The Muse & the Marketplace 2016

With over 600 literary magazines in print and hundreds more online, how can you find the journal that's a perfect match for your work? This session will introduce you to the world of literary magazines, demystify their operations and goals, help you develop practical strategies for getting your work into them, and send you home with invaluable submissions resources.

It's an exciting moment when a writer signs a contract with a publisher, but it's just the first step in the process of transforming a manuscript into a book. This session will cover the basic ways in which writers and the staff members of publishing companies work together to polish the manuscript, launch the book, and keep it in print. Helpful for all emerging writers of any stripe, and for those seeking to understand the process they hope they will soon be undertaking. 

In our celebrity-obsessed culture, the juicy tell-all has become as de rigueur for Hollywood hotties as the VH1 Behind the Music is for washed up hair metal bands. And for the author brought in to serve as ghostwriter or cowriter, the experience of helping stars tell their tales of riches to rags melodrama, or guide the next generation with their attitude-laden self help tomes, actually offers an important lesson in storytelling, authenticity, and the power of memoir to engage readers with their own dreams and desires. Not only will this lecture offer insights into how ghostwriting really works, it will also provide memoirists and other authors with new ways of approaching their own stories and craft.

What's your writing style and how do you improve it? What makes Michael Ondaatje or George Saunders or Barry Hannah a Stylist? Using examples from fiction and non-fiction, Matthew Salesses will show you how (and when and why) to add music to your sentences. You'll do this in part through micro-editing, choosing the right verbs, using common words in new ways, cutting out unnecessary words and phrases, adding precision and specificity, and looking at how word order can transform a sentence. We'll also borrow poetic techniques, paying attention to the rhythm and cadence of a sentence, to meter and stressed syllables, and to the persona, or attitude, of the narrator. You'll leave with a cheat sheet of handy techniques. Time permitting, we'll do a quick exercise to try out some of what we've learned.

Everyone's life is interesting. Everyone has wisdom, insight, experience, and maybe humor to share, whether in memoir or fiction. But it can sometimes feel like writing what you know isn't enough. Where's the excitement? We'll look at how to "own" your experiences and mine your own individual understanding for compelling work, no matter what those experiences have been.

How do you write descriptions of landscape, setting, and weather that, rather than being parts readers "bloop" over, carry narrative weight in the story and drive the plot and character development? How do you mine the locations you've been to for material as well as creating fictional locations not found on any map? We will do close readings of literary fiction and nonfiction stories that lean heavily on the setting or weather and then get to work writing our own. Perfect for fiction writers looking to create more interdependence between setting and character or nonfiction writers looking to make settings more vivid and meaningful.

An author, who got her first book contract without an agent, and an editor cover the pros and cons of navigating the publishing world without an agent. Linda K. Wertheimer, the author, talks about the highs, the lows, the why, and how she did it when she landed a nonfiction book deal with Beacon Press, which published her book in 2015. Yes, no agent means you have to negotiate a contract on your own or hire legal help. But it also makes you the main contact for your publisher. The editor, Lissa Warren of Da Capo Press, talks about the issue from the insider perspective. Under which circumstances would she consider a proposal or manuscript from an unagented author? What role do agents play that an author struggles with or what can an agent do that an author cannot? How does book promotion and publicity weigh into the equation? How do you know which path to take - if you have the option? The author and editor will describe lessons learned, questions to ask yourself, and include plenty of time for questions and answers from the attendees.

This lecture takes on the practical challenge at the core of writing historical fiction: the seamless integration of fictive imagination and historical fact. Truth relies on historical research. However, the evidence of historical reality must be finely woven into the verities of any good novel—point of view, plot, character, setting, structure. The lecture includes (brief) deconstruction of exemplary historical fiction scenes (Russell Banks, Geraldine Brooks, Tracy Chevalier, Edwidge Danticat, E.L. Doctorow) focusing on specific craft elements.

Long after most of the details of a plot are forgotten, descriptive passages can define a particular book in our memory, or even an author’s entire work. What makes an image indelible? How much description is too much? More importantly: how can we put description to work in furthering character development, theme, and plot? We’ll think about this through examples of great description ranging from Proust to Marilynne Robinson.

Important: Please read this description carefully before signing up, and bring all necessary materials to the session if you wish to have your work read aloud.

In this freewheeling session, a trained actor will perform the first page of YOUR unpublished manuscript for the audience and a panel of three judges. The judges are agents with years of experience reading unsolicited submissions. When one of the agent judges hears a line that would make her stop reading, she will raise her hand. The actor will keep reading until a second judge raises his hand. The judges will then discuss WHY they would stop reading, and offer concrete (if subjective) suggestions to the anonymous author. If no agent raises his/her hand, the judges will discuss what made the excerpt work so well. All excerpts will be evaluated anonymously, though, at the end of the session, a winner will be chosen from the group of excerpts that did not elicit any raised hands, and that winner will receive a free Grub Street membership. Please bring THE FIRST 250 WORDS of your manuscript (fiction only, please) double-spaced, to the session, TITLED, with its GENRE marked clearly at the top. You will leave it in a box at the front of the room, and the manuscript will be chosen randomly by the actor. (Unfortunately, given the volume of submissions, we can not guarantee that yours will be read aloud).

This is a fun event that aims to be respectful of your work and illuminate the process an agent goes through when she receives a new piece of fiction. The point is not to get through as many writers as possible, but to thoughtfully evaluate the work at hand and offer concrete suggestions from which all could benefit. Please be aware that some lines may cause laughter or scorn; in other words, this session is not for the thin-skinned!

Secret, lies, evasions, deceptions: what’s hidden and how it emerges fuel narrative drive and tension in stories, whether the subject is concealment within a relationship or who committed a murder, the outcome comic or tragic. In this workshop we’ll look at the set up of secrets and some of the many options for when and how they come out, partially or fully. We’ll discuss clues, misinterpretations, discoveries, revelations, suspense, surprise, and what’s known when by which characters and the reader. We’ll focus, especially, on how this relates to the writer’s choices about structure and presentation: point of view, placement of information about the past, what’s onstage and off, narrative disclosure, and outcome. Though this class will use examples from fiction, film, and drama, the content is also useful to those writing memoir or narrative non-fiction.

NOTE: THIS IS AN ADDITIONAL SECTION OF THE SAME SESSION OFFERED ON FRIDAY. "What is Your Book About?" may seem like a simple question, but it’s not—and for many writers, the answer isn’t so easy to come up with either. But it’s an important question when it comes to selling your book and finding readers, and it’s even more important when you’re in the process of writing it—particularly if you’re closing in on a first draft and/or contemplating a revision. So: What IS your book about? In this dynamic session we’ll look into the three main ways of answering that question: concept, premise, and theme. We’ll discuss each of them in detail, providing a number of illustrative examples from familiar and/or recently published novels. Then you’ll have a chance to come up with the answers for your own novel or memoir, a process that can help you zero in on the core meaning of a work in progress, break creative logjams, and give you the insight needed to take your story to the next level.