Kevin Larimer - The Poets & Writers Complete Guide to Being a Writer: Everything You Need to Know About Craft, Inspiration, Agents, Editors, Publishing, and the Business of Building a Sustainable Writing Career

WITH ORIGINAL ESSAYS BY

GEORGE SAUNDERS, ADAM HASLETT, OCEAN VUONG, JANE HIRSHFIELD, ADA LIMN, LUIS ALBERTO URREA, CHRISTINA BAKER KLINE, JENNIFER ACKER, AND CHARLES YU

AND READING LISTS BY

NICOLE DENNIS-BENN, NATALIE DIAZ, ANTHONY DOERR, TERRANCE HAYES, YIYUN LI, NAOMI SHIHAB NYE, BENJAMIN PERCY, DANI SHAPIRO, NAFISSA THOMPSON-SPIRES, AND CHERYL STRAYED

PLUS 50 ACTION ITEMS TO HELP YOU LAUNCH YOUR WRITING CAREER NOW

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available.

ISBN 978-1-9821-2307-9

ISBN 978-1-9821-2308-6 (ebook)

in memory of our friend and colleague Jim Andrews

and for every writer who believes in the transformative power of the written word and the importance of sharing it with others

Special thanks to Michael Bourne for his significant contributions to the chapters about the business of publishing, to Debra Englander for her insights on self-publishing, and to Bonnie Chau for her inspiring writing prompts.

Being a writeror, to put it another way, telling stories, which is what were really talking about when we talk about writing, whether its poetry, fiction, nonfiction, or some combination thereofis not a hobby. That might be how your big-shot uncle thinks of it, or your cousin who works in corporate finance, or anyone who is decidedly not a writer. We develop words, language, expressions of thought and feeling as tools with which to tell stories, and these stories help us make sense of ourselves and the world around us. We recognize the power of thinking deeply about our stories, what they mean and how to tell them, and then we record them in the best, most powerful way we know: We write them. As Coleridge said about poetry, putting the best words in the best order. And that act has the power to change the world.

There is no higher art form, in its intrinsic beauty and complexity, its capacity for delivering truth, its illumination of emotion and feeling, and its potential for personal transformation. Writing is bigger than borders, its bigger than governments, its bigger than the biggest corporation in the Dow Jones Industrial Average. Through writing we are able to get closer to what it means to be human than through any other activityand if that sounds bold, consider what science and religion and philosophy would be without stories. The stories we writethe poems, the novels, the essaysthey define us.

The universe is made of stories, not of atoms.

MURIEL RUKEYSER

We all have a different story to tell, of course. Talk to anyone, anywhere, for long enough and youll hear it eventually. And maybe thats your project as a writer, telling someone elses story. Or maybe its telling your own. Or maybe its making up the stories of people who dont even exist except as characters in a story of your creation, summoned out of the ether by the sheer force of your imagination. No matter how seemingly mundane or traumatic, no matter how far-fetched or fantastical, each and every one of our stories, fact or fiction or poetry, is connected through human experience, and it is our self-appointed job as writers to make those connections through empathy and understanding, imagination and emotion. So, the fiction writer in Houston who writes at night after her shift at the twenty-four-hour diner and the grad student sleeping on his friends couch in Portland, Oregon, and the poet who tends bar in Austin after caring for her mother who is suffering from dementia and the tattoo artist in Toronto and the grandmother in Cleveland and the adjunct professor in Boise who drives a rusted-out Toyota Celica can read one anothers stories and recognize something of themselves. And by reading these stories they can understand themselvesand the shared world in which we livea little better. Writing remains the best route we know toward clarity of thought and feeling, writes Pulitzer Prizewinning nonfiction writer Tracy Kidder and writer/editor Richard Todd in Good Prose: The Art of Nonfiction. Amen.

Toni Morrison was acutely aware of the writers unique ability to make sense of the great suffering inherent in the human experience. Certain kinds of trauma visited on peoples are so deep, so cruel, that unlike money, unlike vengeance, even unlike justice, or rights, or the goodwill of others, only writers can translate such trauma and turn sorrow into meaning, sharpening the moral imagination, the Nobel laureate said upon accepting the 2008 PEN/Borders Literary Service Award in New York City.

Carolyn Roy-Bornstein turned to writing after her seventeen-year-old son was hit by a drunk driver while walking his girlfriend home from a study date. Carolyns son sustained a traumatic brain injury; his girlfriend was killed. In the months and years that followed, journaling became a way to document her sons recovery and process her parallel trauma. It was also a way for her to exert power over something none of us can ever controlthe past. Ultimately, revisiting the pain through writing helped those wounds to heal, she writes. For her, and for countless writers like her, writing is a redemptive act that can provide, if not a way to change the past, at least a way to understand it better and regain some semblance of control. Although the subject matter that drives us to write may be dark, the act of writing is ultimately an illuminating and positively radiant acta way of applying order to disorder, reclaiming what was lost or taken away. In Roy-Bornsteins case, her early writing led to the publication nine years later of a memoir, Crash: A Mother, a Son, and the Journey from Grief to Gratitude.

For Kaveh Akbar, author of the poetry collection Calling a Wolf a Wolf, writing poetry became a life raft once he became sober after years of alcoholism and drug use. I had no idea what to do with myself, what to do with my physical body or my time. I had no relationship to any kind of living that wasnt predicated on the pursuit of narcotic experience, says Akbar, who teaches at Purdue University and in the low-residency MFA program at Randolph College. In a very real way, sobriety sublimated one set of addictions (narcotic) into another (poetic). The obsessiveness, the compulsivity, is exactly the same. All I ever want to do today is write poems, read poems, talk about poems. But this new obsession is much more fun (and much easier on my physiological, psychological, and spiritual self).