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...
by Virginia Lloyd | Dec 14, 2010 | Blog, Improve your writing
“Publishing School”, a welcome new series in The Awl, looks at “real-world” issues related to writing and publishing a book. I like the approach of this series because articles on writing and publishing are often written in tones of end-times...
by Virginia Lloyd | Nov 14, 2010 | Blog, Improve your writing, Pianos and pianists on the stage and the page
Poet Charles Simic wrote this loving paen to jazz piano bars in New York for the NYRB blog recently. His celebration song is closer to an elegy for the small piano bars that dotted the Greenwich Village of his youth. This was decades ago, when it was possible for a...