Now it’s time for links!

First up, Laura Fraser explores the politics of Chick Lit and Dude Lit at The Daily Beast. This is a FANTASTIC post. Read it!

Agent Nathan Bransford warns of the “pernicious momentum of first ideas”.

Agent Rachelle Gardener gives tips on author headshots (Remember Monday I said I thought every writer/blogger needed one?)

Both Jodie Renner and Simon L. Carter wrote excellent posts on how to format dialogue and write dialogue tags.

Jessica at Book Ends asks what makes a classic?

Jenn posits that playing World of Warcraft will make you a better networker (don’t tell my husband that!)

Michael Hyatt offers four surprising conclusions about author websites (be sure to have your own website graded on WebsiteGrader.com).

Writer’s Digest’s digital Big 10 Issue is out. I have yet to read a magazine on my iPad, but I’m going to download this one.

Chilean artists released a bomb of poems on Berlin Tuesday, so I’m going to bomb you with a poem, too. Written by my friend Matthew Zapruder, I give you Pocket.

Have a great Labor Day weekend!

As some of you know from reading this excerpt from my work in progress, I was a fashion model from 1988 to 1997 (full-time for the first six years in Europe and Japan and then part-time for the last three while I was in college in LA), so clothes were a HUGE part of my life. I modeled for designers like Armani, Jil Sander, Hermès, Missoni, Kenzo, Comme des Garcons, Yohji Yamamoto, Martin Margiela, and Dries Van Noten. I did their big press shows in Paris, Milan, and Tokyo. I did their show room and their fittings, and I wore their clothes in magazines. But my relationship with clothing was—and still is—complicated.

I’m one of those people who loves and appreciates nice clothes but finds people who spend a lot of time and money on them shallow. When I was a kid, I had no sense of fashion and no interest in it. I began modeling for the money, not because I liked clothes. But I had to get interested, fast, because clothes were the product I was selling, and I wasn’t going to sell them well if I didn’t like them. I grew to appreciate the difference between cheap knockoffs from Gap and the real thing from Hermès or Missoni. The fabrics were softer, the cuts better, the designs more elegant and refined. And because I worked as a fit model as well as a press model, everything fit me—perfectly. I learned to love designer clothes and ask other models, “Who is that?” (not “Where did you get that?”) when pointing to an article of clothing.

I bought $400 Anne Demeulemeester shoes (this was 1990, before people were spending $800 on Manolo Blahniks and Jimmy Choos), a $1000 Jil Sander jacket (directly from Jil at the wholesale price), and $150 Agnès B. shirts by the bagful. I spent $500 a month on clothes, and that was a lot less than many models. One woman I met said she spent $10,000 on clothes—every MONTH. I was most envious, however, of my friend who booked Vogue covers and wore thrift store clothing, managing to look stylish without spending much money at all.

Flash forward twenty years, and I am now 40 years old and living in Berkeley, CA, one of the least fashionable cities in the United States. The great thing about Berkeley is that I could go to the supermarket in my pajamas and no one would care, while in Paris I wouldn’t be caught dead stepping foot outdoors in tennis shoes or jeans (all that has changed since the 90s. When I visited Paris in 2005, the fashionable women were wearing Citizen jeans and Nike or Converse tennis shoes.) The drawback of living in Berkeley, of course, is that I sometimes DO spend all day in my pajamas, switching from my fuzzy socks to my Ugg slippers to take the trash out or get the mail. The only time I don’t wear tennis shoes is when I wear a dress, in which case I wear the one and only pair of flats I own—black and fraying at the edges.

So what happened? How did someone who used to spend thousands of dollars on designer clothes end up wearing $10 sweaters from Target? For one, I make far less money than I did in my 20s. I’m a part-time mom spending my nanny days writing for less money than I pay my nanny, which means my budget for clothing is exactly: $0. I’m also in a profession that doesn’t care how I dress. An agent isn’t going to care about the shoes I’m wearing as much as how well I can describe shoes, in a scene, in a chapter, in my book. And the only designer jacket that’s going to matter to my readers is the jacket on my book.

But wait, doesn’t image matter at ALL in publishing? What about personal branding? How you present yourself online matters, doesn’t it? Of course it does. And if you post photos of yourself online, you’d better be looking literary in front of a brick building and not doing beer bongs while getting lap dances from strippers. What you’re wearing doesn’t matter as much as how personable and professional you look. An agent or editor is going to look at those pictures and ask themselves, “Will this person present him/herself well at readings, on book tours, and on author panels at writers’ conferences?” Because although much book promotion is now online, authors do still make public appearances, and do still conduct interviews—whether in person, on television, or on someone’s video blog.

Should you have professional pictures taken of yourself for your website? Unless your mom or best friend is skilled with a camera, I say yes, you should. Just as you should have your website professionally designed, and your book professionally edited. Why? Because there’s a heckuvalotta competition out there, but there’s also a heckuvalotta poorly designed blogs and a heckuvalotta poorly written books. Professionalism will make you stand out above the rest.

What do you think? How do you present yourself to the world? Is your online persona different from your real life persona?

What about you? What is your process for starting a new project? Where do you begin?

For myself, I have a very vague idea of what my next book will be. First I thought it was going to be nonfiction. Then I realized that I never read nonfiction and get really bored reading nonfiction and that all I really care to read are literary novels. So then it occurred to me that maybe I need to take my nonfiction research and turn it into a novel. I like that idea! But I am SO SO far from beginning a draft. I haven’t even begun to research it let alone come up with an outline or a plot. Oy. I get anxious just thinking about the process. And I envision myself (maybe this will be a self-fulfilling prophecy) taking years to really figure out a) What it is I want to say b) How I’m going to say it (plot), and c) What style I want to say it in. Maybe if it were my full-time job I could whip off a draft in a year, but with two kids, freelance editing, blogging, and finishing up what I hope will be the last revision of my memoir, I see it taking more like 5. And in five years, Tawna Fenske, and all fast writers like her, will have whipped off another six books, two or three of which will perhaps get published.

What about you? Are you a lightning speed writer like Tawna Fenske or a pokey poke writer like me? Do you wish you could write faster than you do, or are you happy with your pace?

Narrator, Character: The Two “Yous”

When just beginning to write a memoir, it often helps to think about your narrator. Which is simply you, right? Well, yes and no.

It might seem like simply being yourself should be easy, and sometimes if you hit a groove this might be true. But most of the time, finding the “you” best suited to telling the story is hard work, which involves trying out different voices and seeing what clicks with your material. You wouldn’t speak to your boss the same way you would speak to your best friend from high school, and you wouldn’t speak to your best friend the same way you speak to your husband, even though all those ways of speaking may be equally you. You wouldn’t tell a story about hunting for a parking spot in the same way you’d tell the story of your beloved grandmother’s death. In memoir, too, you have to find the right version of yourself for the story you’re telling, and the audience you want to tell it to. As Sven Birkerts writes in The Art of Time in Memoir:

“If the memoir is to be something more than a thin reportorial digest of events, if it is to matter, then the writer must create her identity on the page, making it as persuasive and compelling as that of any realized fictional protagonist. In other words, the memoirist’s ‘I’ must be an inhabited character, a voice that takes possession of its account.”

But some writers are so naturally outgoing, charming, or intimate that speaking as a narrator is, for them, as easy as walking. For such writers, there’s often a flip-side challenge: presenting yourself as a character. Natural narrators often benefit from stepping back to remember who they were in the “then” they’re recounting, and to remember the reader doesn’t know all the things about your former self that you take for granted. You might also need to see things about yourself then that you hadn’t yet recognized—and make sure to depict them for the reader.

Getting the distinction between “you” as a narrator and “you” as a character in personal writing can allow you to play more with perspective and time. Especially in memoir, the “you” telling the story now sees from a vantage point that the “you” as a character in the story could not. The energy of your story sparks in the difference and dynamism between the two “yous.” When creative nonfiction writing starts flattening, this is often because the writer has not stepped back to make that separation between “you” in the story and “you” telling it. This applies whether you’re telling the story from the vantage point of a few years, a few months, or even just a few days.

Put in a less theoretical way, this is all to say that in creative nonfiction, “you” as a narrator must work towards tremendous powers of distance and perspective from the events you’re relating. You have to be—and one of the great rewards of writing is that on the page you get to be—superhuman. If you were whiny or bitter at that Thanksgiving dinner with your annoying mother-in-law three years ago, you see that about yourself now. Maybe you laugh at yourself about it. Your character in the scene can still be whiny or bitter, but your narrator knows it, acknowledges it, and is honest about it. Even if you didn’t see that you were being whiny and bitter until you wrote the scene and re-read it.

Creative nonfiction asks a lot of us writers in this way. It’s always tough to critique a memoir or personal essay and say, “the narrator seems to be a little bitter here,” or “the narrator still seems angry about this.” It’s tough because so often in life, we have every reason to be bitter or angry or resentful or naive—we’re human. But in creative nonfiction, your narrator must be superhuman. That’s the hard work and the payoff.

As you’ve probably heard by now, according to Jeff Bezos, e-book sales have surpassed hardcover book sales at Amazon (but I’m curious to know how e-book sales compare to paperback sales).

And from The Nation, the trouble with Amazon.

From my friend Connie Hale over at Sin and Syntax (have you bought her book by the same name yet?), an A to Z on e-books.

On NPR, writers reveal why they write.

In case you’ve been living under a rock for the past few weeks like I have, you may not have heard about 16-year-old pop sensation Justin Bieber’s memoir deal.

Great posts, as usual, from Alan Rinzler: one on the author background check and how important it is to present yourself professionally online (does that mean I shouldn’t be posting vidoes of myself doing backflips?) and one on how to boost your book sales with niche marketing.

If you live in the Bay Area, you’ll love Ian Tuttle’s flash fiction restaurant reviews at Stretchy Head (I love that name).

And from Sierra Godfrey, four tools for going paperless. (And while you’re over there, don’t forget to enter her fabulous character contest for a chance at winning an Amazon gift card!

And here’s a hilarious clip sent to me by my friend Ani from the documentary about SF sci-fi writer Harlan Ellison Dreams With Sharp Teeth on why writers shouldn’t work for free:

This year I turned 40. I hadn’t done a backflip in two years, but I knew I had to do one this year. I’d spent 24 years working up to it. I was scared, like Jane Fonda, but I did it. (As Jane says, “I did it! It was lousy, but I did it!” And then I did a front flip, which I’m terrible at. And another and another. My brother started giving me tips, and I felt like I was 10 again, in my living room, doing cartwheels and asking my dad to rate them 1 through 10. My flips aren’t great, but it was empowering to know that, at 40, I can still do them. So I returned home to California, I rented On Golden Pond, and it’s still a great movie, even with Jane Fonda’s deep tan and Farrah Fawcett hairdo. And what did I learn from this experience? That it’s really empowering to set a goal and to achieve it. If I can do a backflip at 40, I can finish my book and get it published. And so can you. Even if it takes 24 years.

Here’s a video of my lousy backflip, despite Kristen’s advice that no one over 40 who has kids should be seen in a bikini (note that this is shot from far enough away that my stretch marks, cellulite, and flappy stomach are obscured):

Backflip from Meghan Ward on Vimeo.

My only time to blog is the two days we have a babysitter, during which time I also have to go to doctor appointments, tour preschools, get haircuts, pay bills, do laundry, edit books, write, etc. etc. And in order not to go totally insane with sleep deprivation, I’ve been going to bed by 9 the past few nights (except last night was Mad Men, so I had to stick some toothpicks in my eyelids and stay up until 11. No, we don’t have TIVO), which nixes the idea of writing in the evening.

I miss my blog friends. I miss blogging, and I miss reading blogs and posting links. I have a backlog of posts half-written in my head, but until my munchkin starts sleeping better, I’ll have to settle for squeezing one or two out per week.

The sandwich method always works best: Start by saying something positive, followed by your constructive criticism, and then end with another positive comment. The reason for this? It’s important to give the writer something she can work with (”I found myself losing interest at the bottom of page 3″) without making her want to give up writing altogether (”YA fantasy novels don’t really interest me.”)

Writing groups and workshops take on different formats. Typically, a group of people (anywhere from 3 to 12) agrees to meet every week or two at which time they will critique a chosen number of works—usually two or three for a 2-3-hour meeting. The works are handed out a week beforehand (either in person or by e-mail), giving the readers a week to read (preferably twice, once straight through and once while marking up the ms) the works.

The night of the meeting, the format could go a couple of different ways.

In my former writers’ group, there were about six people, and we met every other week. We worked in a circle, taking turns giving our verbal critiques while all the other writers, including the writer being critiqued, remained silent. After everyone had spoken, the writer being critiqued could comment and/or ask questions. The reason for the writer being silent during the critique is that writers tend to get defensive about their work and want to explain why they did this or that. The point of a critique, however, is not for you to defend the choices you’ve made, it’s for you to hear the opinions of others and then decide whether or NOT to take their advice. The more experienced the writer, the better she is at distinguishing which advice to take and which not to take. A good rule is that if several people agree about something, you should probably take the advice seriously. That does NOT mean they are right (40,000 Frenchmen can’t be wrong, but five writers can be). At the end of the verbal critiques, we all handed over our written critiques, some a couple sentences written in chicken scratch and others a one- to two-page typed analysis of the plot and characters. That was left to personal choice.

In my MFA program, we had twelve people in a workshop and we met every week. Rather than work in a circle, however, everyone just jumped in when she had something to say, everyone but the writer being critiqued, who remained silent. This format allowed for back and forth discussion: “I loved the scene in chapter one when the protagonist knifed her boyfriend in the neck,” “I totally disagree, I found the violence in that scene gratuitous,” etc. Some of my professors (but unfortunately not all) required that we start with the positive aspects of the manuscript, which was great until ONE person said something negative. Then suddenly the floodgates opened and everyone pounced on the opportunity to give negative critiques. Why? Because it’s SO much easier to give negative critiques than positive ones. SO MUCH EASIER. Whether a piece is magnificent or terrible, the flaws tend to be glaring. It’s much more difficult to articulate what works about a piece than what doesn’t. SO, the minute someone says that first negative critique, it’s all over. The writer is lucky if someone throws her a positive comment at the end. Once the pack of hungry dogs have been corralled back into their den, leaving the writer to lick her wounds, written critiques are handed over, this time with a minimum one-page, preferably typed, critique. (A copy of the critique goes to the teacher and counts toward the critiquing student’s grade, so they’re usually fairly thorough.)

Whether in a group/workshop with format one or format two, it’s important to leave the writer with some positive feedback to take home. I knew one woman who, while being critiqued, marked a check for every time she heard a positive or a negative comment. Her “negative” column was four times as long as her “positive” column, and it had nothing to do with her writing. (By the way, I DON’T recommend this practice. It’s terribly destructive to your self-esteem.)

The job of a critiquer is not to decide whether the writer should give up writing, and not to tell the person what she should write. It’s not her job to REwrite any portion of the person’s work either (not even sentences or phrases). It’s simply to tell the writer what works, what doesn’t, and what are some suggestions for improving the manuscript. If a person doesn’t like the genre at all, that person has to 1) Critique the piece as objectively as possible 2) Consider moving into a writer’s group that includes only the genre she does like. For example, if everyone in your group is writing sci-fi and you’re a literary fiction writer, maybe you need to change groups. If not, you’d better learn to critique sci-fi without being biased toward the genre.

What about you? What experiences (good or bad) have you had with writers’ groups? What did you learn from those experiences?