“There are a lot of ways to stay safe as a writer: by not writing, by writing to no one, by writing to a single admirer, by challenging the judgment of those with the power to judge, by not putting much effort into your work. ‘It’s hard,’ Zink writes in ‘The Wallcreeper,’ ‘trying to…
A few years ago, I had the pleasure of writing a FOB (front of the book) “feature” on the legendary Parsi eatery Britannia & Co. for Saveur magazine. At the time, I was living in Bombay, India, and had frequented Britannia enough to know that it deserved to be written about – if not by…
Sponsorship. If you’re a travel writer, this is a topic that often comes up. Will you take a sponsored press trip, a trip that is planned for you and/or a group of other writers, so that you can see places you may not be able to afford to go? Or, do you go it alone,…
Hi. My name is Melanie and I am laodicean – pococurante, even – when it comes to being cymotrichous. That. Sounded. Weird. But one day it may not. I just used two winning words from previous National Spelling Bees, the 2012 edition is currently taking place in Washington, DC, and on your ESPN screens. Laodicean,…
Newsletters have been around forever. But every couple of years they become the hot new thing. Thanks to services like Mailchimp then TinyLetter and now Substack, writers who have wanted to reach audiences via email can do so in an easy way. Just sign up and start writing. The services take care of the rest…
I’m doing it. Here I am on the first day of NaNoWriMo — National Novel Writing Month — tapping away in a WordPress window. I am writing. Or, should I say, I #amwriting? I don’t have to write a novel. But that’s what a lot of other writers are doing this month. The goal for…
I’ve been freelancing on and off for more than 15 years. While I’ve been lucky to land some decent-paying projects with a few well-known publishers and online outlets, I’ve always wondered whether there is a secret formula to getting more work. In fact, there is a secret formula to getting more freelance assignments, just as…
With friends like this, who needs to worry about FOMO?
I used to think that George Bernard Shaw’s habit of stopping after completing his daily quota of exactly five pages, even if he were in the middle of a sentence, was simply a sign of his eccentricity. But I now realize that he was being canny. A big obstacle to starting to write is not…
