✨"Get Over It," Take Your Work to the Toilet, & Other Writing Advice to Live By from Ashley Reams, Hannah Sharpe, & Tamara Yajiay✨

Also inside: Carly and CeCe's written query critiques; and your chance to ask a bestselling author your burning craft questions!

Happy Tuesday, writing friends!

Do you have specific questions about writing that you’d like answered by a pro? Silly question, because of course you do! After getting Riley Sager’s thoughtful responses for you last month, we’re excited to be doing it again, this time with Jo Piazza, bestselling author of The Sicilian Inheritance. The clock is counting down, so if you’ve got a burning craft question, send it asap to: askanauthor.theshitaboutwriting@gmail.com. We’ll choose the best ones for Jo to answer in an upcoming issue and, as a bonus, if your question is selected and you’re not already a paid member, you’ll get a free copy of our exclusive Tuesday newsletter!

Last week was 📕Books with Hooks🪝week on the podcast, so you can find Carly and CeCe’s written query critiques capturing the writing craft insights they shared on the episode below.

Also in this issue, we’ve got an essay from Hannah Sharpe (TSNOTYAW fan and debut author of Between Lies and Revenge) that will be ridiculously relatable for most of us. She talks about all the uncertainty it’s so easy to feel as an emerging writer, as an agented one, as one whose book has sold, and even as someone who’s been published (we’ve said it before but it bears repeating: even published authors have doubts. And not just debut authors, but authors with track records of publishing success—keep your eyes peeled for a future issue where one who might surprise you backs up this particular point! 😉). Hannah’s advice? Be open to feedback. Feedback is how we improve, and it’s in improving that we conquer doubt. Is your manuscript actually your best work? Or are you simply tired of looking at it and willing to settle for good enough? Mustering this kind of honesty is—honestly—one of the hardest skills for a writer to learn, and also the most essential.

Hannah urges us to resist settling, and to see difficult feedback as an opportunity to grow, improve and try new things (which, if you can find a way to be honest with yourself, you already know is the right thing to do, even if you don’t want to admit it).

Ashley Ream (The Peculiar Gift of July) also knows a thing or two about being open to feedback, even (or possibly especially) when you think you’ve struck writing gold. In the first of our two Q&As today, she shares the writing advice she got in journalism school after turning in an assignment and finding out her best work was not, in fact, it. The advice her instructor offered to help her understand what was and wasn’t working was a lightbulb moment Ashley’s carried with her into her post-journalism career as a novelist—and if you’ve ever wondered what it takes to earn the praise of a professional audiobook narrator, you’re about to find out!

Our second Q&A is from Tamara Yajia, whose debut memoir, Cry For Me, Argentina: My Life as a Failed Child Star also hits shelves today. And if you’re expecting some irreverence after reading that title, you will not be disappointed. Tamara’s no B.S. responses to our questions (the words “GET OVER IT” appear several times) are frank and to the point, and (in one of those coincidences we’re so very fond of here at The 💩) also pick up on the accidental theme of today’s newsletter, which is the absolute necessity of being open to feedback. Or, as Tamara puts it “I wish I wouldn’t have been so overprotective of initial drafts. Trust your editors. They know what they’re doing.”

Words to live by, friends!

That’s all for now. Thanks for reading! ❤️

❤️ The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team