by Chloe Joy One of my guilty pleasures is bad romance movies. Bonus points if they are Christmas-themed or feature a person from a big city forced to travel to a small town and fall in love with a local. If both tropes are used? Immediately my favorite movie of the year. I love them so much because they’re not meant to be taken seriously nor reflect our real lives, so I often let my suspension of disbelief hang. The main leads say “I love you” after knowing each other for a few days? Sure! One big speech at the end can wash away the trauma one character brought upon another? I’m eating it up! However, nothing gets under my skin more than the inaccurate portrayals of the publishing industry in these movies. Many romance movies have a B plot that focuses around the publishing industry (because publishing and struggling writers are just so sexy), and they almost always end with a fairy tale dream success story. I’m tired of this dominant, false narrative prevailing through the media, making publishing look easy, because if you’re a writer or aspiring editor like me, you know it’s anything but easy.
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Amanda Smera Welsh
If you are a writer, especially a writer in the middle of a graduate program, you will undoubtedly encounter many craft materials through the course reinforcing the need to establish a discipline to your own writing. Sometimes, they can sound a little delusional, which was precisely my reaction when I read Robert Olen Butler’s “From Where You Dream.” It truly is the most overtold advice any writer has heard before: “You may not be ready to write yet, but when you’re in a project you must write every day. You cannot write just on weekends. You cannot write this week and not next week; you can’t wait for the summer to write. You can’t skip the summer and wait till the fall. You have to write every day. You cannot do it any other way. Have I said this strongly enough?” Yes you have, dude, now please shut up! by Caitlin Hertzberg As early as I can remember, I’ve always been a writer. I’d always been gifted diaries throughout my childhood, swirling gel pen tips to doodle hearts in the margins near the names of boys I crushed on, spilling the ink of my secrets onto lavender-scented paper. I would steal phrases from overheard conversations and work them into melodies that tortured me from inside my head (I still do this). One of my earliest memories of being a writer is from 4th grade, ripping out sheets from a 99-cent spiral notebook and begging my grandmother to “staple it good” down the middle so that I can write stories like Judy Blume and Jerry Spinelli. Notice I make no mention of writing in school: The kind of writing with strict sentence and paragraph minimums, about topics I couldn’t care about no matter how hard I tried. The kind of writing that you work on for weeks on end in the overheated computer lab, revising, revising, revising, memorizing the teacher-provided rubric until every word of your assignment sounds like an owner’s manual for a VCR. by S. E. Roberts Writing is not a career that has ever paid enough money. Now, I’m not talking about bloggers or journalists, who could certainly stand to make more but don’t necessarily have to. I’m talking about novelists, poets, and short story writers, those artists who are self-advertising on social media, submitting to literary magazines, and publishing books of their work, all in the hope of being recognized and well-compensated for their work. |
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