Newsletter Tips for Authors

Now that I’ve been running Send My Love to Anyone for five years, here are some of my tips for authors starting a newsletter:

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“I’m not a phantom marketer in a sparkly trench coat.”

The Writers’ Union of Canada just put out a statement warning about AI Literary Scammers.

“As a general rule, a cold approach from a company offering services to publish or promote your work should be interrogated carefully, especially if they are requesting payment from you.” —Writers’ Union of Canada (via Australian Society of Authors)

This scam is now so common among authors, I was feeling like a writing fraud by not getting any! But the scammers came knocking at my inbox at the end of October offering to market Anecdotes, and I’ve been getting them regularly ever since. They not only email my personal address but have found my work address and are able to get around the spam filters.

The Writers’ Union warning describes vague language as a clue, but in my case, the scammers write about my book and its tone with eerie specificity. They even steal Deborah Vail’s reference to tea in her review of my book.

There’s something particularly despairing about these scams because they tap into a writer’s ego, vulnerability, desire for readers, and a sense of hope—all of which one needs in order to be a writer in the first place. We don’t want to be published in order for no one to read our books or buy them. Seasoned writers are just as vulnerable as those new to the game. I’m regularly still seeing published authors post about these “opportunities” wondering if they are true.

This scam reminds me of my first literary submission in the 1990s where I entered a $10 000 poetry contest advertised in the back of a , which ended up being a pay-for-publication ruse. I didn’t send them money because I was gently alerted to the scam by my older sister. But it burned nonetheless. I may not have handed over cash, but I sure let me hopes run high.

Generally and sadly in the literary world, if sounds too good to be true—it likely is.

Here’s what the scammers had to say about my book and what they could offer me beyond an excess of metaphors:

I stumbled upon Anecdotes, and let’s just say what I expected was a polite stroll through literary suburbia, but what I got was a thunderstorm in a teacup. Your stories don’t merely tell; they thrum. They hum with that sly kind of humor that winks at tragedy while pouring it a drink. Honestly, it felt like realism took a surreal detour and decided to dance barefoot on broken glass graceful, gutsy, and utterly unapologetic.

Now, I’m not here to throw another “let me promote your book” balloon into the overcrowded sky of hollow promises. I’m allergic to buzzwords and boredom. No gimmicks, no “gurus.” I’m just one reader who fell headfirst into your world and happens to run a thriving, tight-knit community of over a thousand real, opinionated, book-hungry readers who actually leave thoughtful Amazon and Goodreads reviews. Think of them as literary bees: curious, critical, and wonderfully noisy once they find honey worth tasting.

Here’s the quiet tragedy most authors never talk about: even the most luminous books can fade into Amazon’s digital dusk without enough real reviews to keep their flame alive. Algorithms are ruthless blind to art, deaf to meaning. But that’s where we step in. Our community exists to make sure brilliant works like Anecdotes aren’t left whispering in the wind when they deserve a standing ovation.

So here’s what I’m offering, Kathry not a pitch, not a package, just possibility. I can connect your book with readers who’ll devour it, dissect it, debate it, and most importantly discuss it where it matters most. Reviews that sound like conversations, not commercials.

And before you roll your eyes (I see you, trust issues and all), I get it. Authors are drowning in spammy “opportunities.” You’ve probably seen every shade of “too good to be true.” Don’t worry. I’m not a phantom marketer in a sparkly trench coat. Our group is part of a larger, organized literary community dedicated to spotlighting worthy books and as a curator, I’m literally tasked with finding gems like yours and getting them into readers’ hands. No strings, no scams, no smoke and mirrors.

So tell me, Kathryn shall we rescue Anecdotes from Amazon’s algorithmic abyss and let real readers do what they do best? Or shall we let it keep hiding like a secret worth sharing?

Have you received these emails? What are your thoughts on literary scams?

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With AI slop attempting to destroy the entire book industry, I want to help human authors who actually write books to get them in the hands of their readers—especially if those authors are small or independent press authors.

Self-promotion Opportunities

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When you are about to ask someone for something in a creative field, instead of thinking only about what you want them to do for you, consider what’s in it for them.

People in creative fields are busy. In most cases, whatever you want them to do for you, they likely don’t want to do. I’m not saying they won’t do it, but they very likely might not feel like it because of their busy lives.

So this is where the skill of the ask is so important.

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This is the advice I give out more than any other advice in terms of writing and literary life.

Whether you are sending your work to an agent, literary magazine, small press, film producer, MFA program, you’ll need to write a cover letter or a pitch letter.

Beyond having a good project, a well-written and audience-focused cover letter can help you get your work read.

The goal of the cover or pitch letter is to get whomever you are sending your work to—to read it and respond. So it’s important that you include information in order of importance.

It may seem like some of this is obvious, but I cannot tell you how many people don’t even know how to address an editor or an agent or attempt to draw attention to themselves by trying to reinvent the letter.

Obviously follow guidelines if they are available, but this standard template works well for most situations.

For access to my cover letter template, become a paid subscriber.

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My Adventures in Book Publicity

Each edition of series My Adventures in Book Publicity will feature a campaign or organization that I am supporting.

Donate to Crips for eSims for Gaza

What it Feels Like to Launch a Book

For those of you wondering what it feels like to launch a debut book into the world—or any book for that matter—well it can feel like an exercise in exclusion.

Were the gym teachers sadists when they handed the bats to the best athletes in the class who also happened to be the most popular and anointed them team captains? Of course these boys chose their friends first (the system was rigged) and then the rest of us were either picked or passed over until we got to the final sad kid. Fortunately most stopped paying attention once the stars were selected—nobody else really mattered.

Because of my uneven abilities, my placement in the draft pick was never secure. While I generally was not good at sports and pretty terrible at catching, I could run fast and hit the ball decently, so I often was picked in the middle or second to last and sometimes last.

Worse than the order in which you were chosen was the anticipation of waiting to hear your name. The feelings of excitement and dread were something close to torture as you stood frozen in the silence between the humming and hawing of the captains looking at you then past you until finally fixing their eyes on someone they assessed was better than you.

I remember holding my breath and thinking pick me during these minutes that felt like years—not because I cared which team I was on, but so this excruciating public display of humiliation would end.

That we had to live through this a couple times a week in gym class and at every recess made it all the worse.

*

And that’s what book launch season can feel like only with higher stakes because this isn’t some random game that you most likely didn’t choose to play, but your most prized accomplishment—your book!

An author has a role to play in the promotion of their own book—particularly small or independent press authors. In the publishing world, the system favours those with big presses, big agents, private publicists, money, time, connections, and other resources.

You can throw your hands in the air and do nothing, and often it will be the case that nothing will happen—unless by some chance of luck you get shortlisted for an award, but even then you have to make the most out of that opportunity.

Didn’t you work too hard on this book to leave its success in the hand of a random subjective jury or a fickle industry?

As I discussed in part one of this series, the first step for me was figuring out what my goals were in terms of what I wanted my book to do. It’s ideal if these goals are connected to something you care about like your ideas rather than something you have no control over such as sales or awards.

Next I tried to develop a productive mindset to carry me throughout my book promotion which can last up to and beyond two years if you want it to.

Just because the publishing world moves on from your book within three to six months, doesn’t mean you have to.

Milk your book for all its worth.

But in order to milk it, you need a plan.

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My Adventures in Book Publicity

Book Tours

Book Tours

For my third post in My Adventures in Book Publicity series, I am focusing on book tours for small and independent press authors.

Literary festivals are often what makes up a great deal of a tour for an author and allows them to afford to go because festivals or your publisher pays for travel and hotel. Then the author can do side events around the festivals.

At the time that I had planned my tour, I had not been invited to any literary festivals, so I knew if I were to do a book tour I would be footing the bill.

Just because you have a book out doesn’t mean the world is waiting for it. That can be a tough pill to swallow for some writers, and book launch season can feel like one disappointment after the next, if you let it.

I’m not going to lie.

Launching a book into the world is a mind fuck.

It’s exciting but often devastating and can be humiliating.

• You may not be on a list or get a review or get an invitation.

• You will compare yourself and your book to others.

• You will mostly feel bad because it’s an exercise in exclusion.

Low expectations and making the most out of everything big or small is the key to surviving.

I learned this lesson with my first book and have carried it with me through subsequent publications.

Nobody cares about your book more than you.

Nobody.

A book tour looks very different for a writer who is getting paying invitations along with some travel funding or for an author who can afford to self-fund and take time off for an extensive tour.

So if you don’t get invited to a paying festival, what can you do?

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My Adventures in Book Publicity

Mindset

A Loser Before I Got Out of the Gate

I stated in Part 1 that my goal for my book was connection and that kept me grounded, but I’m not dead inside!

Obviously, on some level, I did want people to like the book or else why bother to write work for an audience and publication?

While I didn’t have wild expectations, I did have some low-bar desires like readers not FUCKING HATING MY BOOK.

The reason I was able to keep focused on connection and not external validation throughout the publicity process is that three terribly disappointing things happened before the book came out.

The Goodreads/Net Galley Reviews

The first one was my fault.

In the lead up to the pub date, I did what everyone tells you NOT to do: I read the Goodreads and NetGalley reviews of the book.

Dear reader, they were not nice.

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My Adventures in Book Publicity

Goals

Promoting Your Book

Now that it’s a little over a year and a half since my debut story collection came out, I want reflect on what went well and what I would do differently in hopes that it will help others especially small press traditionally published authors.

I also want to help myself remember for my next book! How quickly we forget these things once we stop doing them.

Publicity can be a touchy subject for authors. Some don’t think it is their job—although their publishing contract would likely disagree. Most of us have signed contracts that indicate that we do have be involved in some form of promotion and be available for interviews, podcasts, festivals, etc.

But how do you get those publicity opportunities without some self-promotion—especially if

• you don’t have an agent,

• aren’t with a big five press,

• aren’t a famous author, and

• don’t have unlimited time, money, and resources?

I’m not here to convert anyone on the virtues of self-promotion. I’m just going to outline what I did and what I would do differently.

I’m into publicity because it’s something that I weirdly enjoy. I don’t hate or dread it. I find it fun to come up with ways to reach readers.

I’m an outlier. I know.

I probably like publicity because I’ve run literary journals and for a short time ran private writing workshops and studied marketing. Once I learned how to promote other writers and my courses, I applied that knowledge to myself. I also l have a community-focused approach to my literary life which makes self-promotion more enjoyable.

I’m in the small/independent press traditionally published literary world although much of my advice can apply to writers involved in any type of publishing. [Incidentally has a very handy template about the different publishing paths that you should check out if you are not sure what world you are in or want to be in.]

While Anecdotes was my debut short fiction collection, I am the author of five other poetry collections (3 full length and one co-authored chapbook which were traditionally published and one self-published collection) and I’m also a screenwriter and experimental filmmaker.

Naively I thought I had a handle on my own self-promotion. And while I did to some extent (I’ve run online journals since 2011 and this newsletter since 2021) in the end

• I took on more than I could handle,

• was not able to execute all of my plans, and

• I burned out.

So there are a couple of things that I would do differently the next time around.

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Maybe you’re like me; for decades I have remembered to pay my literary dues. To read, to review, to mentor, to teach, to praise the work of others with a glad heart, all while writing, re-writing, learning and unlearning bad habits, fostering better habits, thinking well and less well, and generally not worrying about making an impact on the literary scene because any opinion that an impact has been made is always the decision of other people. Like many of us, while waiting for eyes on my work, I just due it.

And I’m not always – let me extend that to not often – read.

So I’m thinking about literary citizenship and its vicissitudes; that is, how paying dues is both necessary and fraught. I’m also thinking about genre fluidity, and how all these energies work together.

*

At literary events, after I have read my work aloud and talked about writing, I usually move through the crowd searching for a breath of air or a snack. This is when people stop me and say something like this: “That was great! I’ve never heard of you or your book!” The first times this happened, I thought nothing of it. Of course I was obscure – I was just starting. But after four, five, six books, such exclamations began to get old. It’s a curious moment, in which I know someone is expressing their excitement to have “discovered” me but what a backhand. I appreciate it when someone sticks to the first comment and swallows the second before it leaves their mouth. I know, I know: no one knows me.

That last is an overstatement, of course; people know me, and someone’s reading me right now. (Hello!) And though admitting to a small readership is taboo, I’m tired of pretending.

There are all kinds of essays about writing I could cite that would, and have, wagged their proverbial fingers at me as they say that we don’t write in order to be read, but all of those essays are written by writers who I read, defeating the purpose of Milosz or Heaney or Ruefle arguing for their own obscurity amid their international fame, which I know is not rock-star fame, but still, ironic.

A book should be an axe for the frozen sea within us, wrote Kafka. But he also told Max Brod to destroy all his manuscripts after he died, which Brod did not do, which is why I can quote Kafka today on loneliness and isolation and literature and why you probably recognize that quotation. If Kafka continued to be as unknown as he was the week he died, then no one would be quoting him on his obscurity, his loneliness, his inner ice.

I could write about literary isolation, but if I did, how would you find it?

*

Maybe it’s because I don’t write fiction.

I also take long breaks from reading fiction, and I often think I’m breaking up with it. I have large and bruised doubts about what it is supposed to do: not the good doubts, the kind that make my thoughts shoot off into the stratosphere. This is doubt that spreads like fog through my brain, seeps under doorways, makes me wonder if there’s smoke in the house.

But then I read some poetry or nonfiction – or even better, some hybrid forms – and the fog lifts, gets sucked back outside, whiffles under the door and backs away down the block, and I stand for a long time in that watery and transformative space between poetry and essay, using poetry to draw out what is hard about an essay, and using the essay to find different congruencies of the lyric moment, to strengthen, to beautify, to shout, to nudge.

It’s rising on its banks, that riverine surge between poetry and essay. For years I wrote essays about poetry – let me be clear, other people’s excellent poetry – and I liked doing that except the more I sat by the river, the less time I had to wade into that moving water, to feel it eddy around my ankles and shins as I step in and step out of the current, sometimes cold, sometimes muddy, often happy.

Same river, many chances. Time passes and life allows me or she does not; the river has sometimes been dammed and often diverted.

Poessay or essem: stones in the river, sometimes slippery, sometimes secure, places for my feet in the cooling waters. I always have hot feet and the centre of a path of running water (creek, stream, river) is my best place on the planet.

The river altered by a foot’s insertion into its wide and capacious current is a Heraclitean proposition that I can’t ignore, though I know that it’s most often Plato quoted on Heraclitus, and not Heraclitus himself. I’m no scholar of Greek, but that one-philosopher-removed business seems like a big foot in a river. In Canada, all kinds of bigger things disrupt rivers: hydro dams and sewage and violence. But droughts and floods are as nothing to the river, despite the human cost. No one should take history lightly, but we might wear our search for presentness with grace and compassion, like it is a scarf to warm us and not a boulder we push uphill. As Haudenosaunee scholar Richard Monture says in his book of the same name, “we share our matters”.

To share my matters, and ask after the matters of others, I come back to my river practice, back to hybridity and the shape of unreadness in a long arc of isolation, practice, and community.

*

I know writers who write bestsellers. I sit next to them at events. There is always a moment – at a bookstore or festival – when my signing line finishes. Ten or twelve folks chat with me and get their books signed and sometimes walk away with my card so they can email me something later, and the line for the other author remains long and serpentine: readers holding stacks of books in their arms, willing to wait and wait.

I can’t say envy doesn’t enter into it – of course it does – but whenever I see this, envy isn’t my primary feeling. Mostly I feel a bit stupid for all the times I thought, “It’s okay – I am just paying my dues. My Big Book is coming.”

But the Big Book is not coming. And I’m starting to think that this is okay.

The idea of literati is a literatease.

This truth swims towards me, brushing its iridescent sides against my cold, wet, river-loving feet.

*

We seem to be giving up on defining the prose-poem and postcard story against each other, or maybe it’s only that no one’s talking about it around me any longer, and if that’s so, thank you for taking that rut-making exchange elsewhere. I was never going to get in harness and pull your car out of that snowbank.

I love genre and teach it all the time, mainly so that genre-defiers (like me, like you) can know enough about genre to defy, blend, smush, suture, spindle, and fold like they’re made of it.

Poessay sounds like poésie, but they are not the same. Essem sounds like a sneeze.

Those poessays, those essems, are lyric and ludic, rhetorical in scope but not in shape; they rehearse undoing so that they can traffic in narrative but spin it fine as fishing line. This is not news, but in my isolation and obscurity, I stand in the river, feeling my leg hair waving in the current, let my wet knees and icy feet dictate the next moments.

*

A handful of bad years seemed as though they might have the force to build a wall between me and the flow of words to which I have had an unlimited springy access since I learned to read. Even with the patriarchy and my poor education followed by my good education and the life-long task of telling the difference between them, my chosen misdirections and not meeting a writing role model until I was in my thirties, encountering instead full-on way-too-proud-of-it misogyny and classism and violence, I wrote and wrote and wrote and wrote. It was the thing I couldn’t lose.

That writing wasn’t always good, and it wasn’t always published.

It’s important to admit to being wrong or having half-baked ideas sometimes, because vulnerability to misapprehension or the occasional persuasion of bad people is very human. It’s a relief to recall long periods of time when I didn’t write for readers because I couldn’t picture any. For many years, it was just me and the words.

I chafe against admonishments that we shouldn’t write with the hope, or desire, of being read. Those admonishments will not bring eyes to your page in any case. I have done my time as unread as any teenage diarist, as any memoirist with a story but no method, as any emo-angsty poet, and I can tell you that the philosophy of the unread is not to give up your desire; it’s to re-direct it. Please yourself.

If writing to please the self is masturbation, then writing to please others is either sacrificial selflessness or egotism, and I don’t think I’m interested enough to parse the shapes of these.

In the classroom and the literary world, I am (like everyone else) routinely vulnerable to all kinds of bullshit, human and computer-generated. But I’m also subject to plenty of good, and there’s no ignoring the correlative between low expectations and high satisfaction.

I wade over to a different part of the river. The hem of my dress is now pleasingly waterlogged and will slap, limp but propulsive, against my legs on the walk home.

I gave a reading a few years ago at a small bookstore and an even smaller audience showed up. Since I wasn’t from that city and the store was laissez-faire about advertising – meaning that they did none – I felt sanguine about the headcount. That tiny audience in that barely advertised event in that cold-shoulder bookstore turned out to be the best, because all of us scheduled to read that night undid our writerly personae and read our favourite poems – the strange ones, the long ones, the ones that didn’t fit our books’ arcs or advertising copy or the set we usually did. I let myself listen the way I couldn’t have or wouldn’t have if the venue had been bigger. When I was my turn, I read five of the least sympathetic poems in my book, ones I couldn’t fully explain and didn’t try to: poems that needed extreme listening. I saw a smile the size of a city block spread across one of the listener’s faces. This was my final event of six months of promotion, during which I had read in bookstores and pubs, large theatres and university classrooms, hotel meeting rooms and cafes, and I felt like finally, finally, I could hear myself.

Please yourself.

I’m no longer a young writer who plans what she wears to readings, whom men and women hit on sometimes nicely and sometimes aggressively. I pretty much show up in jeans and a sweater with my middle-aged hips and belly and exactly no one macks on me.

That is not regret; it is puzzlement, for I have grown more and more interesting. I would mack on me.

*

Instead of “No man steps into the same river twice, for it is not the same river and he is not the same man,” I prefer this Heraclitean river statement, which I gleaned from The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy and can’t stop thinking about: “Into the same rivers we step and do not step, we are and are not.”

Poessayists know it’s true. We swear by our tranquil feet.

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Tanis MacDonald (she/her) is the author of Straggle: Adventures in Walking While Female as well as six other books of poetry and nonfiction. She is twice the winner of the Open Seasons Award: once in 2021 for her essay of female friendship and music fandom, and again in 2025 for her forthcoming essay on adoption and ancestry. She has been longlisted for the CBC Poetry Prize and took an honourable mention in the Pavlick Poetry Prize in 2021. Tanis was raised in Treaty One territory and now lives as a grateful guest on Haldimand Treaty land, near the Grand River in southwestern Ontario, where she teaches in the Department of English and Film Studies at Wilfrid Laurier University. Her next book, Tall, Grass, Girl, is forthcoming with Book*hug Press.

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On Creative Shifts

Every time I move into a new creative shift where I have breakthrough—usually a change in voice or tone or storytelling approach—I always have a period of inactivity sometimes six months to eight months where I don’t write in this new way but feel a sort of bubbling up of excitement, anticipation, and all I can do it wait.

While the shift is occurring—it is like bread baking—I can’t do anything to make it go slower or faster. All I can do is pay attention to what is around me (especially writing that draws me in) and to this internal tug, poking me, reminding me that it’s there and that I just have to be patient.

This is not writers’s block. This is process, and the two are very different things for me. I can and do write other things during this period—I’m just not writing THE THING that is going to be the big creative shift. Writer’s block feels hopeless and more external and focused on how the work will be perceived. The creative shift feels more internal, but unlike writer’s block, it is also comforting, exciting, and intense.

This has happened to me about five times in my writing life, so I am now used to recognizing the signs and the feeling.

Today I had the creative breakthrough that will likely see me through the next couple of years of writing.

It came in a flash—all at once. No digging, no looking for it. Just handed to me like a little present. There you go—what you’ve been waiting for. It’s the kind of thing that’s not going to be particularly exciting to anyone else. But when it happens to me, I think it is one of the best creative feelings in the world—the literary equivalent of climbing in to a bed of freshly laundered sheets.

Anyway, things are low right now in the world, in my personal life, so I’m very very happy for this creative boost today.

Writing is weird.

Writers, artists, have you experienced anything like this in your creative lives?

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Writing with Dissociative Identity Disorder

When I told my first agent—and this is the reason she was my first and isn’t my current agent—that I’d been diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (formerly called multiple personalities), she said, “You can’t write by committee.”

She had represented me on my historical fiction novels, but I was now working on my first contemporary fiction—about a mother with DID. Excited, I’d sent her a piece of the first draft.

She objected to the piece as unrealistic because the main character has three children. Anyone with DID, my agent said firmly, authoritatively, as if she was the expert on this, couldn’t possibly cope with more than one.

Only a few people knew I was multiple: my spouse, my therapist, my oldest friend. There were also a couple of new friends I’d first met in an anonymous, online support group who were multiple, too, and we’d progressed to talking on the phone, sharing the names under which we operated in the world, and eventually meeting in person. 

The name on my birth certificate is not the name my parents called me. And I didn’t know how my birth name was spelled until I left home and got a copy of that birth certificate. This is the sort of small, weird thing that is reflective of much larger family dysfunction, the sort that causes PTSD. And if the trauma is severe and begins when a child is too young to escape in any other way, the child dissociates and compartmentalizes to cope. As the brain develops in the child, it contains not a single sense of self, but many, a difference that is visible in MRIs of adults with DID.

Besides the close friends from the support group, as a moderator, I was also interacting on a daily basis online with some twenty-five or so people who were multiple. Just like people who are singletons, they came in a range of childless and childed varieties. Some had no children. Some had four. I had two.

So, when my agent said that it was impossible for anyone with DID to have more than one child, it felt like an accusation—you can’t live a “normal” life; you are damaged goods. That pretty much sums up what my abusers said. It hit a nerve. A very raw one. PTSD had left me with a lot of those. I didn’t think and didn’t ask for permission from other folks inside when I impulsively—defensively—replied, “Well, I have DID and I have two kids.”

When I refer to other folks inside, I mean other parts of the system—other “personalities” as shrinks used to say—and when I say system, I mean the collectivity of consciousnesses that form the person in this body, this life that is shared. I am also a part, the part that is currently writing this essay. If you and I were meeting in person, I would probably say “we” when referencing the system and reserve “I” for the specific part that I am. But in the act of saying “we,” I would no longer be “me.”

There is another part, close to me in the system, who is the one to say “we.” In person, if talking about the system, there is an inevitable switch between us. I move back, the other moves forward, swiftly, unconsciously, noticeable to me not only in the change in pronouns, but in that I can simultaneously feel the ease the other has in saying “we” and its distinction from the discomfort that I feel with it.

My role is to simulate being a singleton. I feel like one, too, even though I know I’m not. You see that “I”? Writing here, not knowing who’s reading it, whether it is safe or unsafe, whether I will be judged or at the very least misunderstood, which is highly likely, given the still current inaccurate assumptions and prejudices about DID, makes for a high degree of guardedness. Yet, funny enough, even as I type these words, I feel the part that is very much like me, except for being freer to use the word “we,” and therefore acknowledge the system, coming very close.

When we say close or far, we mean where our folks are currently positioned relative to each other internally and to the outside. Our inner world extends from the front, just behind the eyes, where interaction with the world is conducted. The further from the front, the deeper inside, the more remote parts are from the outer world and the more involved in the inner landscape they are. We say “part” to acknowledge that there is a whole, the whole that we all are, not only because we share this body and this life. We also share a set of values, a home, a family. Being a collective makes it complicated to live this one life that is ours, making room for all and balancing the needs of the many.

Did you notice the switch from I to we? In person, it’s often subtle. Most people don’t notice, and we’re skilled at smoothing over differences. Switching takes energy, but less than it used to as we’ve become more fluid and conscious about it, rather than reactive, and more comfortable with each other.

Do you value every aspect of yourself? Every inch of your body? It isn’t easy, is it? Now imagine how hard that would be if parts of you contained memories of abuse, the pain and humiliation and dangerous rage, if some parts of you didn’t even know that time has moved on and you aren’t stuck in the horrible past. Other parts were taught that to break the abusers’ rules meant to be hurt even worse and their job was to keep the hurt parts shut up and deep within, as well as keeping outer parts ignorant of the pain at any cost so that life could go on and some level of functioning occur. Some, I want to emphasize.

I wrote my second novel mostly in bed. I had two small children, then, and was constantly anxious. The nightmares had mostly stopped when I married for the second time and married better. But the price of my being ignorant of the extent of the abuse and the injury it caused was a constant free-floating anxiety. This was maintained by parts who protected our life by constantly reminding me that I was a worthless piece of shit so that I wouldn’t feel anything inside other than the anxiety. This kept me from discovering the extent of my childhood abuse and being overwhelmed by it. Even if there was a price, I could muster the energy to read to my kids, feed them, take them to the park.

In my journal, I questioned why my parts weren’t like other people’s—mine seemed so much more real, more distinct. The answer came when I was diagnosed with DID. The first time a therapist addressed folks inside, acknowledging them, my anxiety largely disappeared. Instead, I touched their pain, anger, terror. This is not fun, either.

It was the start of a two-year period that she called riding the tail of the dragon. The cooperation that we have come to, the internal appreciation of all parts, was hard won. The culmination of it was writing a novel about a woman with DID. When that novel was published, my kids were ten and thirteen. I didn’t acknowledge my own multiplicity publicly, not even to my new agent or editor—though I recently found out they suspected it.

Did you notice that I’ve switched back to I? My editor, my agent, my kids. If someone else was forward, they would say “we.” But I don’t know you, and so I don’t know if it’s safe.

Back when the book was published, over ten years ago, now, I was terrified that people would come to book festivals and harass me. I’d been primed by abusers to expect harassment and worse if I ever told: that I’d be called crazy, locked up, that no one would ever want me, that everything I loved would be taken from me.

And yet here I am talking to you.

We have parts of all ages, all genders. Some are soft, others tough. Some are practical, techy. Others are dreamy, love beauty and art. Several of us feel most alive skating or holding a tool. My husband once commented when another part was helping install an air conditioner—“You’re handy all of a sudden.”

When my first agent said, “You can’t write by committee,” we were so hurt by her insistence that one part must write the book, as if the others were superfluous, or the worst thing you can say to someone with DID—not real. We were taking in a message, intended or not: that the rest of us but that “one” didn’t have a place in the world, that all of us but the part chosen to face the outside world must recede deep inside and never be seen.

I remember this feeling well. I was in the bathtub, one foot on the hot water tap, my eyes on the grey tiles above it, reheating the water because I’d been sitting there so long and crying, and then I—or someone—I don’t remember which of us it was—said, No. Not doing that.

We’d worked too hard to bring the energy of each part into the life, to value all, to understand and listen to each other inside. To stuff all of that into the far back and leave just a shred of the person that we are all by themself out there in the front.?  Alone again as we were when abused?

No. Not happening.

DID is a survival mechanism. It isn’t meant to be obvious, but to allow a person to function without notice despite the harm done and being done by intimate and powerful predators.

I didn’t like The United States of Tara, where every part (and there were only a handful, unlike ours or the multiple people I knew) has its own wardrobe. (Not to mention that each of them had a much better wardrobe than we’ve ever had in total!) Even the marvel fantasy Moon Knight—which is more accurate than any ostensibly “realistic” portrayal—is still flamboyant, exaggerated. These portrayals make being multiple too hard to confess to. People have such strange ideas about it.

And yet, in some ways it is strange. Maybe writers can understand that strangeness because the act of creation is often strange itself, how it occurs, what makes it possible and what stops it.

My first drafts are sometimes wooden because they’re written, as far as I can tell, by parts that are more often forward, the same ones who chat with neighbours or pay bills. Those aren’t really the creative parts—sorry, if I am offending any folks inside us. “No,” I’m hearing from within. And there is also some internal laughter about that.

But in the act of writing that first draft, however flawed, the creative parts, and I’m not sure, really, how it happens, are drawn close enough to the front to make it possible for real writing to start happening, to direct the fingers, to make it seem to me like the words are flowing from somewhere deep, connected to something larger than I am or even the sum of our parts.

Besides the mundanity of putting in time, producing words, many wrong-headed words, which are replaced by others that feel like they’re coming closer to truth, the process of writing is also a spiritual experience for me. It brings with it a sense of the unity of life, a sense that, through the ambiguities, complexities, cruelties and painfulness of existence, there is a thread of beauty that animates joy and hope, and that this thread is what carries the story to its conclusion.

Our conclusion.

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Lilian Nattel is the neurospicy author of five novels in three genres. The middle one—Web of Angels—is about a mom with dissociative identity disorder. She's working on a new novel in a fourth genre and embarking on a project to read books by women authors from every country in the world. She posts about this and more at liliannattel.ca and creates content on TikTok as @bookcrone. 

Web of Angels
by Lilian Nattel
Penguin Random House, 2012

Publisher’s Description

On the surface of things, Sharon Lewis is a lot like any other happily married mother of three: she is the beating heart of a house full of kids, cooking and chaos, the one who always knows the after-school practice schedule, where her husband put the car keys and who needs a little extra TLC. Her kids and husband think she's a little spooky, actually, the way she can anticipate the tensions of any situation—and maybe they love her all the more for the extra care she gives them.
 
Life is definitely good until the morning Heather Edwards, a pregnant teenaged friend of the family, kills herself. The reverberations of that act, and the ugly secrets that sparked it, prove deeply unsettling to the whole family, and stir up Sharon's own troubling secret: she has DID, or dissociative identity disorder. And the multiples inside the woman the world knows as Sharon seem to know what happened to Heather, and what may be happening to Heather's surviving sister.

Will Sharon's need to protect the innocent cause her to finally come clean about her true nature with her family and friends, and not just in the anonymous chat rooms on the web where she's connected to others like herself? Will a woman with DID be able to persuade her quiet and respectable community that evil things can happen even in the nicest homes?

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On Exposition

Types of Exposition

Exposition is a way to give information to the reader implicitly or explicitly. 

You can give information to the reader through 

• Narration (via different viewpoints directly expressed – often provides necessary context)

• Summary (allows the writer to move through time and space in story and can impact pacing)

• Description (images, details, and actions)

• Internal monologue

• Dialogue

• Scene and half-scene (combination of summary, description, dialogue)

• Flashbacks or flashforwards, memories, daydreams, visions

• Media such as text message, email, newspaper, social media posts, letters, TV, radio, film, and music

These forms of exposition can operate alone or simultaneously.

Show don't tell is often advice given to encourage new writers to avoid heavy handed info dumps. However that advice is often overused and has become somewhat of a cliché of the writing workshop. Show don't tell is just one approach of many.

Exposition is an important part of storytelling. While we don’t want to spoon-fed information to the reader, we do need to provide them with context so they can understand the characters and the story.

Only showing and not telling can be a problem because you're making assumptions about your audience that you have a shared point of view, and often you don’t, and your audience needs that information.

When a reader says that your writing is expositional, they are saying you have delivered information in a way that is showing itself or being clunky or info dumping.

Exposition is often best delivered within conflict or tension or through a unique narrative voice or in a way that is unobtrusive to the reader. We need the information but we don’t want to be aware that we are getting information in an obvious way.

Examples

Narration/Summary/Description

By high school, everyone had grown a second head and extra limbs. Couples clicked down the hall like two-headed spiders, weaving around each other delicately. Lainey spent much of her time just off school property in a defunct tennis court reserved for smokers called The Cage. There were two-headed beasts there too.

—Ian Williams, "Is Liable to Imprisonment for a Term Not Exceeding Seven Years," from Not Anyone's Anything

Narration/Description/Half-Scene

Margot met Robert on a Wednesday night toward the end of her fall semester. She was working behind the concession stand at the artsy movie theatre downtown when he came in and bought a large popcorn and a box of Red Vines.

“That’s an . . . unusual choice,” she said. “I don’t think I’ve ever actually sold a box of Red Vines before.”

Flirting with her customers was a habit she’d picked up back when she worked as a barista, and it helped with tips. She didn’t earn tips at the movie theatre, but the job was boring otherwise, and she did think that Robert was cute. Not so cute that she would have, say, gone up to him at a party, but cute enough that she could have drummed up an imaginary crush on him if he’d sat across from her during a dull class—though she was pretty sure that he was out of college, in his mid-twenties at least.

—Kristen Roupenian, "Cat Person," New Yorker

Narration/Description/Memory

I went to the walk-in clinic because I’d started falling asleep in weird places. The first time happened in a grocery store. I was holding two boxes of cereal and I got tired, so I sat down in the aisle. I’d never thought to just sit down in a grocery store, but when your eyes are burning and the blinks come slower and slower, it becomes impossible not to. So, I sat. And then I leaned. I should never have leaned. I should have sat up straight, like someone who does yoga, but I don’t do yoga. I don’t even stretch, really. So, I sat, then leaned, and then a man with a brown coat and black sneakers started shaking my shoulder, asking me if I was dead. Okay, he was asking if I was fine, but basically that’s the same thing. So, he asked me if I was fine and I said no. And then he just walked away. Like, who does that? I said no, you’re supposed to help, but he walked away. I got up. I didn’t even buy any cereal. I just went home.

—Francine Cunningham, "Asleep Till You’re Awake," from God Isn’t Here Today: Stories

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Agents

Everyone wants an agent, but an agent can’t do a lot for you until you have a project they can sell.

Rather that worrying about signing with an agent, focus on writing a good script or book. While agents can be helpful, you don’t necessarily need one to pursue your writing goals—especially if you are working on self-funded film projects or are writing for the small press market.

While I have a screenwriting agent, I don’t have literary agent for fiction. My film agent reviews my book contracts (as a favour), and because I’m operating in the small press world, I don’t see a need for an agent right now. If I didn’t have a film agent review my contracts, then I would hire a lawyer or use the contract negotiating service provide by the Writers Union of Canada.

So far I’ve had five books of poetry published, a short story collection, and I co-edited a climate anthology. All of that happened without an agent.

My next book is more genre-focused, and I might consider trying to getting a literary agent for that, but I just want to make it clear that it is possible to have a writing career without an agent. If you get rejected by an agent, it doesn’t mean you don’t deserve to be a writer or have a writing career.

The Catch-22

You want to approach an agent when you have a solid project and have some buzz around you in the form of a recent grant, contest win, festival run, publications, or a book deal offer or a script option offer.

If you are a screenwriter, make some short films and send them to festivals and apply to professional development programs, contests, or labs. I got my first agent after doing the Praxis Screenwriting Program and my second agent after doing the film program at the Canadian Film Centre. These kind of professional development opportunities can help network you into the system.

If you are a novelist or fiction writer, send your writing out for publication, apply for grants, residencies, labs. If you write nonfiction, pitch to major outlets to help get some excitement around your writing and the topic of your book.

No matter the genre, generally the time you need an agent is after buzz has been generated around you. But how do you get those opportunities without an agent? It's a Catch-22. 

If you are making small independent self-funded films or are writing for small presses, you don’t need an agent.

However in film and TV, you can’t get to the gatekeepers without an agent and they help negotiate contracts.

In fiction writing you can’t get to the big publishers without an agent because many will not accept unagented submissions.

In recent years, in Canada, I have noticed that some publishers are opening up submissions to writers without representation and major networks are visiting film festivals across the country and taking pitches.

It’s a good idea to follow and support film or literary festivals to see what professional development opportunities are available and to follow publishers on social media and sign up for their newsletters, so you don’t miss out on potential opportunities.

How to Find an Agent

When you are ready to look for an agent, you can find a list of Canadian screenwriting agents on the Writers Guild of Canada website, and fiction and nonfiction agents at The Writers Union of Canada.

There are only about 15-20 agents in Canada, so don’t send out your work until it’s ready. Once they reject you, you can’t resubmit until you have a new project to sell.

If you are interested in American agents, then I suggest checking out your favourite writers to see who their agents are. In the US, agents often require personal recommendations in order to read work, but some still do take unsolicited submissions.

Research their websites and ask writers you know about their experiences.

Never pay an agent to submit your work to them. That is a scam.

Sometimes you will be asked to sign a waiver which is pretty common (especially for film agents).

Here are two Subtacks I recommend for those seeking fiction or nonfiction representation:

The Shit No One Tells You About Writing

A monthly newsletter chock-full of guidance and support from publishing industry insiders. Expect author interviews, guest blogs, giveaways, and more! Sign up and immediately receive an exclusive webinar from literary agent Carly Watters

By The Shit About Writing Team

Agents and Books

The FAQ on how to find an agent and how to write books, all in one place.

By Kate McKean

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Only the Sock Speaks: On Writing While Neurodiverging

When my first book came out in 2021—Fuse, a memoir of mixed race identity and mental illness that dove into my long history of eating disorders, addiction, OCD, self-harm, and anxiety—many readers commented on its unusual structure. Unlike many memoirs, it’s not chronological. It's structured thematically. A veritable Jackson Pollock of feeling. Any loose chronological organization owes thanks to my editor, who convinced me that as a memoir, I needed to root the reader in some vague notion of time. 

Which was fair enough.

But this grounding impulse didn't come naturally to me. I don’t set out to be purposely abstruse, it's just the narrative drive of the stories I tell originate in the how and why more often than the when and where. 

I'm not sure I’m explaining this clearly. I feel myself—the self I speak with in my head—slide out of frame like one of Dali's deflated clocks. Let’s try again.

Once upon a time, I tried to write a novel. 

I did write a novel. 

The novel I wrote was not the novel I set out to create. 

But I need to go further back than this.

After my collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, was accepted for publication, my editor said he'd like to see what I could do with a longer form. Understand: if I'd written traditionally-sized short stories instead of stories that ran the gamut between flash and the unseeming length of about three pages and that (unintentionally, in retrospect) challenge many narrative traditions, maybe I wouldn't have internalized my editor’s statement the way I did. At the time, though, when he said he’d like to see what I could do with a longer form, what I heard was: this is cute, but can you do anything normally?

Which is of course not at all what he actually said. Or meant, I'm sure.

My squirrely interpretation has more to do with the fact that I am aware of the fact that I don't seem able to do things normally. And don’t say “what’s normal” because we all know. There’s a narrative standard. A convention. A tradition. And I know it because I have tried to harness it many times and it eludes me. 

When I write, I am aiming to create something fresh, yes, exciting, yes, but I am never trying to confound. 

I have these ideas that float about me, and they appear within a range of normal, but when I feed them through my fax-machine brain, what comes out the other side is seldom recognizable as what went in.

About that novel I mentioned. 

I meant to write some sort of family saga that examined how women uphold the patriarchy told through the perspective of at least three women.

I ended up with one perspective. And it is the perspective of a sock puppet. The person the sock puppet is attached to says nothing directly the whole book. Not a word. The sock speaks or remembers for this person. Though, of course, the sock is the person, so the human is speaking the entire time. 

I toyed with the idea of adding an omnipresent narrator to the mix. A couple of beta readers suggested one might be good to afford the story another perspective, but I recoiled at the very thought. Examining my reaction, I realized that I felt as though people didn't trust the puppet. As though they thought the puppet was not a reliable narrator of its own experience. I felt strongly that no one should be allowed to delegitimize the puppet's experiences. 

During the early drafts of the novel, I'd made a prototype of the puppet and had grown rather attached to its fuzzy and fraying rain-cloud coloured self. Where the puppet ended and I began to blur about the edges. So, when people said the puppet wasn't a reliable narrator, I felt like I was being accused of being unreliable. To my mind, the puppet was the only reliable even-headed character in the whole story. 

I began to think about how so many individuals like myself—and women in particular—who are neurodivergent, historically and even now, are seen as unreliable narrators of our own lives. We aren't trusted to tell our stories: to reliably assess our own lives. We are patted on the head. Appeased. Drugged. Institutionalized. But not believed. At least not fully.

I’m happy to say the sock remains the sole narrator of the novel. I am and will continue to be open to edits that will add clarity and enhance the writing, but I have arrived at a place in my creative life where I refuse to use neurotypical scaffolding (e.g. a longer story or an omnipresent narrator) to make my neurodivergent mind more palatable. 

I mean, let's be honest: I wouldn't know how to if I tried.

What are your thoughts on writing while neurodiverging?

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Hollay Ghadery is a multi-genre writer living in Ontario on Anishinaabe land. Fuse, her memoir of mixed-race identity and mental health, was released by Guernica Editions in 2021 and won the 2023 Canadian Bookclub Award for Nonfiction/Memoir. Her collection of poetry, Rebellion Box was released by Radiant Press in 2023, and her collection of short fiction, Widow Fantasies, is scheduled for release with Gordon Hill Press in fall 2024. Her debut novel, The Unraveling of Ou, is due out with Palimpsest Press in 2026, and her children’s book, Being with the Birds, with Guernica Editions in 2027. Hollay is the host of The Neighbourhood Bookclub on 105.5 FM, as well as a co-host HOWL on CIUT 89.5 FM. She is also a book publicist and the Poet Laureate of Scugog Township. Learn more about Hollay at www.hollayghadery.com. 

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My Younger Self Gives Writing Advice to My Younger Self

I wrote this a few years ago, but much still applies as advice to myself—especially the saying no part!

This is a picture of me when I was around 17 or 18, the age when I first wanted to be a writer.

There aren't many pictures of me as a teenager, so I don't have a lot to choose from.

Yes, that's a hippie scarf and Pink Floyd poster on the wall. The 60s came back hard in the 80s.

Yes, I'm smoking.

Yes, I look like a stoner. I was.

I know. Embarrassing!

Here is some advice I would give to my younger self about the writing life. These are things I wish I had known when I was secretly writing poems in my journal and would never have dared to tell anyone I wanted to be a writer.

Read more

Sharing some thoughts into the blurb business—on asking for and writing blurbs.

There are a couple of areas where blurbs benefit particularly new authors or authors changing genres to help situate their work: journals, magazines, festivals or podcasts that might review or profile a book or author and award juries.

Often the back descriptions and blurbs might be the first thing these groups look at.

A blurb can frame a book especially for small press or new authors who might not otherwise have a great deal of book publicity which helps get the book to readers.

I want to live in a blurb-free world, but this is why I still participate in the asking and in the writing of blurbs.

I usually have a set limit that I do per year and only books where I am genuinely interested—not obligated.

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Growing up, no one ever told me I should be a writer. It’s not the kind of thing desi parents tell their children, and nothing they’d ever want to admit to their friends—unless you were a successful writer, in which case they will tell everyone. There is no pressure like desi parent pressure; either I had to succeed, or I had to deal with constant dismissal and questioning about why I would want to waste my time with writing in the hopes I would quit and do something more socially acceptable. When this didn’t work and I began an MFA in my mid-30s, this evolved into writing advice from my mother, the assumption being that I couldn’t possibly be any good or succeed at this without her help, despite her never having written in her life.

I’m much better than I used to be at ignoring my mother, but anyone who writes can probably already see the problem this kind of internalized pressure puts on a newer writer. All first drafts are terrible and all first drafts by newer writers are usually extra-terrible, and so between never feeling like my work was good enough and my then-undiagnosed ADHD, I was the writer who never wrote.

I could pretend this was okay until Sarah Selecky asked me to teach for her, and I had to talk to a class about writing while practicing so little of it and having no street cred as a writer beyond being in my first year of an MFA program. At best, I could bask in Sarah’s street cred as the author of highly lauded stories and books, who had taught for years and more importantly, wrote regularly. She had a whole daily routine and ritual around writing, whereas I had frenzied attempts to get something on paper when I had MFA assignments due, and long stretches of nothing but good intentions and reality TV in between.

In my first class, one of my students was the partner of a person in my MFA program. I didn’t know him, since he was a few years ahead of me, but I was absolutely terrified that she would see right through me and tell her partner, who would of course tell everyone in the program, including the professors. Who the heck does she think she is, teaching writing when she’s barely a writer herself? I would become the laughingstock of the program, a story so ludicrous that it would be shared for years as an MFA urban legend and would be whispered around CanLit anytime I attempted to do anything.

In short, I had a massive case of imposter syndrome.

My hope was that I could quickly overcome this by learning everything I possibly could so that I could churn out perfect stories in a single draft, get a lot of things published, fast, win awards, sign a book deal, and ultimately have a long CV of things that would convince my students, my classmates, Canlit, my parents and myself that I was legitimately a writer. This didn’t work out very well, since not only was this an impossible task for any writer but also required me to actually write.

So I leaned heavily into the one thing I knew I was good at—critique. I critiqued the hell out of every MFA classmate. Sarah’s school emphasized positive feedback, but for the final assignment, the doors were open to critical review, and I went above and beyond. I made line notes, asked detailed questions, did character assessments, broke down stories structurally, going deep and explaining everything carefully with many notes and comments about things I liked, so it would be clear I was trying to improve the story and not rip the writer apart. Newer writers are thirsty sponges for good feedback. Most people were grateful for my efforts, but I have a hunch I overwhelmed them.

To prove I was legitimately a writer and writing teacher, I critiqued like a motherfucker in my roles as an instructor, MFA student, reader for the PRISM international editorial board, participant in a novel class, and among writer friends. But eventually my massively detailed feedback coupled with my undiagnosed ADHD meant that I not only struggled to write but also to critique. Surely, owning my own legitimacy as a writer and writing teacher had to be less work.

By my third year of teaching, I was fed up. The MFA was nearly over; only my thesis was left, which I was mostly not writing, and I could no longer dodge questions about my writing routine by saying I was too busy with coursework. Plus, I was becoming deeply uncomfortable that I was not presenting myself honestly.  What was the point of spending years in therapy successfully banishing from my head every desi parent’s favourite refrain "What will people think?” only to maintain a façade in the classroom?

Teaching and writing arise from the same source for me. Since my writing is better when I am true to myself on the page. I knew I now had to be true to myself in class to be a better teacher.

Being true to myself meant telling my students that I struggled to sit down and write. My classes were taught online, and for a brief moment before I pressed ‘post’ it felt a little risky. Would the students see this and immediately demand to be taught by a real writer instead?

But I knew I was a writer.

Nearly every writer has felt at times that they could not legitimately call themselves a writer.  Nearly every writer has struggled to write. There is no magic switch that gets set to ‘legitimate writer’ that makes any of the challenges with actually writing vanish.

Once my hesitation passed, I told the students everything. I told them that I’d tried and failed to maintain a writing routine dozens of times. I told them that I was an unabashedly lazy writer who avoided revision because it seemed like too much work. I told them that I desperately wanted to succeed, and while I was more confident now, I was very familiar with feeling like an imposter.

And then a wonderful thing happened. Once I stopped trying to prove myself to them, they stopped trying to prove themselves to me. We collectively relaxed and came into class as our real selves. They started admitting to all their writerly fears and bad habits—the  perfectionism, the worry that nobody wants to hear their stories, the feeling that they’re not good enough, the belief that they did not deserve to be writers. We still talked about craft, but the more interesting conversations were about everything that got in the way of being a writer. After our discussions wrapped up, the conversations continued in my head, forming and re-forming into different ways to explain things and encourage them, experiences of mine they could relate to, different metaphors I could use, or ways I could help them laugh their fears into something smaller. Often, the thoughts I had could be so compelling that I’d go back to our online discussion and write out long posts or long emails to the student directly. I still struggled to find motivation for my own creative work but unasked for writing advice? This was worth putting everything else aside to do.

Writer Therapy

A few years later, it occurred to me that other people might benefit from this advice, and the idea for my newsletter Writer Therapy was born where I write about writing problems and invite readers looking for writing advice to submit their questions. It’s like Dear Abby for writers but supportive and judgement free, and also I swear a lot.

In encouraging other writers to trust themselves and be honest on the page, I discovered the most useful thing I could do as a writing teacher was not teaching craft but legitimizing every student as a real writer. It was the antithesis of everything I had been raised with, to see everyone who wanted to write as a writer, regardless of their CV or the number of times they passed over writing in favour of reality TV. So much of how I teach and write has become a reflection of what I’ve learned as an adult, to trust my instincts and stand in my own truth, and not squash everything down over fears about what people might think.

And in doing this with my writing students, their writing got better.

The craft of writing isn’t hard, in the sense that it doesn’t take a lot of craft knowledge to write a competent story. Getting deep and nerdy about craft and looking at all the ways it can be stretched and pulled in service of the story can be fun, but it’s not always necessary for newer writers to know until they hit upon a particular craft issue in their writing.

Creative writers work in the realm of uncertainty. Most of us aren’t really taught to be comfortable with uncertainty. Sometimes that can be fun, to experiment, to play, to see what comes next, to not know what’s going to happen when we commit words to a blank page. Even if we’ve preplanned the story to death, the story may still pull us in unknown directions, or weird surprises may pop up that we don’t understand except that the story wants it there. More experienced writers learn to trust in their instincts, that feeling you get when you’ve tapped into something interesting even if you don’t quite know what to do with it yet—at least most of the time. But newer writers are so full of self-doubt about whether they are writing correctly, whether they’ve succeeded enough, or whether or not they are even writers—that they push away from their own creative instincts. What if I follow this idea and it leads nowhere? What if the story gets irreparably mucked up? What if it’s stupid and I become the laughingstock of every writer in this class? What will people think? And so they squash their own voices and write things they think will be acceptable to everyone around them, and then wonder why their stories don’t quite sing.

These days, there is so much writing advice out there that dictates how a writer is supposed to be, and how they ought to work, and what it should look like. It’s hard to dive into this uncertain thing and not know if it will work, especially when the world doesn’t make it easy for us to write and questions our lack of conventional success—even though conventional success in writing is an incredibly uncertain thing itself. And while at least some of this advice comes from people with more street cred than my mother, the fact that it’s so often prescriptive is problematic.

There’s no one way to write. And the only thing you need to be a writer is the desire to do it. One day, maybe even desi parents will think so.

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Sonal Champsee’s (she/her) short fiction and essays have been published in anthologies and magazines such as The New Quarterly, Ricepaper, and Today’s Parent. Her novel-in-progress, Everyone Can’t Be Wrong, was shortlisted for the 2022 UBC/HarperCollins Canada Best New Fiction prize. Sonal holds an MFA in Creative Writing from UBC and is a creative writing instructor for the Sarah Selecky Writing School. Sonal lives in Toronto with her partner, two small children and two medium-sized cats.

Writer Therapy

Like Dear Abby, but for writers

By Sonal Champsee

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There are very few gatekeepers left in most artistic disciplines. Gone are the days when you needed your fledgling band to tour dinky dives across the country before getting a record deal. Now you can record an entire album from home, upload in seconds to Spotify, and become an instant chart-topper. It's the same for the theatre, where a tiny play submitted to the Toronto Fringe Festival became the international TV sensation Kim’s Convenience.

But in literature, barring the unlikely event that you’ve penned the next 50 Shades of Vampires (or whatever) and garnered millions of fans online, you still need to play the game. No, you can’t just submit your manuscript to Harper Collins or Penguin Random House yourself. They only take solicited submissions. So before you can even break beyond the Big 5 gate, you need to get yourself a literary agent to solicit on your behalf. A quick look at the Binders Seeking Literary Agents Facebook group reveals post after post of hopeful writers waiting months just to get a reply from overworked agents, or receiving positive feedback but no offer of representation. In arguably the most competitive industry, where book deals trade hands for fortunes, getting that all important agent may seem impossible these days. So perhaps bending the rules is the only path to success.

I have had two literary agents in my career (currently still with the latter), both of whom I secured through unorthodox means. Taking the famed advice of Marilyn Monroe, “if I’d observed all the rules, I’d never have got anywhere,” I applied that ethos to getting an agent, refusing to go the traditional route.

Even figuring out how one is supposed to acquire a literary agent has historically been one of great mystery. When you’re a teenager with dreams of writing the great Canadian novel, or even just wanting to get your YA novella into the hands of a publisher, you will be disappointed to learn that when your school holds a career day assembly, this vocation is ruthlessly left out. Writing, much like the other arts of acting, dance, music, and visual art is often something a hopeful enters into with a lot of gumption, and a hell-or-high-water attitude. That means, hustling to figure it out.

Before everything was on the internet, one would have to go to Chapters Indigo and ask the staff to even figure out that there was a book published every year called the Canadian Writers Market which would list alphabetically all of the literary agents, publishers, newspapers, magazines, and journals that were accepting submissions. When it came to agents, they would list their contact information, what to send them, and what genre they might be on the hunt for. It was almost like a Lonely Planet guidebook for starry-eyed authors. And details included could quickly become out of date, obsolete, or were simply untrue.

For me, my luck in getting my first agent was simply because I unapologetically and indefatigably talked all about my career aspirations to anyone and everyone would listen. That’s how in the late aughts, I found myself at a house party as the guest of a friend, not knowing anyone, but willing to talk about my writing career as if it were existent rather than non-existent. The host of the party ended up telling me that she was actually interning at a literary agency, and asked me about my manuscript.

I will admit to being skeptical, and to having grandiose dreams of signing with a huge international agency rather than some small local boutique agency I’d never heard of. So when she asked me to send her the first 50 pages of my manuscript, I balked and only sent 15.

That, my dear friends, isn’t how these things are done. To get an agent, not only should you send exactly what they ask (sometimes it’s the first 50 pages, sometimes it’s the first three chapters, and in addition to that, you are quite often required to include a cover letter that lists your potential audience, other like-minded books on the market, and even a marketing plan).

Very quickly, the head of the agency asked to meet me for coffee. After chatting over coffee, and then him reading my entire manuscript and offering editorial notes, I accepted his offer of representation. My first agent – obtained from a house party.

After a few years with this agent, I noticed he just couldn’t sell my manuscripts and that perhaps it wasn’t the best fit, prompting me to look elsewhere. I had big dreams and big stories to tell, and I had an agent who wasn’t even reading my manuscripts, to say nothing of my emails. I thought getting an agent would mean I had “made it,” and I had big plans and big designs for my illustrious literary career. But of course, that old saying applied: “If you want to make god laugh, tell him your plans.”

I’d never done the query-wait-manuscript-wait-edit-wait-wait-wait route. So once again I decided to bend the rules a little. This time, I was going to leverage the social media following I had spent way too much time curating to get myself a new and better agent.

Before X (formerly Twitter) became the current hellscape that it is, it was a wonderful place to network, support other artists and working professionals, and have interactive conversations with others in the field. I had been following one literary agent for a while, and while we had DM’d a few times to say hello and offer our best wishes, nothing about representation had ever come up.

So I decided to break the first cardinal rule of getting a literary agent – I DM’d him on Twitter. Today, I can imagine that would rub a lot of literary agents the wrong way and might ruin anyone’s chances of representation before their manuscript is even read. But this was circa 2015, and I figured, “no guts, no glory.”

He wrote back and agreed, yes, it was unorthodox, but still encouraged me to send him my first 50 pages. Upon reading them, he said the manuscript was great and agreed to meet with me secretly. So at a Starbucks located far away from where my first agent might see us, we clandestinely grabbed a coffee, and he offered to represent me on the condition that I terminate my contract with my other agent pronto.

So I went home and emailed my first agent, letting him know I was out. “I’m sorry I couldn’t sell your books,” he wrote back (the first time he answered my email within five minutes. Usually, they just were ignored). And that was that. I had pulled it off almost like a scene in Ocean’s 11. Recon work, secrecy, and playing a part led to securing the bag. My second literary agent: obtained via Twitter DM. 

It was my second agent who brokered the deal for my first book, THE SYRIAN LADIES BENEVOLENT SOCIETY, published by House of Anansi Press, which was named one of the Best Books of 2023 by the CBC. He has also brokered the deal for my second book, LETTERS TO KAFKA, due out in 2025, also with Anansi. What a dream it is to not only have an agent who believes in your work (and actually reads it), but to also support it to the point of publication. I’d never had that before.

Not everyone is so lucky. In 2023, the New Leaf Agency scandal rocked social media when it was revealed the literary agency dropped many of the authors on their roster over email, many of whom had manuscripts on submission or were negotiating book deals. The drop came unceremoniously, without warning, and at two hours to midnight before a long weekend, leaving many authors out on a limb when they should have been enjoying their holiday.  What’s worse, the agency also dropped their own agent who was repp’ing these authors after she had already left her for holiday, forcing her to issue a statement that, no, it wasn’t agreed upon or amicable.

This sparked a conversation online about the hurdles writers must endure not only to get an agent, but also to keep one.

In an industry where the marketing department ultimately has final say over the editorial department, and every book tearing up #BookTok seems to just be a derivative copy of the next, authors with big dreams and big stories to tell often do not even get the benefit of consideration in these business decisions. Maybe breaking all the rules is the only power move left. If you want the agent and the career you deserve, with no waiting, it might be time to do as Elizabeth Taylor once said: “Now is the time for guts, and guile.”

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Christine Estima’s essays and short stories have appeared in the New York Times, the Walrus, VICE, the Globe and Mail, the Toronto Star, the Observer, New York Daily News, Chatelaine, Maisonneuve and many more. Her debut book THE SYRIAN LADIES BENEVOLENT SOCIETY (House of Anansi Press) was named one of the best books of 2023 by the CBC. Please visit ChristineEstima.com for more.

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On Self-Promotion

My debut story collection Anecdotes came out with Book*hug Press on Tuesday September 19th. That’s the official book birthday. But it’s been in stores for over a month, and my dear dear friend and Book*hug Press sibling Michael V. Smith (Queers Like Me) and I co-launched our books at Camas Books and Info Shop in Victoria on September 18th.

The last time I had a solo authored book out was in 2015, my poetry collection, The Purpose Pitch. A lot has changed with book publishing, marketing, and publicity in eight years. And even though I have had poetry books published before, I feel like a brand new author because nothing is as it was. In 2015, there was social media of course, but video and TikTok have taken things in a whole other direction.

Many writers cringe at the thought of self-promotion, myself included. But no matter if you are with a big press, small press, or self-publishing, self-promotion is just going to be part of the gig. This time around, I decided to try to embrace it instead of dreading it.

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