eduify | write faster

By Julia H. Jackson

You keep a notebook in your back pocket. Or maybe you are an obsessive blogger. Every time your teacher offers the option of a creative imitation instead of an academic composition, you leap at the chance to make something your own. You file your stories, poems, doodles, plays, and journals on your computer, but the moment someone walks into the room, you cover the screen. You are a young writer, or maybe a secret writer, and there’s something you should know: the best way to develop your literary skills is to share your work with the world.

Intimidated? Bewildered? Not sure where to start? The publishing world can be daunting, but the important thing to remember is that there is no one way to write, nor is there one magic way to get published. There are as many more publishing companies, literary magazines, writing contests, scholarships, and workshops as there are kinds of writers. We at Eduify aim to simplify this new world with the Young Writers Series. We’ll start today by organizing writing contests by genre and style.

Teen Writing Contests

There are some benefits to adolescence. Teen writing contests usually offer opportunities for junior high and high school students to submit their work to magazines and other publications. Many teen writing organizations, such as Teen Ink, offer print magazines, interactive websites, and even book publishing opportunities for young writers. Because many of the writing contests are limited by age (13-19, usually), the probability of your work being chosen is greater than if you submitted your first short story, to, say, The New Yorker. Additionally, many teen-oriented publications offer opportunities to intern, which is a great opportunity for anyone interested in learning more about the writing world.

Teen Voices;  The Claremont Review

Writing Networking Sites

Although writing itself may be a solitary task, the emergence of writing communities worldwide encourages interaction between writers, often leading to collaboration on projects. Not only that, but many sites offer regular writing contests and links to resources for young writers. Sometimes the dialogue that a piece inspires is as valuable as the piece itself. Many sites for writers also have free online newsletters, where subscribers can receive regular updates about upcoming contests and events.

SMITH Mag; The Rumpus; Glimmer Train; Writer’s Digest; WritersCafe.org;  The Next Big Writer

Literary Magazines

Just what is a literary magazine? In basic terms, a literary magazine is a publication (print or online) that accepts submissions of literary work in various forms. The definition itself is often left to the publication’s editors; each magazine has its own style, genre preference, and intended audience. There are poetry journals, fiction and nonfiction publications, multi-genre anthologies, and everything in between. Literary magazines are often the most plentiful (check out the alphabetized list at Poets&Writers and you’ll be astounded at how many just begin with the letter “A”), but sometimes the trickiest to submit your work to. It is always a good idea to familiarize yourself with recent issues of any magazines you might consider, because many magazines receive so many submissions that they will only consider work that closely follows their specific guidelines. All the same, literary magazines are a great way to multiply your options.

McSweeney’s Quarterly Concern; Rattle (poetry); New Letters (poetry, fiction, nonfiction, book reviews, interviews); 

Fourteen Hills: The SFSU Review (poetry, fiction)

Flatmancrooked (poetry, fiction, essay, audio, art)

So there you have it: three different avenues to pursue your next move as a not-so-secret writer. Not finding what you’re looking for? This is just the tip of the iceberg. Your next job will be to float your work. And just how do you do that? Stay tuned for our next Young Writers post!

by Adam Krause

One of the best pieces of advice about writing comes from William Faulkner, who said, “I only write when I’m inspired. Fortunately, I’m inspired at 9 o’ clock every morning.” If you wait for an otherworldly message from the Muse to hit you before you sit down at the desk, you may have the same odds of being inspired to write as you do of being struck by lightning. It often helps to have some specific, small challenge to meet that gets you to think about the writing process in a new way. In this, the first installment of a series, Eduify presents five ideas to help you start writing fiction.

1) Surprise your characters.

At some point, almost every writer produces a story about a jaded young person who makes cynical, knowing comments about everything around her, but has no challenges or obstacles to confront that she isn’t already prepared for. This is wasting an opportunity to draw in the reader with tension and conflict. Often, the most interesting scenes in fiction are those in which a character is knocked off guard and has to adapt to the situation.

For instance, you might write a scene in which a character has to pretend to be someone they are not, in order to negotiate a set of tricky circumstances. In the process, they might grow into the new identity with more confidence. (This is a variation on the many identities everyone assumes in the course of a normal social day: to quote Indian author Vikram Chandra, “It is very common for a person to speak one language at home, use another on the street, do business in a third, and make love in a fourth.”) Or you might take a cue from Douglas’ Adams Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, in which one sodden, unhappy character is always followed by rain clouds. He is a rain god, and doesn’t know it. Create a character that causes trouble, or some other recurring event, wherever they go, and has to deal with the consequences.

Finally, you could write a scene between two characters that do not speak the same language, but urgently have to communicate. You do not necessarily have to be bilingual to write such a scene. The important thing is not what the characters, initially unintelligible to one another, say; it is their conflict or cooperation as they deal with the unusual situation that could make the scene into compelling fiction.

2) Stretch your style.

French experimental author Raymond Queneau wrote a book called Exercises in Style, in which a mundane encounter on a bus (an older man tells a young man in a tall hat to move aside, and the narrator later sees the same young man in a tailor’s shop having a button on his coat raised) is written in 99 different and increasingly wild prose styles. For instance, one of the entries is written from the point of view of the inanimate objects in the scene, who naturally see themselves as more important than the people. Another narrator, who uses the anecdote to lodge a complaint against the government, substitutes “taxpayer” each time a person is mentioned.

As a reading experience, the book sometimes feels like it is spinning its wheels. However, as a writing exercise to imitate, it is excellent. Take notes on a public encounter that you witness (something involving at least two characters) and write the same scene using five or more writing styles. If you can’t think of five styles, try taking on the mantles of different authors that you admire. How is the way that hard-boiled detective author Raymond Chandler would see a scene different than the way that free-associative, lyrical James Joyce would see it? Knowing that the author’s palette of words, or how they choose to write about something, is at least as important as what they choose to write about, should always keep you from complaining that you don’t have any writing material.

3) Make headlines.

Now that supermarket tabloids are all about celebrity gossip and unflattering photos captured by paparazzi, it makes one nostalgic for the bygone age of Weekly World News and the old National Enquirer, whose stories were primarily composed of supernatural nonsense. “Bat Boy Endorses Al Gore” was a typical headline, accompanied by photos of a Nosferatu-faced feral creature standing next to the smiling vice president at a campaign rally. “A Baffled Scientist” was often the source quoted for expert opinion.

Make up your own outlandish headline and then write an accompanying fake newspaper story, or other short work of fiction, to go along with it. Or go the opposite route: look in a more legitimate newspaper for a local, national or international story that tells what happened, but not why it happened. Making up the background – the nuanced relationships between characters that eventually led to a newsworthy occurrence, which might be the climax of your story – is part of the fiction writer’s job.

4) Family ties.

One of the deepest seams a writer can mine is their family. But you don’t have to be limited to your own experiences, with your parents as parents and you as the child. You can go back in time and show, with all the clarity and immediacy of fiction, the origin stories of how people became the way they are.

For instance, you might write a scene in which your parents meet for the first time. Did they have a memorable first date? What details of another time and place could come out when you imagine that scene in detail? Or you might have an eccentric uncle who collects rare fish and seems to prefer their company to that of people. What paths in his life may have led him to that state? Pick anyone in your family over the age of, say, forty, and just from anecdotes you have half-listened to, you probably know enough about their past to make them a complex and compelling fictional character. If you don’t know something in their history, make it up. They never have to read it, and you might now be halfway to creating a character of your own.

5) Personal inventories.

There are many ways into a character, but one reliable and deceptively easy way to figure out the person you are rendering on the page is through the objects around them. Some objects reveal a person’s profession and standing in the world: a student’s private school uniform, a musician’s jazz trumpet, a police officer’s badge. Others reveal their personal tastes and quirks: a collection of swizzle straws, a fridge full of condiments but no food. What do your characters have in their sock drawers, duffel bags, coat pockets, locked safes, space shuttles?

Make a list of at least a dozen items each of the characters in your story keep with them. Try to keep these objects physical and tangible so that you can describe them, and stay away from using digital possessions – iPod libraries, and the contents of Facebook photo albums – to sum up your characters, unless their music tastes and embarrassing photographs are absolutely key to who they are. Even if little or none of this information ends up in the story itself, it will make the characters seem that much more real, since the author has gone to the work of imagining their inner lives. And, most importantly, it might be a simple enough project that it breaks your mental block and gets you writing in the first place.

by Adam Krause

Writers have every right to end this decade in a state of as much uncertainty and confusion as everybody else. Will there be paper books in ten years, or will everyone be curling up with the Kindle? Will there still be investigative newspaper journalism, or will all public information be provided by bloggers like yours truly? And what should we even call this ten-year period at the beginning of the twenty-first century that we have just lived through? “The oughts” sounds regretful, “the ‘00s” sounds sinister and “the turn of the century” still sounds like we should all be wearing petticoats.

However, while most of us are anxiously watching the skies, the hurricane coasts and our stock portfolios to see where the next disaster will come from, a few novelists have kept their eyes focused where they should be: on, as William Faulkner memorably put it, “the old verities and truths of the heart… love and honor and pity and pride and compassion and sacrifice” and on epic stories of conflict, culture clash and family that bring these qualities to the fore. Each of these five books is sprawling and ambitious, able to leap generations in a single bound and observe, as if with X-ray vision, the intensity of a single moment. They should be required reading for anyone who wants to write in these times: anyone who thinks they can step up and give our recent history a name.

5) White Teeth 

British-Jamaican author Zadie Smith finished this stunning first novel when she was a 22-year-old undergraduate at Cambridge. It concerns the lifelong friendship between two war veterans in London, Archibald Jones and Samad Iqbal, and the intertwined destinies of their offspring. Archie gets regular letters from the Swedish cyclist with whom, in the greatest triumph of his life, he tied for thirteenth place in the Olympics (“your earnest competitor, Horst Ibelgaufts”) and Samad’s wife, in punishment for his decision to send their son away to Bangladesh to study Islam, resolves never again to give him a yes or no answer on anything (“Where have you put the remote control?” “It is as likely to be in the drawer, Samad Miah, as it is behind the sofa.”) It is as funny and penetrating a look at our multicultural society as has been written yet this century.

4) The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Though no graphic novels have been included on this list, the next three novels draw on comic books for their inspiration. This decade has brought about the belated acknowledgment that comics can be as affecting, and take as many risks, as the best literature. Two other related developments: movies based on comic books are now cemented in the mind of Hollywood as the most reliable way to get audiences to the theatre (which may not be such a good thing) and writers of more traditional literary forms are more and more often invoking superheroes as a powerful metaphor, a part of our collective unconscious in the way that the myths of Odin and Hades informed the imaginations of earlier cultures.

Oscar Wao is a Dominican-American nerd, who as we follow him through high school and college, desperately wants a woman but is much more comfortable talking to his Doctor Who figurines. His story is narrated by Yunior, the on-again-off-again boyfriend of Oscar’s sister, who also narrated the author’s earlier story collection Drown. Yunior has been given the task of watching over Oscar, but cannot protect the brilliant misfit from his tendency to fall madly in love with any woman who talks to him, even when he goes to visit his relatives in the Dominican Republic and the curse of a hated dictator finds him from beyond the grave. Author Junot Diaz’s chief accomplishment is in the language, the way it blends epic storytelling and street slang, Spanish and English, the confident narration of a folk tale with the awkward scrawled-diary intimacy of an adolescent who thinks nobody else has ever been in love before.

3) The Fortress of Solitude

One of the great things a novel can do is show the way the passage of time changes people: how many different times in a day or a lifetime our identity shifts to meet what the world asks of us. Jumping swiftly from one point of view to the next (“You’re white! Winegar wanted to scream. Man can fly! Dylan wanted to scream”) Jonathan Lethem tells the story of Dylan Ebdus, a “whiteboy” whose well-meaning bohemian parents move to a black neighborhood of Brooklyn in order to raise him. After leaving for college but failing to escape his past, Dylan returns as an adult to take care of unfinished business. The bulk of the story takes place in the late seventies, as phenomena that would define American culture for the rest of the century – rap, crack, graffiti and punk rock – were being forged in the crucible of New York. Its supporting characters change with their times – one goes from chess nerd to wannabe gangster to landlord in a new, gentrified Brooklyn – and we believe the authenticity of each, not because the character has finally found their true self but because the world Lethem creates is so constantly in motion. Oh yeah, and there’s a magical ring that sometimes gives flight, sometimes invisibility: two superpowers that the amateur should never confuse with one another.

2) The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay

Master magician Michael Chabon transforms meticulous research into a world that never was: a New York circa 1940 seen through the eyes of two young comic book creators, all sharp angles and jutting jaws that mask the human frailty behind the heroics. In America it is the Golden Age of comics and in Europe it is an age of unprecedented darkness, of World War II and the Holocaust, from which Joe Kavalier, a budding artist in Prague, escapes by smuggling himself inside of a giant golem. He winds up in his American aunt’s small apartment with his cousin Sammy Clay, and the two of them create the Escapist, a Houdini-like superhero who makes them famous. The immersive, addictive novel (which my college roommate claimed to read in a single day, by doing nothing else for eleven hours but flip through its 656 pages) articulates, more brilliantly than any of Chabon’s work before or since, the author’s vision that it is the dreams we dream that make our lives all the more real.

1) The Corrections

This dark, hilarious novel came out in September 2001, just after a decade that many pundits called “a holiday from history,” to announce that however happy we thought we might be while on Prozac, the holiday was over. At its center are three siblings, products of a prosperous Midwestern childhood: Chip, a lecherous academic who ends up working for an Eastern European Internet scam that allows investors to buy pieces of Lithuania; Gary, a successful but miserable investor who has to hide his drinking from the surveillance system rigged up by his ten-year-old son; and Denise, a trendy chef who breaks up her boss’s marriage by sleeping with both him and his earnest hippie wife. Their father is losing his mind to Parkinson’s disease and their mother wants them to come home for one last Christmas together. The writing is so sharp, the failures of the characters rendered in such excruciating and recognizable detail, that you can open the book to any page and find a sentence that draws the eye, compelling you to read to the end of the scene. Jonathan Franzen, who has not published a novel since, managed to write what is, so far, the century’s most important American novel by focusing on an image we have seen a thousand times – witness the happy family on its cover – and zooming in to pick at all the warts, veins and scars.

by Julia H. Jackson

Given the number of books published in the United States every year, it can be hard to keep up. This week, we bring you 2009: Book by Book, a literary review with one book for each month. Whether you’re in the mood for memoir, fiction, or graphic novels, we’ve got a little something for everyone.

January: Things I’ve Been Silent About – Memories, by Azar Nafisi

This memoir comes fresh from Azar Nafisi, the author of Reading Lolita in Tehran. Nafisi reveals her journey from Iran to the United States, from writing to educating, from childhood to adulthood. An expert on Western literature, Nafisi recognized that the very act of open expression was dangerous in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. She breaks the literary silence by answering lingering questions from her first book, probing into the nature of her father’s extramarital affairs, and exploring her life as a mother, wife, and teacher.

February: The Women by T.C. Boyle

The life of famous architect Frank Lloyd Wright has been depicted in various ways, but none so creatively as this most recent fictionalized novel by Irish writer T.C. Boyle. The Women reveals another side to Wright’s darker nature by focusing on the important female characters in his life. The featured romances include Wright’s three wives, Olgivanna, Maude Miriam Noel, and Kitty, and his lover Mamah, who was murdered by one of Wright’s servants. Boyle’s creation is the narrator Tadashi Sato, an imagined apprentice to Wright, who undertakes the task of writing his mentor’s biography. Boyle’s mixture of fiction, gossip, and legend provides an original perspective on a talented, if not highly controversial, man.

March: How We Decide, by Jonah Lehrer

Twenty-seven-year-old author Jonah Lehrer examines the human capacity for decision-making in this, his second science book for left-brainers. Lehrer, who is a contributing editor at Wired magazine and a frequent resource on the WYNC program Radio Lab, breaks down neuroscience by punctuating it with manageable, understandable anecdotes. He links the way our brains function to the decisions we make, and the effects that has on, say, the current economic crisis. An excellent introduction to the world of science writing for the left- and right-brained.

April: The Beats: A Graphic History by Harvey Pekar, edited by Paul Buhle, art by Ed Piskor and others

Perhaps Jack Kerouac’s most famous quote is his affinity for “the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved.” American Splendor writer Harvey Pekar and editor Paul Buhle approach the world of Beat writers and artists by delving into the realm of underground comics. The history includes stories of Keroauc, William S. Burroughs, and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s City Lights Bookstore, as well as unsung heroes such as “hobohemian” Slim Brundage of Chicago’s College of Complexes café.  Although some of the stories’ facts are contested, the book itself is a testament to the unruly and revolutionary nature of an artistic generation.

May: Sag Harbor, by Colson Whitehead

Colson Whitehead’s fifth novel follows Benji, an African-American teenager who represents the “black boys with beach houses” by spending his summers at Sag Harbor. The characters challenge what it means to be “post-black” by resisting the urge to give into racial stereotype. Benji and his friends have BB gun wars, lust after hip-hop star Lisa Lisa, and confront the message behind “turning the other cheek.” Whitehead’s story is fiction, but follows the nuance of memoir, and offers a fresh voice not only for African-Americans, but for citizens of the Obama generation.

June: The Heyday of Insensitive Bastards: Stories, by Robert Boswell

Every word in this book packs a punch, as evidenced by the original title. Boswell’s thirteen stories feature the lost, wayward souls whose desires compete with their limited environs: addicts, cleaning ladies, fortune tellers, priests, all teetering on the edge of their own specific “heyday.” Boswell’s work goes beyond the short form; previous books include Century’s Son and What Men Call Treasure: The Search for Gold at Victorio Peak. This latest short story collection is a great glimpse into his Southwestern world.

July: In the Heart of the Canyon, by Elisabeth Hyde

If you’re looking for an adventure, look no further than Hyde’s latest novel, whose diverse cast of characters are forced to examine their neuroses whilst navigating the rapids of the Grand Canyon. Hyde takes on it all: a quarrelsome husband and wife with their two teenage sons, a divorcee and her obese daughter, an elderly couple on their last trip, an arrogant college grad, a middle-aged Harvard professor and, of course, a dog named Blender. The river guides wade through both water and conflict as they attempt their 125^th trip down the canyon. This is a warm, well-written summer read that will inspire the adventurer in everyone.

August: Zeitoun, by Dave Eggers

Dave Eggers has done it again: he has combined sleek prose with real characters to prove a point without sounding preachy. Zeitoun follows the odyssey of a Muslim man and his family before, during, and after Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005. Our hero chooses to stay behind while his wife and children flee to safety, preferring to navigate the murky waters of the city streets to rescue his fellow citizens. Complications arise when his good intentions are mistaken as something more sinister, a plot choice that mirrors the confusion and chaos of FEMA politics and America post-9/11. Eggers skirts political criticism by couching it in a carefully written, beautifully handled novel.

September:  Juliet, Naked ,by Nick Hornby

Hornby welcomes us to the world of fandom with his latest novel, which revolves around a bizarre social triangle: Annie, her distant partner Duncan, and musician Tucker Crowe, Duncan’s hero. The plot thickens when Annie posts a review of Crowe’s latest album, “Juliet, Naked,” before Duncan does, sparking an unexpected correspondence between her and her husband’s idol. Hornby confronts the hidden side to popular icons, exploring the sincerity of fans and their adoration; a concept he himself might have some experience with, after publishing wildly successful High Fidelity and About a Boy.

October: Manhood for Amateurs, by Michael Chabon

Michael Chabon’s memoir gives a modern portrait of manhood from the perspective of a successful author (The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, The Yiddish Policeman’s Union), husband, and, above all, father. His story is told in a series of linked essays that follows his childhood, his parents’ marriage and divorce, and the comedy of errors that is the transition to adulthood.

November: The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver

Kingsolver’s ambitious new novel follows the lives of Mexican artists Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera through the eyes of Harrison Shepherd, who has a Forrest-Gump-like ability to participate in a series of notable historic events. Shepherd works for Lev Trotsky, a  lost political revolutionary, and returns to the United States in time for the chaos of World War II. Kingsolver, who brought us Prodigal Summer and The Poisonwood Bible, merges history with fiction to shed light on an exciting era of the twentieth century.

December: Cleaving: A Story of Marriage, Meat and Obsession by Julie Powell

A surprising, humbling diary brought to you by the Julie of Julie & Julia fame, Powell’s latest book follows the grisly details of an extramarital affair that forces to examine her intentions. Her intimacy is not limited only to her lover; Powell is suddenly struck with a desire to learn how to butcher meat, a process that feels familiar as she painstakingly dissects her own love life. A private, yet modestly open meditation on what it means to redefine love, if not for her husband, than for the pursuit of challenge.

Are we missing something? What was your favorite book of 2009? Let us know!

by Julia H. Jackson

Dave Barry is a Pulitzer-award winning humor writer with more than 25 years of professional writing under his belt.  He got his start writing humor columns for The Miami Herald, where he later became a nationally syndicated columnist. This is the man who brought us such classics as Dave Barry’s Guide to Marriage And/Or Sex and Dave Barry Hits Below the Beltway: A Vicious and Unprovoked Attack on our Most Cherished Political Institutions, newspaper column collections such as Boogers Are My Beat: More Lies and Some Actual Journalism! and Dave Barry is NOT Making This Up, and novels like Big Trouble and Dave Barry’s Complete Guide to Guys that later translated to the big screen. Most recently, Dave has partnered with Ridley Pearson to write the Disney Edition Starcatcher series for kids, with titles such as Peter and the Sword of Mercy and Science Fair. Dave agreed to share some Writing Careers tips with us, just as soon as he’d polished his annual “Year in Review” column, which readers can read at The Miami Herald on December 26.

Photo by Daniel Portnoy

JHJ: How did you get your start as a writer?

DB: I always liked to write humor. I wrote humor columns (at least I thought they were funny) for my high school and college newspapers. When I got out of college I went to work for a small newspaper, and when I could I wrote humor columns there. Eventually I got some larger newspapers to publish my work, and I just kept building on that until humor-writing was my only job.

DB: I don’t really think about the medium; I think about the audience, and what would likely entertain them. My main goal is not to be boring.

DB: It’s anything that’s intended to make people laugh and actually succeeds.

DB: More than anything, deep down inside, it’s a need to be liked, and a fear of failing at that. This is not a very noble motive, I admit, but I think it’s true of most of us in the humor business.

DB: If you want to be funny, be funny quickly — get the joke out there, end with a punchline, and don’t dwell on it. Move right on to the next joke. And give your audience credit for being at least as smart as you are.