As you watch a Nora Ephron movie or—better yet!—read something she wrote, you can tell that she loved words, characters, and storytelling. She is famous for having said, “Everything is copy,” which is one of the truest things I have ever heard about writing and art. And she totally lived it! She mined her divorce from Carl Bernstein to write her hilarious novel Heartburn, which she also adapted into the screenplay for the movie.

Meeting Nora Ephron

I had seen her movies, of course. I remember watching You’ve Got Mail in theatres and I was utterly captivated by the power of books in other people’s lives. For me, it was one of those moments where I realized that it wasn’t just me.

But I don’t think I truly met Nora Ephron until after she died.

In 2014, my life (and the lives of my mom, dad, uncle, and grandma) revolved around visiting my beloved papa in one hospital facility or another. It consisted of a lot of sitting while he dozed. I’m not good at sitting and doing nothing, so I made sure to bring books with me. But when you’re constantly being interrupted by nurses, aides, visitors, etc, it’s difficult to get into the groove of a novel.

That’s where Nora came in. I had purchased The Most of Nora Ephron when it came out in 2013 and randomly decided to bring it with me. It’s a long volume, clocking in at just over 550 pages. But it contains multitudes.

Robert Gottlieb, who compiled the volume, arranged it by types of writing. You get to meet Nora Ephron the journalist, the novelist, the foodie, the blogger, and the essayist, among other her personas. 

As I flipped through the book, I gravitated toward the shorter pieces that I could finish in one gulp. These were by and large under 10 pages. And they were funny! It was a nice break to get to laugh when things sucked so much.

After that initial introduction, I began purchasing her individual volumes of essays: Wallflower at the Orgy, I Feel Bad About My Neck, I Remember Nothing, Crazy Salad, and Scribble, Scribble (those last two conveniently combined into a single volume). 

Whenever I finish a book, I sign my name and write the date on the inside of the front cover. Looking back at these books now, I can see that I read them in the days immediately after my papa passed. Those books, those essays, provided the balm I apparently needed in order to get through. Humor is, after all, a great medicine.

Realizing the Larger Context

As time passed and I became more serious about this whole writing thing, I began seeing Nora Ephron in a new light. I still thought she was funny as hell, but I became more interested in the arc of her career as well. She wrote a bit of everything. 

While I don’t harbor any desire to write screenplays, I do want to write essays. I want to write a novel. I want to write about food. I want to write widely because there’s just so much out there to explore. And I love seeing that somebody has done so. 

I know other authors have done it (hello, Joan Didion) but Nora Ephron was the first one I really noticed, which makes her special to me. Plus, her style is more intuitive and natural to me, which is why I gravitate toward her so strongly. 

Essays are my first love as a writer and probably the genre I’ll most frequently write in. And I have to credit Nora Ephron with that. She sparked an interest in personal essays that led me to David Sedaris and Joan Didion, then onto Samantha Irby, Rebecca Solnit, and so many others.

When you start something new and you’re alone, it’s kind of like the first day of high school. You walk into the cafeteria and you don’t know where to sit. Your eyes scan the room. You observe. You try to find connections amongst the people at the different tables so you know where you might fit in. 

Well, as I was scanning the writers’ cafeteria, Nora Ephron looked up, caught my eye, smiled a welcoming smile, and beckoned me over. 

I found my table. And I hope you find yours. 

Tell us in the comments: Have you ever read any of Nora Ephron’s books? What did you think?

Lori Walker is the Operations Maven at DIY MFA. Though she’s fallen off the wagon as a writer, she’s hoping to return to writing essays (perhaps even a novel!) through her involvement with DIY MFA. She is also Launch Manager, Web Editor, and Podcast Producer for DIY MFA and a Book Coach. She resides in Smalltown, Oklahoma, with her husband and their cat, Joan Didion. You can follow her on Instagram at @LoriTheWriter.

The post The Book Nook: Ode to Nora Ephron appeared first on DIY MFA.

Charlie Jane is the author of the essay collection Never Say You Can’t Survive along with the short story collection Even Greater Mistakes. 

Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. 

Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

In this episode Charlie Jane Anders and I discuss:

• What makes something an “idea” versus a “story” and how to tell the difference.
• How to keep short stories contained while making them rich and deep.
• Why she believes endings are hard and what she does to cross the finish line.

Plus, her #1 tip for writers.

About Charlie Jane Anders 

Charlie Jane Anders is the author of Victories Greater Than Death, the first book in a new young-adult trilogy released in April 2021, along with the short story Even Greater Mistakes and the essay collection Never Say You Can’t Survive. Her other books include The City in the Middle of the Night and All the Birds in the Sky. Her fiction and journalism have appeared in the New York Times, the Washington Post, Slate, McSweeney’s, Mother Jones, the Boston Review, Tor.com, Tin House, Teen Vogue, Conjunctions, Wired Magazine, and other places. Her TED Talk, “Go Ahead, Dream About the Future” got 700,000 views in its first week. With Annalee Newitz, she co-hosts the podcast Our Opinions Are Correct.

You can follow her on Twitter or Instagram.

Even Greater Mistakes

In her short story collection, Even Greater Mistakes, Charlie Jane Anders upends genre cliches and revitalizes classic tropes with heartfelt and pants-wettingly funny social commentary.

The woman who can see all possible futures is dating the man who can see the one and only foreordained future.

A wildly popular slapstick filmmaker is drawn, against his better judgment, into working with a fascist militia, against a background of social collapse.

Two friends must embark on an Epic Quest To Capture The Weapon That Threatens The Galaxy, or else they’ll never achieve their dream of opening a restaurant.

The stories in this collection, by their very outrageousness, achieve a heightened realism unlike any other. Anders once again proves she is one of the strongest voices in modern science fiction, the writer called by Andrew Sean Greer, “this generation’s Le Guin.”

Never Say You Can’t Survive

From Charlie Jane Anders, the award-winning author of novels such as All the Birds in the Sky and The City in the Middle of the Night, this is one of the most practical guides to storytelling that you will ever read.

The world is on fire.

So tell your story.

Things are scary right now. We’re all being swept along by a tidal wave of history, and it’s easy to feel helpless. But we’re not helpless: we have minds, and imaginations, and the ability to visualize other worlds and valiant struggles. And writing can be an act of resistance that reminds us that other futures and other ways of living are possible.

Full of memoir, personal anecdote, and insight about how to flourish during the present emergency, Never Say You Can’t Survive is the perfect manual for creativity in unprecedented times.

If you decide to check out the book, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links for Even Greater Mistakes and Never Say You Can’t Survive, where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 390

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 390: Idea to Premise to Story: Crafting a Dynamic Short Story – Interview with Charlie Jane Anders appeared first on DIY MFA.

But no, our published pieces are captive to the amber of time, words that were written can’t be unwritten. Your writing is out there naked in the world colliding with the viewpoints, critiques, and skepticism of others. 

Returning written words to your imagination isn’t an option, but embracing those words is, no matter how imperfect you might perceive them. An essay collection just might make for the perfect embrace.

More than just an exercise in self-aggrandizement, or a nonfiction writer’s greatest hits, an essay collection can trigger reflection, contemplation, and self and societal assessment in a reader. Essential ingredients for both individual and social betterment. 

No, not everyone’s essay collection will have the might of Toni Morrison’s The Source of Self-Regard, but, of course, not everyone is Toni Morrison. But your resurrected work can provide readers with a unique way of looking at their life, this world, and the people they inhabit it with. 

But choosing exactly what to include out of your massive archive of writing can provide a unique challenge. What stays and what goes? How do you organize it all? And will any of it still resonate with readers after all this time? 

These are questions I was forced to answer while gathering the essays that comprise my collection, Readying to Rise. Hopefully my hard earned knowledge can assist you with building your own essay collection. 

1. Embrace the Past

Reencountering old writing can be scary, in no small part because you’ve hopefully evolved as a person, writer, and thinker since you put the final punctuation mark on a months or years-old essay. 

A friend says old writing can be like bumping into an ex. You’re different and so are they, but no matter how the relationship ended, whether you wish it had concluded differently or not, you have to make peace that you made an impression upon their life, and they yours.  

You were who you were during that time period. And that is completely okay. Chances are, the thoughts, experiences, and interpretation of events then still ring true to someone encountering a similar circumstance that you previously wrote about. One person’s past is another’s present, afterall. 

Maybe you would’ve even drastically changed things had you written the same piece today. But remember writing is like Virgina Madsen’s description of wine in her monologue from the movie Sideways: I like how wine continues to evolve, like if I opened a bottle of wine today it would taste different than if I’d opened it on any other day, because a bottle of wine is actually alive. And it’s constantly evolving and gaining complexity.

Don’t deprive readers of the taste of your past work, the work you were uniquely able to craft on a singular day, just because your own tastes have evolved. 

2. Make Order Out of Chaos

Most of your work was probably intended to live as stand alone pieces without regard to potentially being bound together one day in a single essay collection.

This means you have to go about the business of organizing disjointed columns or essays into something that a) makes it look like you knew what you were doing all along and b) doesn’t completely jar the reader’s sensibilities. Going from a scarthing piece on FEMA’s missteps following Hurricane Katrina to a musing on overcoming severe halitosis probably isn’t the best sequencing. 

Once you’ve identified all the pieces you found fit to reprint, you want to ensure that you’ve categorized them under comprehensible themes. They don’t necessarily have to be grouped by a concrete topic (e.g. politics, culture, art, etc.) but a reader should be able to implicitly understand why an essay was placed where it was.

I originally chose to group my essays under three categories: Tribulations, Trials, and Triumphs that corresponded with essays dealing with my mental health struggles. I eventually decided it would be better to sort them chronologically. 

You shouldn’t try to shoehorn a piece into a category. If you have enough pieces that seem out of place, there’s nothing wrong with simply creating a new category called Random!

3. Pick That Which Endures 

With an essay collection what’s old is new again. A piece you wrote five years ago about the destigmitizatizing mental health in professional sports may now have new relevance given the recent stances of athletes like Simone Biles and Naomi Osaka. Likewise, a profile you wrote about an Afghanistan War veteran’s return home a decade ago might provide an illuminating insight into the recently concluded conflict. 

In both cases, it’s not only that each story has a renewed news peg, it’s that each story deals with underlying issues that will be ongoing long after your book is planted on someone’s self: The normalization of discussing mental health in the workplace, and America’s role in conflicts abroad. 

You want to do your best to ensure that what you’ve selected can add to those continuing conversations. 

4. Your Vulnerability is Someone Else’s Strength

My favorite writer, James Baldwin, once said that a primary reason he wrote was so that long after he’d departed, hopefully someone who was looking through the wreckage of the past for words of inspiration, comfort, and affirmation might find refuge in his work.

Black, gay, and atheist at a time when just one of those identities would invite scorn, prejudice, and even death, he left a goldmine of words for others to find who dealt with racism, homophobia, bigotry, and alienation. 

Writing about your life’s struggles is never easy, especially when you might still be dealing with those struggles.

However, resharing them in the form of your essay collection can potentially make a difference in someone’s life. It can allow them to know that they are not isolated in their experiences. Your words can make someone feel like their life is seen, heard, felt, and potentially rescue them from a dark place.

Add your words to what people might find when they rummage through the past. 

5. Take Stock

You’ve spent years writing. You’ve persisted through criticism, negatively, doubt, and frustration to arrive at a body of work that you should be proud of. While others waited for the muse to strike, you set your butt down solidly in your chair and produced. 

Was everything you wrote Nobel laureate worthy? Of course not.

But in all your writing, you’ve surely crafted something that has the potential to uplift someone, change their bullheaded beliefs, increase their empathy, or just put a smile on their face after a particularly craptastic day. 

The fact that you amassed enough work that can be bound into a collection is an achievement worthy of celebration. It also means that your work as a writer most likely matters to someone, whether dozens, hundreds, or thousands of people, but who cares.

It all means that you haven’t written in vain. And sometimes we all just need a testament to that.

Marcus Harrison Green is the author of Readying to Rise, the publisher of the South Seattle Emerald, and a columnist with the Seattle Times. Growing up in South Seattle, he experienced first-hand the impact of one-dimensional stories on marginalized communities, which taught him the value of authentic narratives. After an unfulfilling stint in the investment world during his twenties, Marcus returned to his community with a newfound purpose of telling stories with nuance, complexity,  and multidimensionality with the hope of advancing social change. This led him to become a writer and found the South Seattle Emerald. He was awarded the Seattle Human Rights Commissions’ Individual Human Rights Leader Award for 2020. You can follow him on Twitter or connect with him on Facebook.

The post #5onFri: Five Tips for Crafting an Essay Collection People Will Read appeared first on DIY MFA.

Phillip is the author of over a dozen books: 

• 4 personal essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head), as well as Being with Children, Waterfront, and Notes on Sontag
• 3 works of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and Two Marriages)
• 3 poetry collections (The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day).  

He has also edited several anthologies, including one of my personal favorites—Art of the Personal Essay—and he’s the author of To Show and To Tell: The Craft of Literary Nonfiction. 

He is a professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

In this episode Phillip Lopate and I discuss:

• Why you need to have some things you haven’t worked out when you begin to write an essay.
• The ground rules, selection process, and organizational structure for his three volume anthology.
• What qualities make for a great essay, what can kill a piece, and the role the past plays.

Plus, his #1 tip for writers.

About Phillip Lopate

Phillip Lopate is the author of over a dozen books: 4 personal essay collections (Bachelorhood, Against Joie de Vivre, Portrait of My Body, and Portrait Inside my Head), as  well as Being with Children, Waterfront, and Notes on Sontag; three works of fiction (Confessions of Summer, The Rug Merchant, and Two Marriages), 3 poetry collections (The Eyes Don’t Always Want to Stay Open, The Daily Round, and At the End of the Day). He has also edited several anthologies (Art of the Personal Essay, American Movie Critics, and Writing New York). He is a professor in Columbia University’s MFA Writing Program, and lives in Brooklyn, New York.

The Glorious American Essay

A monumental, canon-defining anthology of three centuries of American essays, from Cotton Mather and Benjamin Franklin to David Foster Wallace and Zadie Smith.

The essay form is an especially democratic one, and many of the essays Phillip Lopate has gathered here address themselves–sometimes critically–to American values. Even in those that don’t, one can detect a subtext about being American.

The Founding Fathers and early American writers self-consciously struggle to establish a recognizable national culture. The shining stars of the mid-nineteenth-century American Renaissance no longer lack confidence but face new reckonings with the oppression of blacks and women. The New World tradition of nature writing runs from Audubon, Thoreau, and John Muir to Rachel Carson and Annie Dillard. Marginalized groups in all periods use the essay to assert or to complicate notions of identity.

Lopate has cast his net intentionally wide, embracing critical, personal, political, philosophical, humorous, literary, polemical, and autobiographical essays, and making room for sermons, letters, speeches, and columns dealing with a wide variety of subjects. Americans by birth as well as immigrants appear here, famous essayists alongside writers more celebrated for fiction or poetry. The result is an extensive overview of the endless riches of the American essay.

The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970

A one-of-a-kind anthology of American essays on a wide range of subjects by a dazzling array of mid-century writers at the top of their form.

The three decades that followed World War II were an exceptionally fertile period for American essays. The explosion of journals and magazines, the rise of public intellectuals, and breakthroughs in the arts inspired a flowering of literary culture. At the same time, the many problems that confronted mid-century America–racism, sexism, nuclear threat, war, poverty, and environmental degradation among them–proved fruitful topics for America’s best minds. In The Golden Age of the American Essay, Phillip Lopate assembles a dazzling array of famous writers, critics, sociologists, theologians, historians, activists, theorists, humorists, poets, and novelists. Here are writers like James Agee, E. B. White, A. J. Liebling, Randall Jarrell, and Mary McCarthy, pivoting from the comic indignities of daily life to world peace, consumerism, and restaurants in Paris. Here is Norman Mailer on Jackie Kennedy, Vladimir Nabokov on Lolita, Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail, and Richard Hofstadter’s The Paranoid Style in American Politics. Here are Gore Vidal, Rachel Carson, James Baldwin, Susan Sontag, John Updike, Joan Didion, and many more, in a treasury of brilliant writing that has stood the test of time.

The Contemporary American Essay

A dazzling anthology of essays by some of the best writers of the past quarter century–from Barry Lopez and Margo Jefferson to David Sedaris and Samantha Irby–selected by acclaimed essayist Phillip Lopate.

The first decades of the twenty-first century have witnessed a blossoming of creative nonfiction. In this extraordinary collection, Phillip Lopate gathers essays by forty-seven of America’s best contemporary writers, mingling long-established eminences with newer voices and making room for a wide variety of perspectives and styles. The Contemporary American Essay is a monument to a remarkably adaptable form and a treat for anyone who loves fantastic writing.

Hilton Als • Nicholson Baker • Thomas Beller • Sven Birkerts • Eula Biss • Mary Cappello • Anne Carson • Terry Castle • Alexander Chee • Teju Cole • Bernard Cooper • Sloane Crosley • Charles D’Ambrosio • Meghan Daum • Brian Doyle • Geoff Dyer • Lina Ferreira • Lynn Freed • Rivka Galchen • Ross Gay • Louise Glück • Emily Fox Gordon • Patricia Hampl • Aleksandar Hemon • Samantha Irby • Leslie Jamison • Margo Jefferson • Laura Kipnis • David Lazar • Yiyun Li • Phillip Lopate • Barry Lopez • Thomas Lynch • John McPhee • Ander Monson • Eileen Myles • Maggie Nelson • Meghan O’Gieblyn • Joyce Carol Oates • Darryl Pinckney • Lia Purpura • Karen Russell • David Sedaris • Shifra Sharlin • David Shields • Floyd Skloot • Rebecca Solnit • Clifford Thompson • Wesley Yang

If you decide to check out the books, we hope you’ll do so via these Amazon affiliate links: The Glorious American Essay, The Golden Age of the American Essay: 1945-1970 and The Contemporary American Essay where if you choose to purchase via the link DIY MFA gets a referral fee at no cost to you. As always, thank you for supporting DIY MFA!

Link to Episode 377

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

Head over to iTunes, Stitcher Radio, Spotify, or Google and subscribe so you’ll be first to know when new episodes are available.

Also, remember that sharing is caring so if you know anyone who might enjoy this podcast, please tell them about it or leave us a review so other listeners will want to check it out.

Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 377: The Art of the American Essay Anthology – Interview with Phillip Lopate appeared first on DIY MFA.

Many of my favorite essay collections put a humorous spin on everyday life. I think finding the humor in the mundane is something we always need, but perhaps need a little bit more right now. Initially I thought this would be a pretty simple and straightforward assignment–pick five amazing collections of essays. Then I realized how hard it was to narrow it down to just five! So I hedged my bets on several of these.

Enjoy!

1) Slouching Towards Bethlehem

Joan Didion. I love this woman. I named my cat Joan Didion and expect her to be called Joan Didion, not Joan. But that’s beside the point. Only not really because Didion is my favorite writer and she’s the first author I mention on this list.

This collection details Didion’s life in California during the 1960s. In her writing, she skillfully places herself front and center in the action, one of the first writers to begin doing so. Over her career, Didion has published several collections of essays and a few very powerful novels. I highly recommend her writing because she does a wonderful job of capturing the atmosphere of the setting she describes. 

2) Tiny Beautiful Things

Tiny Beautiful Things is a collection of self-help columns written by Cheryl Strayed. These columns first appeared as Dear Sugar on therumpus.net with Strayed’s identity unknown to readers, though she eventually had a coming out party.

This collection is absolutely beautiful and at times utterly gut-wrenching. Through her columns as Dear Sugar, Strayed not only answers the questions posed to her, but also the question behind what is actually asked. She infuses these columns with very personal stories from her own life–unusual for an advice columnist. All the while, she advocates for something called radical empathy. Her writing here elevates what could be a simple, rote advice column into a true work of art.

3) How to Be a Woman

Caitlin Moran is hilarious. This book is a mixture of memoir and manifesto on what it is like to be a woman nowadays. Each chapter tackles a different aspect of how to be a woman in the world. She does a great job of dismantling the outdated view of feminists as man-haters and makes something that is widely accessible. One of the biggest takeaways for me was that there isn’t a one-size-fits-all version of feminism, but the important thing is to support one another along the way.

Moran has published two other collections of essays that run the gamut from pop culture to politics to current events and everything in between. She’s also published two fantastic novels that do such a great job of depicting the growing process from teen to adult that I sincerely wish they had been around when I was 15.

4) I Was Told There’d Be Cake

The thing I love most about Sloane Crosley’s writing is how relatable it is to my life (and I think the lives of all women who were children in the 1980s and 1990s). She is a master at putting a humorous take on everything from the mundane to the unfortunate to the genuinely funny. To give you a sense, the first essay opens with the sentence: “As most New Yorkers have done, I have given serious and generous thought to the state of my apartment should I get killed during the day,” then goes on to detail her secret (embarrassing) collection of ponies and what she believes it says about her.

5) Calypso

David Sedaris’s writing is pretty much a guaranteed laugh-out-loud for anyone with even a smidgen of a sense of humor. He is a master at putting a hilarious spin on life. At times, critics have claimed that his writing blurs the line between fact and fiction. To that, I say that sometimes you can’t let all of the facts get in the way of a good story. Very rarely are you able to entertain by telling things exactly as they happened; sometimes you need to add a good twist or good line to make the story worth repeating.

Sedaris has written a number of essay collections–all of which I highly recommend. Calypso just happens to be his most recently published. He’s also begun publishing his diaries, which are a very interesting read because they give you the backstory to some of his essays.

Bonus: I just can’t help myself, so here’s some other essay collections you should check out (in no particular order): Dead Girls by Alice Bolin, How to Write an Autobiographical Novel by Alexander Chee, We Are Never Meeting in Real Life by Samantha Irby, Changing My Mind by Zadie Smith, and Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit. I could go on and on–and I feel like I’m forgetting some very huge, very important collections–but I think this is a good starting point. Enjoy!

Lori Walker is the Operations Maven at DIY MFA. Though she’s fallen off the wagon as a writer, she’s hoping to return to writing essays (perhaps even a novel!) through her involvement with DIY MFA. She also teaches yoga part-time in Smalltown, Oklahoma, where she lives with her husband and their cat, Joan Didion. You can follow her on Instagram at @LoriTheWriter.

The post #5onFri: Five Essay Collections to Check Out appeared first on DIY MFA.

My reading was – and still is – catholic (except I avoid anything dealing with westerns and politics). The joy of finding new topics and authors is why I pick books at random at bookstores and libraries. I rarely look at covers. I focus on titles and then delve into the book’s middle. I look for a glimpse into the book’s heart…and, too, the author’s mind.  This somewhat haphazard habit is how I discovered the beauty and mental muscularity of James Baldwin’s political essays. Yes, political essays. 

How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Essays

I blame that bit of off the rails behavior on an undergraduate composition class. Its entire focus was the essay. What could have been a drudge-worthy class full of dry scribbles was instead enlightening. In it, I discovered words’ power to solve problems, to educate, to change another’s mind, to clarify. The instructor, Dr. Sipiora, taught us how to sculpt our own words into powerful vehicles, essays.

But what is an essay? And what makes it so powerful? Merriam-Webster defines essay as a “literary composition usually dealing with its subject from a limited or personal point of view”. The term itself, essay – from the French essayer, “to attempt” or “to try” – encapsulates its aim to influence the reader. While an essay’s topic can be whatever subject a writer chooses, it will fall under the following types: analytical, argumentative, expository, or persuasive.

Analytical essays generally examine, analyze, and interpret. They tend toward academic subjects such as art, literature, and social or political events. Argumentative essays set out to prove the writer’s opinion, theory or statement is more credible than another’s. Many political essays tend to be framed as such. Expository essays have an explanatory bent. They are often written to explicate a particular issue, theme or idea. 

Persuasive essays aim to convince readers to adopt the writer’s position on an issue or point of view. The writer gives good or beneficial reasons for the reader to do so. 

Any and all of that influencing power within bounds. I believe much of an essay’s power comes from length. Essayist extraordinaire Roxane Gay, in discussing the preferred length of essays, opined: “[Essay length] varies. Sometimes an essay needs to be 700 words and sometimes, 7,000 words. 2,500 -­ 3,500 is a sweet spot.” 

Let Your Love Shine In

The success in writing essays lies in the writer’s love of her subject. One great example of this is Roxane Gay’s New York Times Op-Ed piece, Ask Roxane: Is It Too Late to Follow My Dreams? on Dec. 30, 2017.  It’s also a fantastic example of a persuasive essay. 

Gay fields letters from two writers of what she calls “a certain age.” Both writers ask a version of “Is it too late to follow my dream?” She answers first in recounting her own writing experiences.

Let’s Read: 

“I was incandescent with envy — so many breathless stories about people my age and often younger who were discovered by a hotshot agent, who sold a book for six or seven figures, who created a popular blog and parlayed that success into a full-time writing career. 

The writing world was passing me by. I was never going to be noticed. I was going to spend my life working mediocre jobs, writing in obscurity, and before long it was going to be too late. I was going to turn 30 and then 35 and after that, I couldn’t even speculate because I was either going to have a bestselling book by the age of 35 or my dream would be not merely deferred but dead, dead, dead.”

She tells them that even after she got some success, she still worried. The success she experienced didn’t look like what she had imagined. [An interesting aside, Gay was 38 when she sold her two books: Bad Feminist, a book of essays, and Untamed State, a novel.] Gay says that she wished, “I could have told myself when I was hopeless about my writing prospects is that I should have defined artistic success in ways that weren’t shaped by forces beyond my control.”

She follows this information with writing/writing industry realities. 

Let’s Read:

“Sometimes, success is getting a handful of words you don’t totally hate on the page. Sometimes success is working a full-time job to support your family and raising your kids and finding a way, over several years, to write and finish a novel. Sometimes it’s selling a book to a small press for 25 copies of your book and a vague promise of royalties you may never see. And sometimes, if you are very lucky, artistic success is marked by the glittery things so many of us yearn for — the big money deals, the critical accolades, the multicity book tours, the movie options.”

She ends with turning the writers’ view inward. She asks them to examine their own writing expectations and realities. Writing is not a zero-sum game. Gay reminds them that “[t]he literary flavor of the week did not get your book deal.” She leaves them with reality, one with an ever-open door for dreams:

“Write as well as you can, with as much heart as you can, whenever you can. Make sure there are people in your life who will have faith in your promise when you can’t. Get your writing in the world, ideally for the money you deserve because writing is work that deserves compensation. But do not worry about being closer to 50 or 65 or 83. Artistic success, in all its forms, is not merely the purview of the young. You are not a late bloomer. You are already blooming.” 

New and Different Worlds

If writing essays is new to you, take a look at the following anthologies, books, articles, and websites to learn about the technique and craft:

• The Art of the Personal Essay: An Anthology from the Classical Era to the Present, Phillip Lopate – This anthology gives an overview of the personal essays from the ancient world to the 20th century.

• Best American Essays: This annual anthology series offers an overview of current essayists and the topics being discussed. It can easily serve as a practical primer for approaching essay writing.

• Collected Essays: James Baldwin, edited by Toni Morrison

• Crafting The Personal Essay: A Guide for Writing and Publishing Creative Non-Fiction: Dinty W. Moore – A hands-on, creativity-expanding guide to help you explore the flexibility and power of the personal essay.

• DIY MFA interview: Exploring Essay Writing: An Interview With Jayne English: My interview with Relief Journal essayist Jayne English on generating ideas and creating depth in essays.

• Wanderlust: A History of Walking, Rebecca Solnit – “A passionate, thought provoking exploration of walking as a political and cultural activity.”

I’m long past my undergraduate years but I still choose most of my TBR list the same random albeit pointed way. I read books and essays that bring light to topics on which I’m woefully in the dark. I gravitate to authors who show vulnerability. I take heart from the idea they’re struggling with the same or similar things I battle and that we’ll get through them.

As a writer of essays, I try to bring the same things to the fore. In her Skillshare class intro, Roxane Gay says:

“One of the most interesting things that writing essays has shown me is that one person really can make a difference. When you write a good essay, people gravitate toward that work and they tend to start thinking about the world in new and different ways […].”

That’s the best any of us writers can do.

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay “The Kindness of Strangers” appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

The post Deep Dive into Short Forms: Essays appeared first on DIY MFA.

Today’s show is our last episode of 2018 so Happy New Year everybody!

And this episode is an especially awesome one because it features three members of my awesome DIY MFA team. I am so excited to have DIY MFA columnists Melanie Marttila, Brenda Joyce Patterson, and Stacy Woodson on the show!

I also want to take a moment to mention that these three amazing women are only a tiny sample of the awesome members of DIY MFA. We currently have 21 members on our team, from columnists who contribute articles to people who work their magic maintaining our archives and helping to curate all the voices we feature on our site. So a big thank you to all the members of the team for another awesome year!

Now, let me introduce the three amazing ladies I’ll be chatting with in this interview.

Melanie Marttila is a certified corporate trainer by day and fantasy writer by night. She writes the DIY MFA column Speculations, which is all about science fiction and fantasy. Her own works of scifi and fantasy have appeared in several places such as Bastion Science Fiction Magazine and On Spec Magazine.

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. Her column at DIY MFA, Writing Small, focuses on the various different short forms of writing such as short stories, poetry, and essays. She is a mentee in the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Writer to Writer Mentorship Program for Fall 2018—which is a very prestigious and selective mentoring program—and her poetry and flash fiction have been published in numerous literary magazines such as Vayavya. She has also had a travel essay published (along with works by Maya Angelou and Gwendolyn Brooks) in the anthology Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure.

Stacy Woodson writes crime fiction and is the columnist behind Hook, Line, and Dagger, which dives into all things thriller and mystery. She is a U.S. Army veteran and memories of her time in the military are a source of inspiration for her writing. Stacy is a Daphne du Maurier winner and a Killer Nashville Claymore finalist. She also has several short fiction pieces forthcoming in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine, Malice Domestic’s Mystery Most Edible, and Chesapeake Crimes: Invitation to Murder.

Didn’t I tell you my team was amazing?!?! But I’ll stop gushing and let you hear from these fabulous women themselves. So listen in as Melanie, Brenda, Stacy and I chat about the aspects of genre writing and give you a sneak peek at the behind-the-scenes of DIY MFA.

In this episode Melanie, Brenda, Stacy and I discuss:

• An inside look at the Speculations, Writing Small, and Hook, Line, and Dagger columns.
• The different conventions within genres and writing forms.
• Why reading with purpose in your genre is so important.
• Pitfalls to avoid when writing thriller, scifi/fantasy, and short forms.
• Book recommendations to help you dive into each of their genres.

Plus, all these lovely ladies’ #1 tip for writers.

About Melanie Marttila

During the day, Melanie is a certified (insert joke-of-choice here) corporate trainer, and by night she is a science fiction and fantasy writer. She writes the DIY MFA column Speculations which is all about science fiction and fantasy.

You can find her short science fiction in Bastion Science Fiction Magazine (“The Broken Places,” June 2014), On Spec Magazine (“Downtime,” Fall 2014), and Sudbury Ink (“Cicadas” and “Molly Finder,” 2016).

To connect with Melanie check out her website melaniemarttila.ca.

And you can read Melanie’s most recent Speculations article here.

About Brenda Joyce Patterson

Brenda Joyce Patterson is a poet, writer, librarian, and lover of short writing forms. She is a mentee in the Association of Writers & Writing Programs’ Writer to Writer Mentorship Program for Fall 2018. She writes the column, Writing Small, for DIY MFA extolling poetry and short stories, literature’s mild-mannered superheroes.

Her poetry and flash fiction have been published in Vayavya, Gravel Magazine, and Melancholy Hyperbole. Also, along with works by Maya Angelou, Gwendolyn Brooks, and Alice Walker, her travel essay, “The Kindness of Strangers”, appeared in Go Girl: The Black Woman’s Guide to Travel and Adventure published by Eighth Mountain Press in 1997.

To connect with Brenda check out her website at brendajoycepatterson.com.

And you can read Brenda’s most recent Writing Small article here.

About Stacy Woodson

Stacy Woodson is a crime fiction writer as well as a U.S. Army veteran, and memories of her time in the military are a source of inspiration for her stories. She is a Daphne du Maurier winner for best romantic suspense, in the single-title, unpublished category and a Killer Nashville Claymore finalist. She reviews books for Publishers Weekly, and writes the column Hook, Line, and Dagger for DIY MFA which dives into the thriller and mystery genre.

Her short fiction will appear in Ellery Queen Mystery Magazine in 2019, as well as in two forthcoming anthologies: Malice Domestic’s Mystery Most Edible from Wildside Press also due out in 2019, and Chesapeake Crimes: Invitation to Murder due out from Wildside Press in 2020.

To connect with Stacy check out her website at www.stacywoodson.com.

And you can read Stacy’s most recent Hook, Line, and Dagger article here.

Link to Episode 232

(Right-click to download.)

If you liked this episode…

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Until next week, keep writing and keep being awesome!

The post Episode 232: Behind the Scenes of DIY MFA’s Genre Columns — Interview with Melanie Marttila, Brenda Joyce Patterson, and Stacy Woodson appeared first on DIY MFA.