During my final year at Pomona College, whenever I had a serious deadline, I would put on my glasses and head to the philosophy library. My glasses were tortoise shell with round lenses and did nothing to help my vision. Seriously, they were filled with fake glass. And the philosophy library might as well have… Read more »
Today, Lori is interviewing Thien-Kim Lam. They’ll be talking about writing romance with depth and spice. Have you signed up to be a DIY MFA Radio Insider yet? This is an exciting new monthly newsletter especially for our podcast listeners. Every month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer with recaps of the most… Read more »
In 2020, I finally penned the novel I’d always dreamed of writing. While furiously typing on my laptop, I had kept the home office door locked because I had been too terrified to share what I’d written with anyone, even my husband. My manuscript was too intimate, too personal. Too raw. The thought of others… Read more »
So, is Twitter dead? Just try Googling it—the headlines aren’t pretty. For writers, the agonizing decline of our digital public square hits hard. The #PitMad pitch competitions were excellent for getting agent attention. You could have real conversations with publishers and famous authors. It was a place to create genuine #writingcommunity, breaking down the high… Read more »
For last year’s NaNoWriMo, I chose to write about my WIP, a modern fantasy YA setting in the Caribbean. I had already finished the novel’s first draft in mid-2022, but something felt off about the writing. I didn’t even want to look at some chapters. It wasn’t disgust: it was detachment. That’s because when you… Read more »
Once you make a habit of writing, there are things you come to expect, like characters ignoring the plot, one revision after another, and long hours spent in front of a computer talking to yourself, often out loud. What you don’t expect, is to discover a secret ingredient that brings your writing to a new… Read more »
Today, Lori is interviewing Courtney Maum. They’ll be talking about honesty in memoir and her book The Year of the Horses. Have you signed up to be a DIY MFA Radio Insider yet? This is an exciting new monthly newsletter especially for our podcast listeners. Every month, you’ll get an email from our podcast producer… Read more »
When I told a writing instructor I wrote historical fiction, she replied, “Don’t put too much history in it.” I blinked. Say what? How can we have a clue about where we’re going if we don’t know where we’ve been? Historical fiction can take us to the foreign country that is the past, can make… Read more »
Let’s be honest, defining genres can be a real bear, and one of the blurriest lines is the one between Science Fiction and Fantasy. If you’re like me, your manuscript has elements of both. So how do you market it? Cue the glazed eyes and the descent of that nebulous SFF cloud. But what does… Read more »
I am so excited to share this interview with Rochelle Bilow just ahead of Valentine’s Day. I’m relatively new to the romance genre, but I love it. By definition, we know it’s going to end with a happily ever after…but the fun part is seeing how the characters get there. It’s the journey, not the… Read more »
