Last month, Portland author Matt Mikalatos guest blogged for the Editor’s Blog on Guide to Literary Agents on “5 Lies Unpublished Writers Tell Themselves (and the Truths That Can Get Them Published).”

Writers tend to be creative in many areas of life, so it’s no surprise that we can get creative with the truth. Or, as my mother said, “You lie a lot.” This is especially tempting when we are debating why we aren’t published. Before I was a published author, I embraced a few cherished lies because they blunted the pain of rejection. But the road to publication required discarding these lies and facing reality.

The five lies Mikalatos refers to are:

1) The rules don’t apply to me.

2) Agents and editors have it in for me.

3)I’m not a marketer, I’m a writer!

4) I should spend a lot of time fantasizing over where I will be published now that I’ve written two chapters of my novel.

5)I’m a better writer than most published authors. Read more »

When I read submissions for Willow Springs, certain words and phrases kill off my interest in the narrative entirely, dismissing the prose as sentimental drivel: cancer, realize, hospital, grandmother, English major, “I felt”, shimmering, and so on (okay, English major doesn’t denote sentimentality, necessarily, but oftentimes in a story/essay, after a grandmother dies of cancer in the hospital, the narrator realizes that she needs to major in English and write shimmering prose that makes her feel…[insert digressive cliche here]); it’s like using the phrase, “In today’s society” – people know better, but they do it anyway. I was in Hutchinson, Kansas, this past weekend among 18 immediate and extended family members – the largest family reunion I remember being a part of, thanks to nieces and nephews and once-removed cousins born in the last few years – to see my grandfather. Prior to arriving, Read more »