What A Bestselling Author Learned When She Went Back to School to Study Writing

Stephanie Land hit the jackpot when Netflix made a hit miniseries of her bestselling memoir Maid, which described the financial and emotional perils of raising her young daughter as a single mother earning $9 an hour as a housecleaner.

Her new book, Class, tells what happened when she went back to school to study creative writing, hoping to launch a career as a writer that would lead to a more secure life for herself and her child. In her mid-30s, Land financed her $50,000+ education with a combination of loans, grants, and more, including the income she earned from cleaning houses in the Missoula, Montana, area.

Land eventually graduated, but only after what she described as probably “the hardest year of my life.” Her challenges included coping with PTSD, severe scoliosis, frigid Montana winters, custody disputes with her child’s father, and trying to cut through the red tape needed to claim the government benefits to which she was entitled.

You can read more about how she did it in my review of Class on Medium. If you’re dealing with a few challenges of your own, her story might help you see them in perspective.

View at Medium.com

Do We Overpraise The Novelist Dorothy Sayers And Her Sleuth, Lord Peter Wimsey?

Novels about Lord Peter Wimsey, the aristocratic crime-solver, recently turned 100. And Dorothy Sayers’ stories about him have had a full life in books and other media, including TV, radio, and film. How well have Wimsey’s adventures held up over the decades?

Sayers has won fans worldwide, including Narnia creator C.S. Lewis and Madeleine L’Engle, author of A Wrinkle in Time. But not everyone agrees that she deserves all the praise she’s received for novels like The Nine Tailors, Whose Body?, and Gaudy Night.

A famous assault on her reputation came from the book critic Edmund Wilson at The New Yorker, who said her detective novels weren’t especially good–they just had more literary pretensions. Where does the truth lie? I weigh the evidence for and against Sayers over at @Medium.

Does Your Career Feel Like A Train Wreck?

This has been a tough year for my journalism colleagues, with 20,000+ media jobs lost, and not just in places where a bloodbath has been going on for years, such as newspapers and magazines. Major websites and podcasts have gone under, too.

What can the walking wounded learn from survivors of far worse disasters, like shipwrecks and plane crashes? I’ve reviewed a lot of books on world-class calamities and wondered what their authors might say. Quite a lot, it turns out.

One helpful step is avoiding self-pity or feeling sorry for yourself, according to a book that dealt with the near-miraculous survival of a mountaineer given up for dead after he broke his leg while climbing and fell into a crevasse in the Peruvian Andes.

In a new post at @Medium, I write about five strategies that worked during extraordinary catastrophes, including that of a pilot who fell five miles without a parachute and broke nearly every bone in his body. I’ve focused on the potential lessons for writers, but the tips could help people in other careers, too.

View at Medium.com

The 5 Worst Words of 2023

Right after Thanksgiving, Meriam-Webster named its word of the year: “authentic.” But what were the worst words of 2023?

I’ve posted a list of my “5 Worst Words of the Year” at @Medium, a dishonor roll that includes both newer words and older ones that refuse to die even though they insult you or make no sense.

The No. 1 spot on my list goes to the word “learnings,” business jargon for “lessons” or “wisdom” or “what I’ve learned.” Others on my dishonor roll include “relatable,” “famously,” “Karen” (or “Becky”) and “hack” (as in “productivity” hack. Here’s the full list and my explanations for why I chose each word.

View at Medium.com

Should You Self-Publish Or Hold Out For A Traditional Publisher? How A Top Editor Made The Decision

If you’ve written a book–or hope to do one–you may face some tough questions. Should you self-publish? Hold out for a Big Five publisher? Or split the difference by going with a traditional but smaller press?

Judy Culbreth faced those decisions when she wrote a book after a high-flying career in publishing in New York: She’d been the executive editor of Redbook, the editor-in-chief of Working Mother, and had a regular spot on the “Today” show in the days of Katie Couric and Matt Lauer. She answers 10 questions about how she made that decision–and what she learned from it–in my recent interview with her at @Medium.

View at Medium.com

Why Are There So Many Genres Of Fiction And Nonfiction? How Do You Know Where Your Writing Fits Into The Mix?

Does it seem to you that literary genres are increasing faster than beer brands?

You’re not alone. Fiction and nonfiction genres and subgenres have exploded in the age of online bookselling and review sites that allow you to tag books and stories any way you like–in effect, creating new categories other writers can join.

Wikipedia lists 50 subgenres of science fiction alone. And the list doesn’t include up-and-comers like cli-fi, or sci-fi about the effects of climate change.

Do we have too many genres of fiction and nonfiction, or so many that they’ve stopped being useful to writers and readers? What’s driving the boom? And–if you’re a writer–how do you know where your work fits into the dizzying array?

Drawing on my experience of having edited the book section of Ohio’s largest newspaper, I offer a few thoughts on the trend at @Medium.

We Need To Kill ‘Take A Listen’ And Phrases Like it

Watch a news report on almost any TV network and before long you’re likely to hear someone say “Take a listen” and cut to a video.

This windy phrase seems to have begun its rapid spread at cable news shows that had more air time to fill than the 30-minute nightly broadcasts on older media.

But it’s long since infected politics, business, and other fields. It’s annoying enough to have an entry in Robert Hartwell Fiske’s The Dimwit’s Dictionary: More than 5,000 Overused Words and Phrases andAlternatives to Them: 2d Edition (Marion Street Press, 2006).

Fiske calls “Take a listen” (or “Have a listen”) an “infantile” expression: “As inane as it is insulting, have (take) a listen obviously says nothing that listen alone does not.” And it’s not the only pointless and baggy phrase you hear regularly.

Do expressions like that irritate you, too? You might enjoy my column about them @Medium.

View at Medium.com

Why I Support The Writers Guild Strike

I belonged to the Newspaper Guild for more than a decade when I was the book editor of the Plain Dealer, a “closed shop” where certain types of employees had to join the union. During those years, I found that union membership had benefits that went far beyond the difference it made in my co-workers paychecks’ or everyday working conditions.

The Writers Guild in Hollywood has gone on strike, in part, because the rise of streaming services has cut deeply into what they earn, and movie and TV studios and production companies are allowing it to happen.

But even those of us who work in other fields have reason to care about the outcome: The long, slow death of traditional unions has been a major factor in the growing gap between the rich and the poor in the United States. That income inequality helps to explain why unions recently have become reenergized in media companies, including the book publisher HarperCollins.

I write about why I support the Writers Guild strike–drawing on my experience as a third-generation union member in my family–in a new post over at Medium that might interest you if you care about whether writers earn a decent living. The official hashtags for the strike include #WGAStrong and #DotheWriteThing, and if you support the strike, you might also consider using them on social media.

View at Medium.com

15 Inspirational Quotes On Writing You Won’t Get From Stephen King or Anne Lamott

Have you noticed that every time you see a list of inspirational quotes on writing these days, they’re always from Stephen King’s On Writing or Anne Lamott’s Bird by Bird?

It takes nothing away from those books to say that a lot of authors had worthy things to say about the process before either of them arrived on the scene.

I recently read a long out-of-print memoir of the novelist Somerset Maugham by Garson Kanin, the director and screenwriter who with his wife, the actor Ruth Gordon, wrote the screenplays for some of Tracy and Hepburn’s most famous comedies, including Adam’s Rib. It turned out to be a trove of great quotes from Maugham, Kanin, Gordon, and the playwright Noel Coward, who wrote the foreword.

The book is Remembering Mr. Maugham, and because it’s hard to find today, I rounded up 15 of its best quotes on writing at @Medium.

In one of my favorites, Kanin takes on the question: Can you accomplish anything but writing only a few hours a day? He writes: “Charles Darwin–working only four hours a day–had changed the course of civilization.” You’ll find more like it in my post at @Medium.

View at Medium.com

View at Medium.com

What’s Wrong With ‘Expository’ Dialogue in Fiction?

Why do critics fault writers for “expository” dialogue in novels and short stories? Is always bad? And how can you avoid it in your writing or spot it in a book you’re reading?

Short answer: “Expository” (or “expositional”) dialogue often leads to stilted or awkward info dumps. Here’s the longer answer:

View at Medium.com