Friday Finds for Writers
Most Fridays the Practicing Writing blog shares writing and publishing resources, news, and reflections to peruse over the weekend. But it’s been an excruciating week for so many of us. And frankly, I’ve paid next-to-no attention to garden-variety news from the writing and publishing spheres.
On Wednesday, however, I received an email from Facing History and Ourselves, a Boston-based global nonprofit organization that I’ve admired for many years. The email introduced a “mini-lesson” titled “Processing Attacks in Israel and the Outbreak of War in the Region.”
The resource isn’t perfect. (What resource is?) But one of its segments impressed me as something that, though intended for educators and students, could be clarifying for writers as well, in our work and in the rest of our lives. It’s a section titled “Avoiding Antisemitic and Islamophobic Tropes in Discussing Israeli-Palestinian Conflict.”
- “Stick to a daily word count. Take more writing classes. Write twenty more queries. Yada Yada. What are the writing resolutions that are really important in terms of achieving success and having a reasonably satisfying work life?” Katrin Schumann shares 10 of hers on the Grub Writes blog.
- Over on the Kenyon Review blog, Laura Maylene Walter discloses her relationship with writing prompts (hint: It’s complicated.)
- Worth a look, especially if you’re a self-publishing writer: Toni Fitzgerald’s “9 Manuscript Mistakes Only First-timers Make (and How to Fix Them)” for The Writer magazine.
- Our own recent Q&A with R.L. Maizes has now joined the archive of Interviews with Practicing Writers. If it has been a while since you’ve taken a look at the conversations stored there, please go visit!
- And if it’s Friday, it’s also time for a fresh batch of Jewish-lit links over on the My Machberet blog. (I recommend especially heartily Adam Kirsch’s latest review for Tablet magazine, which takes on some big issues about historical fiction.)
Have a great weekend!