Editor’s Note: Please Join us in Anchorage on Friday, November 15, 2019 at 7 PM at The Writer’s Block Bookstore & Café in Anchorage. 49 Writers, Alaska Quarterly Review, and the Center for the Narrative & Lyric Arts present two engaging and provocative stories from the new AQR edition: Lee Conell’s “Ex Party” and Debbi Urbanksi’s …
Susan Orlean is best known for her books The Orchid Thief, Saturday Night, Rin Tin Tin, and most recently, The Library Book, published in October, 2018. Now out in paperback, it’s a story she was compelled to tell about the largest library fire in US history and how it renewed a lifelong love and appreciation …
What we like can do so much for our writing, including challenging us to come at our fiction in novel ways. So don’t segregate your likes into the “for fun” column and forget about them when you get down to work. Investigate your likes. Interrogate them. Ask yourself: Why do you like what you like—and how can it help you become a better writer?
Who among us doesn’t have a dead novel or memoir that resisted all CPR efforts? Who hasn’t wondered if some part of it couldn’t be saved or repurposed? With that in mind, I’ll share a few lessons I learned from my experience doing a “page one rewrite” of my novel currently titled “Annie and the Wolves.”
In August 2017, I had one of the strangest experiences of my writing life. I opened a file in a folder associated with a novel I’d given up on five years earlier, read a few unfamiliar paragraphs, What’s this?, and then a few pages more, I know I wrote it; I just don’t remember writing it. I kept going all the way to the end of the chapter, and found myself intrigued, What the heck is going to happen next?
