA, members of which are known under the apt moniker “Carwackians.”) I’ve been an interested observer. Now that the Bandit Creek Series has matured, and can provide lessons and data, CaRWA’s third-time president joins [...]

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 There’s a lot of talk in the writing/publishing world about contracts. Author/Agent contracts, publisher’s contracts, advances, foreign rights, non-exclusivity clauses. But those aren’t actually the kind of contracts I wanted to talk about today. I want to talk about the most basic contract of all in the writing business–and it’s not one you sign in [...]

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Kath here. We’re thrilled that novelist Liz Michalski is back to guest with us! Liz’s last guest post with us was just terrific, and we’re so pleased she agreed to return and discuss a quite unusual way of marketing your book. Her haunting debut novel Evenfall has received praise and buzz. Booklist says, ”EVENFALL is a [...]

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Today’s guest is bestselling Kindle author Kathleen Shoop. Her second historical fiction novel, After the Fog, is set in 1948 Donora, Pennsylvania. The mill town’s ”killing smog” was one of the worst environmental disasters in U.S. history, triggering clean air advocacy and eventually, the Clean Air Act. Kathleen’s debut novel, The Last Letter, sold more than 50,000 copies and garnered multiple awards in 2011, [...]

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Kath here. Please welcome back Ellen Weeren to WU today. Ellen’s first post on Writer Unboxed was called Believing We Have a Story to Tell. She graduated from college with a BA in Writing, but took time off from creative pursuits when she began working full-time as mostly a technical writer. When her second child [...]

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Kath here. Please welcome back L. B. Gale to WU. The response to her first guest post with us was so positive, we asked her back for another, and happily, she agreed! L.B. works in education as a literacy specialist in New York City. She studied comparative mythology and fantasy literature for her Master’s degree at the [...]

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Therese butting in for a second to officially welcome Robin LaFevers to Writer Unboxed as a regular contributor. So glad you’re with us, Robin! In the comments of my guest post last month, a number of people wanted to know what techniques allowed me to dig deep and find the crunchier stories I had to [...]

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“In that book which is my memory, On the first page of the chapter that is the day when I first met you, Appear the words, ‘Here begins a new life’.” ― Dante Alighieri, Vita Nuova For everyone, a book starts in a different place. Recently, while I was on vacation, I received a mystifying [...]

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Today’s post is intended for any writers who occasionally encounter… well, let’s call them obstacles. I’m talking about the sort of thing that grinds your writing to a halt. Whether it writer’s block, the conspicuous absence of the muse, or just the feeling that every single word you write stinks worse than Satan’s dirty gym [...]

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(This is the third post in the Flip the Script series: check out the previous installments here and here.) More so than some other cliched writing advice we’ve discussed in this series, “kill your darlings” sometimes makes sense. It’s dangerous to get super-attached to a character or a sentence or a scene in your book [...]

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Aside from the immediate benefit of getting yourself away from the computer screen and the blackhole of the Internet, studying movies and TV shows is a great way to enhance your storytelling skills. No, writing a script is not the same as writing a novel. But if you look beyond the differences in written format [...]

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