She Writes

When I first learned to write, I loved to do it. I wrote on tablecloths and napkins at restaurants. I secretly signed my name underneath my family’s dining room table. When I visited my grandmother, my sister and I wrote stories, which we often gave to our parents as gifts. I liked reading the stories that I wrote out loud.

As I got older, school became more pressured and difficult. My fondness for writing dissolved. I became more judgmental, critical, and doubtful. I no longer had an interest in writing for pleasure. I worried a lot about what other people thought. Getting good grades became far more important than enjoying the process.

In spring 2010, as an undergraduate student in health promotion at American University, things shifted. I began writing on the notepad in my cell phone whenever I had to wait for the subway. I did this for several months. Then, I started a blog. I spent good chunks of time writing on my own again. Writing became a very important tool…

I'm happy to serve as a guest editor for the SheWrites blog this week--especially knowing we can create some precious creative space for co-founder Kamy Wicoff to work on her own book. Go, Kamy, go! Today, I thought I would give you a glimpse of where I am; each day this week I look forward to featuring a post from a talented member of the SheWrites community. 

For most of January I've been in residency at Virginia Center for Creative Arts in the mountains of Amherst, Virginia. This is my third stay here--a precious time to plunge ahead on the third poetry collection, make notes toward a new nonfiction project, and read a half-dozen books. I've been in the studio the staff calls the "sunken living room," because it…

This morning I read a really interesting conversation with Michael Scammel, the biographer of Alexsandr Solzhenitsyn and Arthur Koestler. A lot of what Scammel said about his path to biography resonated with me. He describes having wanted to become a fiction writer in his twenties (just as I did), only to find that he “didn’t have the stamina for it.” The urge to be a biographer crept up on him without his realizing it. And the questions of biography — of how tell a life in an engaging and instructive way — came to him naturally (just as they have to me).

Scammel talks about what a biographer must do: wear learning lightly, entertain as well as instruct, write what is genuinely fact-based, and hone the novelistic…

In a recent post, I emphasized the importance of writing down your ideas quickly so you won't forget them. Today, I strongly suggest you also write down something else: your successes. Marketing a book isn't easy, especially if you are independently published, but if you work hard at it, eventually you're going to experience some cool things. You may speak at a local library or bookstore, or maybe you'll be interviewed by a radio station. Perhaps your local newspaper will even do a feature story on you!

It's important to keep track of these achievements, not just for your own self-esteem, but so you can put them in your bio. That way, over time, marketing your book will become easier because people will see where else you've spoken and who else has interviewed you. You'll have credibility, and that opens doors to additional opportunities to get the word out about your…