by Virginia Lloyd | Mar 17, 2011 | Blog, Memoir
While scouring the “interweb” for suitable snippets for my next Brisbane Courier Mail books column, I stumbled across this recipe for pavlova on the Book, Line & Sinker book-review site. I didn’t expect to see an antipoedean classic on a New...
by Virginia Lloyd | Feb 7, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing
Over at the impressive online magazine Guernica, Deb Olin Unferth’s “Memoir Manifesto” is an inspiring rejoinder to Neil Genzlinger’s recent assault on memoir (detailed here). Unferth makes a compelling case for the splintering of autobiography...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jan 28, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing
A stinging but timely consideration of what makes an excellent memoir in “The Problem with Memoirs” by Neil Genzlinger in this weekend’s New York Times Book Review, published online today. Genzlinger, a staff editor at the newspaper, is fed up with...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jan 11, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing, Popular
Authors often ask me about “average” word lengths for their manuscripts. While there’s no reliable statistic, here’s an interesting post on word count from the blog of former agent Colleen Lindsay. The post lists a dizzying number of genres and...
by Virginia Lloyd | Jan 5, 2011 | Blog, Improve your writing
The highly organized Book, Line, and Sinker blogger Natalie (she has an Excel spreadsheet to track her reading) has compiled this list of memoirs that she wants to read in 2011 from the year’s 1,000 (just in the US!) memoir/autobiography/travelogue titles her...
by Virginia Lloyd | Dec 16, 2010 | Blog, Improve your writing
Bestselling memoirist Franz Wisner is bullish on the future of memoir as a genre. On Twitter and in the books pages of newspapers I have noticed references to memoir being on the wane, passe, and “so five years ago”. But not in this article. Wisner...