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The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner's Manual

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  • Embracing your writerliness

    Dani Shapiro has written this for the LA Times on how the publishing industry has completely changed in the last twenty-five years, so that the dream of writing you probably grew up on is no longer the dream of publishing you think it is. I can’t tell you how important it is for you to understand this. I just heard yesterday from an award-winning fiction author with numerous published novels whose agent won’t even shop her latest novel around. This is not at all unusual. I know another award-winning fiction author with numerous published novels whose agent stopped shopping her novels several years ago. Now more than ever the only real point to writing is for the joy of it.

    But, fortunately, the Bloggess found this, and I think all writers should watch it every single day before they start in.

    1 Comment

One Response to “Embracing your writerliness”

  1. Campy « She Started It said on February 8th, 2010 at 1:42 pm

    [...] Victoria Mixon’s link to this article doesn’t tell me anything I don’t already know, but it depresses me just the same even though I’ve no interest in getting an MFA. I have taught in MFA programs for many years now, and I begin my first class of each semester by looking around the workshop table at my students’ eager faces and then telling them they are pursuing a degree that will entitle them to nothing. I don’t do this to be sadistic or because I want to be an unpopular professor; I tell them this because it’s the truth. They are embarking on a life in which apprenticeship doesn’t mean a cushy summer internship in an air-conditioned office but rather a solitary, poverty-inducing, soul-scorching voyage whose destination is unknown and unknowable. [...]

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Upcoming Release: March 2010
All aspects of writing fiction explored copiously, luxuriously, minutely, indiscriminately, and with a certain amount of personal prejudice.

Clients’ Books


Bhaichand Patel is the author of two nonfiction books: Chasing the Good Life (Penguin Books India, October, 2006), and Happy Hours (Penguin Books India, October, 2009). I recently edited Patel's debut novel, When the Streets Were Dark and Cold.

Although my contribution to Baby Jesus Pawn Shop was only a peer critique and participation in a standing ovation, in 2009 I edited two nonfiction essays for my friend Lucia Orth.

The poet Chris Ryan is the author of The Bible of Animal Feet (Farfalla Press, 2007). He has new stories forthcoming in Pank, Anemone Sidecar, and A Cappella Zoo. I edited Ryan's debut novel The Ishmael Blade.

I edited Pushcart Prize nominee Ania Vesenny's debut novel, Swearing in Russian at the Northern Lights, forthcoming from the Invisible Press, 2011.