Craft your scary story with these 4 writing tips from Bryant’s Meher Manda
news.bryant.edu – Thursday October 19, 2023
Whether it’s Bram Stoker’s Dracula or Stephen King’s The Shining, horror stories have spellbound readers since Greek and Roman times. The genre seeks to create feelings of fear, dread, and terror, and takes skill and patience to perfect.
“Horror is most successful when it unsettles the reader with the ordinary,” says History, Literature, and Arts Lecturer Meher Manda, MFA, who’s teaching the College of Arts and Sciences’ “Fiction Writing Workshop.” “People talk about Stephen King as the great bastion of American horror, and many of his novels revel in suburban disturbance where this well-meaning town of well-meaning people has a darker underbelly.”
As a writer, editor, and cultural critic, Manda enjoys horror — especially the stories that shock readers into imagining fears they never knew they had. To help individuals who are creating their own bone-chilling stories, she offers the four following writing strategies.
Inque Magazine is a literary force that will memorialise our time
itsnicethat.com – Wednesday October 18, 2023
Editor-in-chief Dan Crowe, and Pentagram partner, designer and former New York Times Magazine art director Matt Willey uncover the process behind issue two of the magazine that will only have ten.
Who doesn’t feel it? Being perplexed at how we’re going to define this generation. Living in the age of information, where stories from near and far are accessible at just a click, and the allure of the most revered crumbles under increased access to their lives and methods, it’s no wonder that a highlight reel may not be so easy to assemble. But, in the case of Inque magazine, literature is a powerful force that can remind us of the power of our collective now, in just ten years, with a projected ten issues, in a feat to memorialise the 2020s. “Every issue is its own adventure; tracking down new writers, or finally getting in touch with someone I’ve always wanted to work with,” Dan Crowe, the magazine’s editor-in-chief tells us of his journey to commissioning the likes of Annie Ernaux, Sheila Heti and Stephen Fry for its second issue.
Dan, as with all of us, has seen an increase in writers, publishers and magazines throughout the literary sphere. “But, sometimes I wish for there to be an explosion of a new and interconnected group of authors, like a new Martin Amis, Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes and Salman Rushdie hegemony, a diverse and younger school,” he tells us. “And, this seems to occur when there is a coherent force to fight against, a common enemy, and everything just feels so fractured now.” In an effort to bind this generation’s efforts, designer Matt Willey creates with the knowledge that Inque may never make sense until the decade-long ride is over. “It takes on a shape; there’s a beginning, middle and end. Like in Agnes’ photo booth series; she will change over the course of a decade, she will age, life will change and things will be different,” Matt adds.
You wrote a book! Now make a viral TikTok about it.
mashable.com – Sunday October 15, 2023
Authors can no longer succeed in their craft by writing alone. They must embody multiple roles: writers, publicists, digital marketers, and social media managers. They must be rabid in their self-promotion and steadfast in their personal branding. They have to produce viral tweets, create viral TikTok videos, and optimize their Instagram accounts so that they can get paid to do the work they want to do.
In 2023, writing a book is the easy part.
That's not to say that self-promotional branding is a novel concept for writers. In the 18th and 19th centuries, authors pulled off some wild stunts to build their brands in newspaper column inches. In the 1920s, Virginia Woolf went shopping with Vogue. Ernest Hemingway did photo ops on safaris and fishing trips. John Steinbeck posed for beer ads. And beyond that kind of classic self-branding, promotion in the 1900s involved a significant amount of personal networking. Anne Sexton, for instance, became a literary star not only because she was an exceptional poet, but also because she was the daughter and wife of salesmen and excellent at self-promotion, as Joy Lanzendorfer pointed out in LitHub. Sexton, who won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1967, tried aggressively to get her work seen. She was ambitious, sending her poems to dozens of publications at a time and hunting down poets she admired, flirting with them, and then demanding they mentor her.
New Publishing Imprint Listing: Bird Eye Books
firstwriter.com – Friday October 13, 2023
Imprint publishing high quality illustrated books about the visual arts. We plan to work with authors, artists, sculptors, ceramicists, photographers, illustrators, crafts people, architects and other creatives to publish beautiful books about our visual culture.
Poland joins CAA as agent in books department
thebookseller.com – Thursday October 12, 2023
Harriet Poland has joined the books department at the Creative Artists Agency (CAA) as an agent.
Poland will be working across a range of books, including narrative, voice-driven non-fiction, pop culture, memoir and journalism.
She comes to the agency from Hodder & Stoughton, where she was editorial director and published several titles from authors including Rob Delaney, Garth Marenghi and Jessie Ware. Prior to Hodder, she held positions at Hodder Studio, Audible and The Hanbury Agency.
Rebecca Netley on the difficulties of writing ghost stories
culturefly.co.uk – Thursday October 12, 2023
As a long-time lover of supernatural and ghost stories it had always been my burning ambition to write one. My first book had been a thriller and I hadn’t anticipated the particular difficulties that might confront me when moving to this particular genre.
I am in complete agreement with Susan Hill who famously said of writing ghosts stories: ‘Less is more.’ Greater fear is generated by suggestion and ambiguity than by a fully-formed apparition – the shadow behind the door, the singing tones of a ghostly child, a rocking-chair moving on its rockers with no apparent cause and footsteps in an empty room. Once you present the ghost, although the moment should be fear-inducing, it is actually the instant when some fear is dispelled.
New Literary Agent Listing: Ericka T. Phillips
firstwriter.com – Thursday October 12, 2023
Interested in non-fiction authors working in the Buddhist and mindfulness arena with a focus on health and spiritual well-being. She has a passion for developing projects and building platforms that help amplify the voices of women of color and black women writers in particular. She is experienced in platform development, marketing, and publicity and helps authors translate their message into brand strategy.
What Was Literary Fiction?
thenation.com – Tuesday October 10, 2023
As an English professor, I’m often asked, “What do you like to read?” Sometimes I answer, “Literary fiction.” By that phrase, I mean fiction that privileges art over entertainment. I did not know until recently that literary fiction—the phrase, not what it stands for—grew up with me. We’re about the same age. And while I hope I’m only midway through my life, literary fiction might be dead. More precisely, what might have died is literary fiction as a meaningful category in publishing and bookselling.
The term “literary fiction” began its rise about 40 years ago. In the summer of 1980, John Dessauer, a book industry analyst, raged against those who were bemoaning the state of publishing. A wave of mergers and acquisitions had consolidated the industry in recent years, as once-independent publishers were absorbed by conglomerates. Gulf + Western owned Simon & Schuster. Pearson owned Penguin, which had merged with Viking to form Viking Penguin. S.I. Newhouse had just acquired Ballantine, Knopf, Pantheon, and Random House from RCA. Eventually, just five multinational conglomerates—the Big Five—would control most of trade publishing.
New Publishing Imprint Listing: Scarlet
firstwriter.com – Tuesday October 10, 2023
Aims to bring audiences fresh voices in psychological suspense and domestic thrillers.
New Literary Agent Listing: Camille Kantor
firstwriter.com – Tuesday October 10, 2023
Looking for titles, whether fiction or non-fiction, that will inspire the public to engage with nature while imparting fascinating knowledge about our planet and its inhabitants. She is particularly interested in popular science non-fiction work. Her fiction tastes include books that immerse the reader in descriptive but clear imagery and that have themes of nature-human interactions. She especially loves interesting, well-developed characters and high concept literary fiction that approaches philosophical topics about our relationship with our planet.
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