harriet spelled out in quirky splat bold typeface

#Harriet spelled out in quirky splat bold typeface how to

Oh, you may laugh, but writers of promise (what ever happened to that lovely phrase?) were often actively discouraged from writing nonfiction accounts. Even, interestingly enough, if they covered essentially the same subject matter at a similar level of characterization. Blame Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Parker, and their ilk: for a good century or more, even the most beautifully-composed first-hand nonfiction account was generally dismissed in literary circles as a less serious endeavor - or at least one that deserved to be taken less seriously - than garden-variety slice-of-life fiction. My personal favorite: like genre fiction, good memoir writing has very largely lost the stigma it once carried.ĭoes that sharp collective intake of breath indicate that those of you new to the joys and challenges of memoir were not aware that for many years, it was not considered high literary writing? While there have always been wonderfully-written memoirs, it used to be routine for fiction-lovers to sniff at them as literary efforts - and not only in private. Memoir, too, has seen quite a sea change in recent years - and that has generated some immensely positive effects for memoir aficionados and writers alike. Since the economic downturn began, even quite well-established mainstream and adult fiction authors have found themselves gravitating toward these categories - and if they haven’t of their own accords, their agents may well have suggested it.

The explosion of YA, paranormal, and fantasy in recent years has brought incredible richness to all of those categories, partially through definitional expansion - YA in particular now regularly takes up subject matter that would have made even the most hardened high school librarian blush in the 1970s - and partially, let’s face it, through good writers rushing toward those readerships. Nothing wrong with that, of course: publishing has always been a trend-oriented business. It’s not that Millicent the agency screener no longer sees the vividly-rendered descriptions of living room slipcovers, meaningful glances, and tense non-verbal exchanges over WASPy Thanksgiving dinners of yesteryear cross her desk it’s that realism in fiction has very largely been supplanted by fast-paced street fighting, a little light bondage, and sparkling vampires who, in defiance of tradition, wander about freely in daylight. While 30 or 40 years ago, someone who burned to write would have tended to churn out a slice-of-life piece the first time out - and, in all likelihood, seen it treated as a more serious literary production than a nonfiction piece covering precisely the same subject matter - new writers in recent years have been turning in greater numbers to genre fiction.

Why? Well, fact-based fiction is considerably in less popular than it used to be, for one thing.

It’s some of the most difficult writing to do well, yet strangely, we writers tend to discuss walking the truth tightrope far less amongst ourselves than the more fanciful aspects of craft. So don’t panic, rookies: I shall be reviving my annual explanatory tradition next week.įor the next few days, though, I’d like to talk with those of you writing about reality - as memoir, as narrative nonfiction, as everyday life interpreted on the pages of a novel. Innate literary talent has nothing to do with the learned skill of presenting one’s writing professionally, any more than having a naturally good ear for dialogue correlates with the ability to place a comma in the right place or wield a semicolon correctly.Ĭontrary to popular belief, quite a lot goes into writing a book other than inspiration, patience, and the willingness to sit in one place, typing your little heart out, for a year or two. Perhaps my decades of experience as a writer and editor have skewed my sample, but in my experience, approximately no one is born with that knowledge. For some reason that defies human understanding, formatting a book manuscript or proposal as the pros do is implicitly regarded as piece of practical know-how the Literature Fairy bestows on talented writers at birth.

#Harriet spelled out in quirky splat bold typeface how to

Surprised not to see a post on formatting occupying this space, campers? You should be: for the past seven years, I have embraced the decline of the old year and the advent of the new as an opportunity to provide the members of the Author! Author! community with a solid explanation of something that new writers are simply expected to know how to do before they even consider approaching an agent.