by Jessica Strawser I’ve had a lot of babies in the past few years. Two of them are novels (one out on submission with my agent, the other in late revision stages). Dozens of them are magazines I’ve put my heart into at my day job as editor of Writer’s Digest. And two of them […]

by Maggie Marr This October will be the 10th anniversary of the sale of my first two books to Random House. At the time my books sold, I was still working as a subsidiary rights and motion picture agent at ICM and I was unaware of just how hazardous the career of writer could be […]

Penny Sansevieri What is an elevator pitch and why do you need one? An elevator pitch is a short one- to two-sentence description about the book. It's the briefest of the briefest descriptions you can develop. The reason elevator pitches are important is that we have an ever- shrinking attention span, so you need to […]

 Tiffany Yates Martin Writers love their brains: We exploit our highly evolved prefrontal cortex to infuse our prose with dazzling verbiage and transport our reader to the world of our creation. Yet for creating tension—one of the most important elements of compelling fiction—nothing beats the lowly amygdala: the primordial lizard brain that handles the most […]

Vaughn Roycroft Certain I’m Uncertain: I don’t know squat. Not about writing. There, I said it. Glad that’s out in the open. I came upon this realization while pondering what I could share here, as a guest on Writers In The Storm (thanks for having me, ladies!). Yep, while seeking some sort of solid ground, […]