Table of contents for November/December 2023 in Writer's Digest

William smiled at his wife, but it was a manufactured smile, the kind he’d worn when she first met him, many years earlier. He’d gone back to needing levers and pulleys to make his face do what he wanted it to do. She could feel him thinking: Make Sylvie think you’re okay so she won’t worry. —Ann Napolitano, Hello Beautiful (literary fiction) You know how people say when something awful happens, your spirit gets broken? I remember that summer thinking that’s wrong. Mom didn’t break. She shut down, like a laptop in hibernation mode. A spiritual obliteration for a week, then re-emergence into a translucent, smaller version of her former self. —Angie Kim, Happiness Falls (contemporary fiction) Blood from a cut on Sergei’s scalp seeped through his fingers, spiraling down…

A comprehensive book marketing plan includes multiple channels to reach readers where they are. An author website catches people via search engines; social media and advertising can drive anything from awareness to purchase; and influencer collaborations can help tap new audiences. But marketing isn’t finished simply because the website was visited or a book was sold. That initial visit might not have turned into a sale, and a sale doesn’t have to be the only one. Email newsletters can help nurture the reader relationship further. THE VALUE OF A NEWSLETTER Marketing can be challenging. Social media platforms wax and wane in popularity, search engines tweak their algorithms, and the cost of ads creeps higher. Email might be overlooked as old-fashioned, but it offers a valuable, personalized way to connect to…

It is advice as old as time: If you want to make a good first impression, open with a joke. Public speakers, job interview coaches, and your Uncle Jack will all tell you that nothing succeeds like getting a laugh. But does that same wisdom hold true for a query letter? I asked a few dozen agents, each with more than 20 years of experience in the industry, and I received a resounding “oh-please-for-the-love-of-all-thatis-holy-no.” The consensus is that a query letter is a business communication and should be treated as a formal request. “I don’t think authors should try to be funny in a query. This is a business letter, effectively soliciting a stranger to invest in your enterprise. You can be friendly and informal but keep it strictly business,”…

Kehinde Fadipe The Sun Sets in Singapore (Mainstream Women’s Fiction, October, Grand Central Publishing) “Three Nigerian women living in Singapore find their lives turned upside down when a suave, handsome lawyer moves into town.” WRITES FROM: Singapore (currently), London (soon). PRE-SUN: I had just given birth to my son and completed the first draft of a different novel, which was much heavier in content and tone. I wanted to write something lighter that captured the different types of people I was meeting in Singapore, so I started a series on my then-blog, Black Girl In Spore, posting a new chapter every week. I got really excited by the responses in the comments and decided to commit to crafting a fulllength manuscript. TIME FRAME: I wrote this book on and…

Why do we universally appreciate slapstick, sight gags, and cartoons? Because they are visual—the humor unfolds right before our eyes. As writers, we have a unique challenge—to craft worlds, including humorous ones, using only words. We, a cartoonist and psychologist, present techniques from our fields to help writers make humor writing more visual, effectively showing readers the funny. As we discuss ways to strengthen print humor, we remain mindful of E. B. White’s observation, “Humor can be dissected, as a frog can, but the thing dies in the process …” Our succinct dissection focuses on ways to spark readers’ imaginations while ensuring the survival of humor and the frog. “Darth? Darth Vader?” KNOW YOUR AUDIENCE The comedian Steven Wright pondered, “If you tell a joke in the forest but nobody…

As a writer matures, they will generally find a common thread of interest in their material. It could be a theme, a trope, or even where they source their inspiration. As I speak with Adam Peltzman, author of “Debinar,” one thread becomes clear: finding humor in the mundane. The grand-prize-winning short story finds Deb, a novice YouTuber, trying and failing to build an audience. Deb watched the video back: She kept looking past the camera and scratching her arm and saying, “Um.” She couldn’t help comparing herself to Netty Schmidt, always so poised in her clothes-folding videos. In over 300 videos, Deb had never seen Netty scratch her arm. … But then there was episode 132—“Learnings From the Drawer”—where Netty interviewed herself and said that the seventh most important lesson…

I often consider November and December reflective months—a time of year to think about what’s passed, often with an eye on how to move forward. For freelance writers, there’s a great market open year-round that focuses on the past: history magazines. History is about as evergreen as a subject can get, and it never goes out of style. Of course, there are the broad brushstrokes of various empires and kingdoms or especially calamitous catastrophes. But readers are also interested in the origins of food dishes, sporting activities, and various inventions. Here I’ve collected four history magazines open to submissions from writers. While these magazines specifically focus on different parts of history, freelancers would be wise to remember history when pitching other magazine categories as well. ARCHAEOLOGY  (Archaeology.org) Archaeology magazine is…

If I learned one thing as a young writer, it was that kids can read a book as long as it uses short words. It’s what I was taught by more seasoned editors and what I have applied to the hundreds of early reader books I’ve written and edited over the years. And it made sense … until I started teaching my own child how to read. When the pandemic hit, I found myself locked in with a rising kindergartner. I didn’t know what he’d need to know when (and if!) school started, so I pulled all the early readers from my shelves and got to work … only to find that he couldn’t read them. The books I expected to be easy enough for him were too hard. So,…

The summer before my first year of high school, my family took a vacation with my best friend’s family. Somehow, we’d gotten a brochure for a lovely looking resort on an idyllic lake in Wisconsin. It seemed straight out of Dirty Dancing (minus the dirty), so we rented two cabins on the island portion. When six pre-teen and teenage girls in the late ’90s hear “resort”—let the packing begin! We brought our best outfits (all of them) because you never know who you might meet. We quickly realized our mistake when the dock boy greeted our pile of luggage with: “Think you brought enough sh*t?” and then proceeded to throw it on the fish-gut-covered pontoon for the ride to the island, which further peeled back the blinders. The private beach…

1. What email platform will you use to avoid your reader’s spam filters? 2. What frequency can you realistically commit to? 3. How will you funnel readers to your newsletter? How will you make it easy for them to sign up? 4. What promotional strategies feel natural to you (giveaways, reader magnets, contests, and collaborations with influencers or other authors)? 5. How often could you plan to offer these promotions and how much time will it take for you to complete them? 6. What obstacles would prevent you from not successfully committing to your newsletter plan? 7. List your top ideas for newsletter content.…

They say smiling is good for you, that it triggers powerful endorphins that boost mood and reduce stress, much in the way a good rom-com novel does when you’re in need of a hopeful, hilarious, guaranteed happily-everafter. I know I’m hard-pressed not to curl my toes and give my giddiest smile at the words of a particularly romantic, swoony line of dialogue. Or, even better, the playful, quickwitted banter that makes it incredibly fun to guess whether they’re fighting, flirting, or both. Either way, this delicious foreplay is a prelude to love, but I’m honestly not sure who finds it more fun, us or the characters. The answer, of course, is that the two go hand-in-hand. As the love interests get to know each other better, we get to be…

If you have ever tried to be funny even once in your life, you’ve probably heard the old saying “dying is easy—comedy is hard.” It’s been attributed to a long list of famous people over the years, and its enduring fame stems from its simple truth: Being funny on purpose is terribly difficult.1 In fact, sometimes it seems like the more effort you put into being funny, the less funny you actually are.2 In other words, humor is delicate stuff, and it’s easy to go wrong. Whether you’re trying to write a humorous story or just inject some levity into a dramatic narrative,3 there are many, many more ways to go wrong than right. Humor is subjective, so figuring out why no one’s laughing at your jokes can be a…

Writing is a journey to the center of ourselves. For comedy (for any age) it means understanding the kinds of humor you resonate with most. Two questions: What makes you laugh? What made you laugh when you were little? Jot those down. The following are some things to be aware of and some techniques, tips, and tricks to try when writing humor for children. PRE-WRITING MINDSET Originality This is one of the most important elements of comedy. If you are not afraid to express your weird (I hope) and wonderful (surely) sense of humor, you are ahead of the game. Trust that what you think is funny, other people will find funny too. What makes you laugh is your North Star. Photo Op! Find a photo of yourself as a…

When I catch up with Jean Kwok, she’s just returned from the American Library Association conference in Chicago to her home in the Netherlands. “Librarians are the best, aren’t they?” she says. “They’re a very important part of my life because I was so poor. The library was an incredible refuge for me. I would not be a writer today without the library.” But that isn’t the only reason why Kwok was at the ALA conference. “Nowadays with banned books, they’re really under siege. I think this is the time when we need to step up and show our support for our librarians and our schools.” Banned books are something Kwok knows a thing or two about. Her debut novel, Girl in Translation, which she describes as “my most autobiographical…

Rachel Beck Liza Dawson Associates | Pittsburgh, Pa. GENRES: Adult fiction (women’s fiction/upmarket/book club, suspense/thrillers, rom-coms), contemporary young adult, select nonfiction (health/wellness, parenting, sports, cultural criticism/social justice, feminism) CLIENTS INCLUDE: Vered Benhorin, Sara Goodman Confino, Georgina Cross, Britt Frank, Rea Frey, Swati Hegde, Patricia Johns, Ellen Won Steil, Jaclyn Westlake Rachel Beck joined Liza Dawson Associates in 2020. She got her start in publishing by interning with two literary agencies in New York, and then became an editorial assistant on Harlequin’s Christian romance line. She transitioned to agenting in 2015, working with Holloway Literary, and building a list from referrals, cold queries, and conferences. She’s become more selective when it comes to the quality of the work. “I’m less inclined to take on a project that needs more editorial work…

Writing humor as a genre—a satiric story or novel, a laugh-outloud memoir or essay—is a broad topic, deserving exploration beyond the bounds of this column. But what if you’re writing serious, sorrowful, or scary fiction or nonfiction? A personal essay about a tragic event. An edge-of-your-seat thriller. A terrifying horror story. Do you still need to weave humor into your creative writing project? Short answer: yes. It’s not required, of course. Essays and stories and books abound that don’t have a whiff of wit in them. But if you can infuse a whiff, a hint, a line, a scene of humor, even your most seriously focused prose will level up. WHY ADDING HUMOR WILL ELEVATE YOUR SERIOUS PROSE • HUMOR SERVES AS A CONTRAST FOR DARKER SCENES OR IDEAS, MAKING…

Since this is the issue all about making readers laugh, I chose two books I expected would do just that—make me laugh. And make no mistake about it, they did, frequently and loudly. But what I wasn’t expecting was the depth of the emotional connections the characters had with one another that brought joy, heartache, disappointment, and so much love. Frontlist Big Gay Wedding by Byron Lane (Henry Holt and Co., Contemporary Fiction, May 2023) SYNOPSIS: Chrissy thinks her son, Barnett, is coming back to the Polite Society Farm to tell her it’s not just a visit, but that he’s moving back to take the weight of running the farm off her shoulders now that she’s widowed, and her farmhand is off to veterinary school. To her disappointment, he’s actually…

JORJEANA MARIE (JorjeanaMarie.com) is the Los Angeles Times bestselling author of Improv for Writers: 10 Secrets to Help Novelists and Screenwriters Bypass Writer’s Block and Generate Infinite Ideas (PRH/Ten Speed Press) and a staff writer on the Emmy-nominated Tab Time With Tabitha Brown. She has narrated over 400 audiobooks for authors including Nina LaCour, Jacqueline Woodson, R. L. Stine, Elizabeth Gilbert, Kate DiCamillo, and Gayle Forman. Winner of a prestigious Audie Award, a SOVAS, and more than a dozen Earphones awards, Jorjeana has been named one of the best YA voices by AudioFile Magazine. MARK SHATZ, the author of Comedy Writing Secrets (3rd ed.), is a psychology professor at Ohio University-Zanesville, where he teaches and studies the benefits of humor. Dr. Shatz is unique among humorists because he is also a…

4 TACTICS TO ADD HUMOR TO POETRY We wear the mask that grins and lies, It hides our cheeks and shades our eyes,— This debt we pay to human guile; With torn and bleeding hearts we smile, And mouth with myriad subtleties. So begins Paul Laurence Dunbar’s classic poem “We Wear the Mask,” which is not humorous at all, but it simultaneously explains the complexity of human experience and the vastness of poetry. After all, poetry contains multitudes. In addition to so many other fine adjectives, poems can be serious, sensual, nostalgic, and, yes, funny. But how? I won’t touch on every possible trick available, but here are a few tactics poets can employ to add humor to poetry. Experiment With Parody The art and craft of parody is when…

Man on Top, The Real Food Reset, The Author Brain (forthcoming) (Health, wellness, nutrition, and authorship; Fit Ink Publications) WHY SELF-PUBLISH? My first book, Man on Top, was a fitness book for overweight men who didn’t love fitness. Publishers back in the early 2010s didn’t seem interested. I assume they thought not enough people would buy it. And while it might be true they wouldn’t reach the numbers they needed for the book to be successful, my goals were different. I wanted to reach people just like me—busy guys who were overweight, didn’t love fitness, and didn’t want to turn their lives upside down just to be fit. They were an underserved community, and helping them was important to me. And, because I was also a health coach and nutritionist, I…

Saffron Dodd (she/her) says she has always loved reading books for children and young adults. She has a bachelor’s degree in journalism from the University of Brighton and a master’s degree in children’s literature, with distinction, from Goldsmiths, University of London. With a background in media and communications, Dodd most recently worked for a children’s education charity. She joined the ASH Literary team in 2022 as agency assistant and was promoted to associate agent in 2023. She is passionate about highlighting and supporting diverse voices in publishing. “I love children’s books, and I believe that as a society we’re still not doing enough to make reading an accessible and fun activity for every child,” she says. “That starts with making sure there are books for all kids and that might…

Whenever my Humor Writing 101 class is offered at my college, students swarm the registration page like a pack of ravenous pangolins. You’d think it’s because I occasionally bring donuts (college should be more sprinkletastic!) or that I wear Godzilla-sized hair scrunchies or that my coffee mug boasts Yoda Best Professor. But after extensive, evidence-based scientific research—I asked the class one afternoon—I discovered how wrong I was. They signed up simply because they yearned for more humor, levity, and fun in their lives. One kid even channeled her inner Socrates, saying, “Humor is the foam in the grande latte of life!” to which another kid who hadn’t spoken one word in nine weeks nodded and said, “Duuuuuuuuuude.” Well, shucks. I get it. We live in a Trumpapalooza world where politics…

When you think of a rom-com, what’s the first thing that pops into your head? Is it Meg Ryan and Tom Hanks meeting at the top of the Empire State Building? John Cusack holding a boombox over his head? What about Steve Carell screaming “Kelly Clarkson!” as he gets his chest waxed in The 40-Year-Old Virgin? A rom-com, as the title implies, contains moments of romance and comedy. And while both elements present their own unique challenges, I’d wager that pulling off the comedic bits can often feel like the more intimidating of the two. Years ago, I took a writing workshop with a friend who swore she wasn’t funny. “It doesn’t come naturally to me!” she’d exclaim, insisting humor wasn’t a teachable skill. But sure enough, when other members…

Last issue we discussed the challenges of developing article ideas, finding appropriate markets to query, building a professional portfolio, and the value of multiples in freelance success. This issue we’re going to pull it all together as we explore the most effective ways to squeeze every penny from each idea we develop. When working with students I often use the fictional example of a firehouse dog that has been recognized with a national award for saving the life of one of its human colleagues. This is a good example of the kind of human-interest feature that would appeal to the local newspaper as well as regional and national publications. What specific markets might be interested in this story? Some are immediately apparent: national dog/pet magazines and publications for first responders,…

FUNNIER THAN THE ORIGINAL Fill in the blanks with the listed part of speech, then transfer your answers to the stories below to see how you “improve” the original. STORY 1 1. Adjective  2. Adjective 3. Noun 4. Adjective 5. Past-Tense Verb STORY 2 1. Adjective 2. Adjective 3. Noun 4. Noun 5. Verb 6. Noun 7. Verb 8. Proper Noun STORY 3 1. Adjective 2. Adjective 3. Adjective 4. Adjective 5. Noun  6. -ing Verb 7. Noun 8. Noun 9. Proper Noun STORY 1: HERMAN MELVILLE, MOBY-DICK STORY 2: MARGARET MITCHELL, GONE WITH THE WIND STORY 3: LOUISA MAY ALCOTT, LITTLE WOMEN…