Online Writing Certificate > The Writer's Spotlight > Fall 2023
Fall Writer's Spotlight
In this Issue:
- Ask a Writer
- Recent Writing News: Students
- Recent Writing News: Instructors
- Feature Article: A Writing Connection, Now in Print
Ask a Writer
Our writing advice column features questions from our community answered by Malena Watrous and other creative writing instructors.A QUESTION ABOUT RESEARCH
- Genevieve
Dear Genevieve,
Thank you for this wonderful question. For help answering it, I went to a few of our instructors who have published works of historical fiction. Here is what they had to say in response (and this could also apply to authors writing novels incorporating other kinds of research and not just history-based fiction).
Ron Nyren, author of The Book of Lost Light, responded:
When I’m writing historical fiction, I find it helpful to set a time period for doing some initial research (a few months? A year? Depends on the project…), and at the end of that time, put aside the books and write a draft that focuses on just telling the human story, trying to keep further research to an absolute minimum during the drafting stage. That makes my first draft a bit skeletal in terms of details, and sometimes it’s filled with question marks or “[to research]” notes, or even blatant falsehoods, but it helps me avoid getting bogged down in the details. In subsequent drafts, I can do more research to fix details, add necessary new details as needed, and get inspiration for plot holes.
Deborah Johnson, author of The Air Between Us and The Secret of Magic, had fairly similar advice:
I suggest that you do the bare minimum of research at the beginning. This is because of my firm commitment to story as the basis of any novel—historical included. Once I’ve got a notion of the tale I want to tell, then I come up with the characters through whom I plan to tell it. Then I go back and augment my research according to what I believe will authenticate the story both in time and in place. Practically speaking, archivists and librarians have been my strongest resources. They generally love their work and have been generous with their time and expertise. Many historical collections are on the internet now, too.
So the verdict is: put the story first, and fill in the gaps later.
Do you have questions for our writing instructors? If so, feel free to submit them to [email protected] for possible inclusion in our next quarterly Spotlight.
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Student Writing News
- Susan Conventry submitted a novel to the indie press Regal House Publishing, and at the end of August they took it on for their Fall 2025 frontlist. Susan has also written two books in a planned four-book Regency Romance series. She submitted Book 1 to Dragonblade’s Write Track competition. In April, she found out that she was a semi-finalist and on July 1, she was named the grand prize winner. This came with the chance to headline a novella collection to come out next summer. They were also interested in publishing the novel that she submitted to the contest, but wanted a series. They asked for a proposal, and based on the proposal and first book, they signed her for the whole four-book series. Wow, Susan!
- Jill Fordyce’s novel Belonging has found a publisher and will be released in January 2024.
- JK George’s novel, The Evening of Bartholomew Jones, is now available for sale.
- Brian Christopher Giddens has had a terrific run of good news on the publishing front lately, with several short stories accepted for publication, including this one in The Raven’s Perch and this one in Flash Fiction Magazine.
- Following the tremendous success of her first novel, We Are The Brennans, Tracey Lange’s eagerly anticipated new novel is out at last, called The Connellys of County Down.
- Leanne Ogasawara had this essay published in Aeon.
- Richard Rachlin’s novel, Conspiracy of Lies, is now available for sale.
- Stefan Raffl wrote in to share that his book, The Natural Strategist: Cultivating a Mindset of Care and Connection (New Degree Press, 2023) was released this summer. Part of this book was conceived in a Continuing Studies nonfiction class taught by Julia Scheeres.
- Monica Stein-Olson won 2nd place in the 2023 MCWC Memoir Contest for her essay, “Life and Death in East Africa.” The judge had this to say about her piece: “Searing, brutal, and propulsive, this piece about the cruelties of war, motherhood, tragedy and chance, grips your heart and drags it into your throat.”
- Carol Zapata-Whelan has a travel article (generated during her Travel Writing class) newly published in Adelaide Magazine.
Do you have writing news to share? Email us at [email protected] for possible inclusion in our next quarterly Spotlight.
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Instructor Writing News
Holly Brady and her husband, C. Townsend Brady, self-published a cookbook called Mastering Classic Cocktails: Recipes and Techniques for the Home Bartender. Their book won Best Gift Book from the Independent Book Publishers Association in May, and reached #13 in Amazon’s category for Parties & Entertaining this fall. This book was Holly’s attempt to demonstrate that self-published books can compete with the best of traditional publishing (as she teaches in her popular course on how to self-publish well).
Ammi Keller is at work on a short story collection about punk Gen-X women and queers getting into trouble during the coronavirus pandemic. Stories from it have been published online in The Common and Vol. 1 Brooklyn. Her story “You Will Never Know Anybody” will also appear in the final print issue of The Sycamore Review this fall. 
Rebecca Sacks has a new novel out, called The Lover.
This one is actually a first for us—a book jointly written by an instructor and student! Malena Watrous (Lead Instructor and Curriculum Coordinator for Creative Writing, and creator of this very newsletter) teamed up with Nichole Accettola, the chef/owner of Kantine Bakery in San Francisco, to write Scandinavian From Scratch, a cookbook that was published by 10 Speed Press and is out in early October. While Malena and Nichole met through their mutual agent, Nichole had coincidentally taken our class, “How To Write a Cookbook” with Tori Ritchie, about a year earlier—the tuition a gift from her husband, who knew that it was her dream to write a cookbook of her recipes. If you like buttery baked goods, this is the book for you, full of relatively simple recipes that yield incredible results. (OK—can you tell that I am slightly invested/biased?) It’s the perfect holiday gift, IMHO.^Back to top
Feature: A Writing Connection, Now in Print
Introduction from Malena Watrous
Medea Isphording Bern
Jane and I “met” when we signed up for the same writing class through Stanford’s online writing program. It met each of our needs despite the fact that Jane had published several books and my writing career consisted of newsy articles for small publications. The initial assignment in these classes asks each student to discuss her writing experience and to say a little about herself. Coincidentally, I had recently been diagnosed with interlobular breast cancer and was in the medical hell tornado of deciding whether to undergo chemo and radiation or to undergo bilateral mastectomy. I exposed this to the class, primarily to let them know that I may be less participatory than they would. Jane almost immediately sent me a private message. She had just completed her breast cancer treatment and had wise and compassionate advice to impart. To a complete, faceless and voiceless stranger.
The selflessness that Jane showed in baring her own soul to me during a time when my own soul was in tatters kept me from wholesale self-destruction. After the class ended and my mastectomy scars had healed, we continued to correspond, first about mostly health-related matters and as time went on we exchanged more personal emails—about our Scorpio husbands, our sometimes inscrutable sons, our beloved animals, about the questions that the universe poses that often seem like koans.
Over the years, we realized that while we both love to write and are talented and inspired writers, we sometimes lack the discipline to keep fanny in chair and write every day. So, we challenged one another to finish NaNoWriMo. We set aside the month of November to report our word counts every day. We vowed to finish a project that had languished on our hard drives. Like many a writer, we knew we held the will, but damn it if the laundry didn’t demand to be folded!
In 2021, as Covid wore on and turned even the most devoted hermit into someone who yearned for a change of scenery, our letters began to take on a more probing tone. What does it mean to be intertwined with the earth? Why would a raven hang out year after year with the same human family? Does chopping down a perfectly healthy tree turn a person into a homicidal maniac? What is our role as stewards on this fragile, resilient planet of ours?
Jane looked over a few days of our increasingly fevered correspondence and wrote “do you think we could turn these letters into a book?” I agreed that yes, we could.
Jane Galer
In an online class like ours (Writing Fiction with The New York Times), it wasn’t really easy to meet anyone 1-to-1. Considering that I was trying to distract myself from the side effects of cold turkey hormone deprivation and frankly in shock, while Medea was also experiencing her own and greater challenges, it’s amazing we spoke at all. But just one short forum exchange was enough to spin a thread, so when the class was ending, I asked if anyone wanted to join up to basically nag each other about our writing. Medea grabbed the line.
NaNoWriMo was perfect. We didn’t know each other well enough to blow it off. Not yet anyway! At the end of each day, we’d confess our word count. We didn’t read each other’s work, we didn’t do anything beyond a line or two about total words on paper. “Fanny in the chair,” as Medea puts it and enough trust and just a little bit of shame. It worked perfectly. I was able to almost finish my novel, The Navigator’s Wife, and felt I was finally going to complete the project. November’s a crazy month to try this in, but that’s when the program does it. Medea and I have tried to do other similar scheduled writing without as much success because we came to know each other better and better and we were kind and thoughtful and gentle, never demanding.
Sometimes when I was going to be in the Bay Area we would talk about meeting up, but it never worked out. Still, our friendship blossomed into something deeply nourishing for each of us. We wrote often even before Covid. When Covid locked us down, we wrote constantly. Covid wasn’t really the focus as much as climate change and the immediate and desperate drought (California was on fire). I think suggesting we make a book came after I read an exchange we’d written out loud to another friend; she thought a chronicle of ordinary lives in strange times would be a great thing. So, apparently did other people. Perhaps not in the same epistolary format, but it’s definitely a genre of our times.
Will we ever meet in person? We’re almost superstitious about it at this point, but I bet we will, and our lovely friendship will have another side to it as it continues.
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