Writers' Newsletter
Issue #253
April 2024
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News |
Some of this month's news for writers from around the web.
Literary mag launches new writing prize for short stories
quillandquire.com – Saturday April 20, 2024
Attention, short story writers: Montreal-based literary journal yolk is launching the Montreal Fiction Prize.
The prize, open to Canadian writers of stories up to 4,000 words long, carries a $2,000 purse, with two $500 awards for the second- and third-place stories.
Giller Prize-winning author Souvankham Thammavongsa will be the guest judge for the prize’s inaugural year.
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A look ahead to The 2024 Bournemouth Writing Festival
greatbritishlife.co.uk – Saturday April 20, 2024
Dominic Wong, director of the Bournemouth Writing Festival, reveals how this event helps both aspiring and established writers to network and gain valuable skills.
The Bournemouth Writing Festival returns this April after its hugely successful inaugural launch last year. Set to be bigger, better and more inclusive, over 80 events and activities are due to take place over the three-day weekend (April 26-28) with the aim to improve and progress people’s writing – and help them to get published!
A mix of free and ticketed events, involving nearly 100 experienced writers and professionals, have been curated by the Bournemouth Writing Festival team to foster inspiration, networking and stimulate creativity. New for 2024 will be 1-2-1 sessions with literary agents and writing professionals, a free Poetry Hub and a photography studio to get those all-important headshots for book covers and publicity.
Writers' Handbook 2025 - Out Now!
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Registration open for King’s College writing retreat
citizensvoice.com – Saturday April 20, 2024
King’s College will host the third annual Leo & Friends Writing Retreat from June 7 to 9. The event brings together writers of all genres and experience levels for a weekend of writing workshops, review sessions and open mic readings.
This year, the retreat is open not only to alumni, but to non-alumni as well.
“While the Retreat began as a King’s College alumni gathering, we are excited to welcome a diverse group of writers to campus,” said Dr. Robin Field, Professor of English at King’s College and retreat board member. “Writers may attend workshops on craft, listen to published authors discuss how to submit creative writing to literary magazines, and share their works-in-progress for feedback and encouragement.”
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Listings |
A selection of the new listings added to firstwriter.com this month.
New Publisher Listing: McNidder & Grace
firstwriter.com – Thursday March 21, 2024
We specialise in non-fiction and fiction titles for adults. With a particular emphasis on popular culture, our non-fiction list includes books on photography, art, music, biography, history, country pursuits and more recently health and well-being. Our fiction list concentrates primarily on Crime and Thrillers.
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New Literary Agent Listing: Ciara Finan
firstwriter.com – Thursday April 18, 2024
I am looking for fantasy, romantasy, dark academia, rom-coms and romance, book club fiction, psychological thrillers, historical fiction and commercial non-fiction. I’m particularly interested in finding and championing stories by writers from underrepresented backgrounds and communities.
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New Magazine Listing: Heavy Traffic
firstwriter.com – Tuesday April 16, 2024
Fiction magazine with open submissions and no criteria. Send submissions by email.
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Articles |
Some of this month's articles for writers from around the web.
Ernest Hemingway’s Advice to Aspiring, Young Writers (1935)
openculture.com – Thursday April 11, 2024
Here in the twenty-twenties, a hopeful young novelist might choose to enroll in one of a host of post-graduate programs, and — with luck — there find a willing and able mentor. Back in the nineteen-thirties, things worked a bit differently. “In the spring of 1934, an aspiring writer named Arnold Samuelson hitchhiked from Minnesota to Florida to see if he could land a meeting with his favorite author,” says Nicole Bianchi, narrator of the InkWell Media video above. “The writer he had picked to be his mentor? Ernest Hemingway.”
What Hemingway offered Samuelson was something more than a literary mentorship. “This young man had one other obsession,” Hemingway writes in a 1935 Esquire piece. “He had always wanted to go to sea.” And so “we gave him a job as a night watchman on the boat which furnished him a place to sleep and work and gave him two or three hours’ work each day at cleaning up and a half of each day free to do his writing.” To Hemingway’s irritation, Samuelson proved not just a clumsy hand on the Pilar, but a fount of questions about how to craft literature — something Hemingway gives the impression of considering easier done than said.
Nevertheless, in the Esquire piece, Hemingway condenses this long back-and-forth with Samuelson into a dialogue containing lessons that “would have been worth fifty cents to him when he was twenty-one.” He first declares that “good writing is true writing,” and that such truth depends on the writer’s conscientiousness and knowledge of life. As for the value of imagination, “the more he learns from experience the more truly he can imagine.” But even the most world-weary novelist must “convey everything, every sensation, sight, feeling, place and emotion to the reader,” and that requires round after round of revision, so you might as well do the first draft in pencil.
The Importance of a Great Setting in Crime Fiction
crimereads.com – Monday April 1, 2024
Some years ago, I was working on a draft of my first real mystery thriller. In the opening pages, I included a bit of description meant to establish the location of the story (my hometown, Gainesville) and the time of year (late spring, the most miserable season in Central Florida). When I submitted the chapter to a writing workshop, one of the more experienced writers in the group immediately commented: “You need to cut all this setting stuff. Thriller fans don’t care about setting. They want to get to the action, quick.”
Like most writers, I passionately despise criticism of any kind, but this rankled more than most. It rankled, of course, because I knew that the writer who had made this comment (a very elegant and smart older lady with a couple of published novels under her belt) was partially right. Not about the “thriller readers don’t want to read about setting” part (I totally disagreed with that portion of her response; my disagreement is, in fact, the topic of this essay), but with the fact that I was rendering my novel’s setting improperly. That is, I was describing the setting in a very lazy and arbitrary manner, disconnected from what was actually happening in my main character’s mind or, for that matter, in the plot.
Not everyone has a novel in them
thecritic.co.uk – Friday March 22, 2024
Mrs Secret Author, who knows her onions, recently drew her husband’s attention to a Facebook post that, or so she claimed, simultaneously epitomised all that was best and all that was worst about the modern literary marketplace.
In it a woman — thankfully unknown to us — had decided to file her new year’s resolutions. One of them was to write “a Romance novel”. Clearly this was going to take a bit of time, but the aspiring novelist was confident that if she started now it would be possible to plan for a pre-Christmas launch.
All this, it turned out, had gone down a storm with the poster’s friends. To a man — well, actually to a woman — they rushed to assure her what a terrific idea it was. Several of them confided that they, too, had always wanted to write “Romance novels” and it was great that at least one of their number was about to get on with it.
And who was lined up to publish the darling work? Naturally, in this age of limitless technological horizons and level playing fields, the author was going to publish it herself.
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