✨Sara Koffi on finding your sweet spot genre✨
In this week's Books with Hooks, our hosts discuss a children's picture book and a literary fiction query. Bianca interviews debut author, Sara Koffi, and we ask for your input in our quick poll!
Greetings all you marvelous writers…
How’s April treating everyone?! It’s almost over, DUH DUH DUM (as Bianca would say). Get those words down so you can hit your goals before the month takes its final bow and heads for the afterparty!
In this week’s episode, Carly, and CeCe share their wisdom and insights in Books with Hooks, while Bianca’s contribution is to make terrible jokes. She’s then joined by debut author, Sara Koffi, to discuss While We Were Burning 😍 We share links to Carly’s and Bianca’s upcoming seminars, and then ask for your feedback in a quick poll!
As usual, we are continuing our TSNOTYAW Membership Program so you can get even more The Shit No One Tells You About Writing goodness! Our podcast episodes and Friday newsletter issues will continue to go out free of charge (we *love* sharing all this amazing content with writers like you). But as TSNOTYAW has grown, so too have the many, many hours our team pours into it, and in order to be able to keep showing up for our lovely listeners, we decided to launch this exciting new venture.
For just $8USD a month or $80USD a year, you can receive our paid newsletter on Tuesdays which features weekly bonus author Q&As, exclusive content from industry experts, weekly access to Carly Watters and CeCe Lyra’s written notes on queries from the podcast’s Books With Hooks feature, monthly bonus podcast episodes, AND regular Ask Me Anythings / Q&As with Carly, CeCe, and Bianca Marais. If that doesn’t kickstart your writing journey, we don’t know what will!
Thanks for reading ❤️
The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team
This Week’s Podcast✨🎙️✨
In this week’s 📕Books with Hooks🪝, Bianca, Carly, and CeCe critique a children's picture book and a literary fiction query. They discuss:
Avoiding vagueness, no matter the genre
Using illustrator notes in a picture book pitch
The need for tension, even in a children's book
Framing your novel in your query so agents aren't confused when they get to the pages
The need for external plot points, even in a more internal work of literary fiction
The natural gravitation of readers to one POV in a dual POV work
The subjectivity of the industry
The purpose of interiority, and
Erring on the side of showing, rather than telling, to maintain tension
Bianca interviews Sara Koffi, author of the debut novel, While We Were Burning. They discuss:
Sara's letter to the reader
Her reasoning behind the setting she chose
How Sara chose her characters' POVs and her inspiration behind the characters
Writing an unreliable narrator
Weaving in overarching themes or messages
Advice for writing an unlikeable main character
Opening with characters experiencing and processing grief
Sara's journey to publication, and
Avoiding comparing yourself to others.
More information about Sara can be found here. She's also on Twitter at and Instagram.
You can purchase While We Were Burning on our Bookshop.org affiliate page here. Buying books through this link supports a local indie bookstore, as well as The Shit No One Tells You About Writing 📚❤️
Writing memoir? 😍🌟
Join Bianca on the 11th of May from 10am-5pm ET as she hosts a one-day virtual retreat specifically for memoirists!
Speakers include:
Catherine Gildiner – Author of Too Close to the Falls, After the Falls, Coming Ashore and Good Morning, Monster: Five Heroic Journeys to Recovery.
Chelsea Devantez - Emmy-nominated writer, comedian, and filmmaker. Author of the upcoming memoir, I Shouldn't Be Telling You This (But I'm Going to Anyway).
Courtney Maum - Author of five books, including the game changing publishing guide, Before and After the Book Deal, and the memoir, The Year of the Horses.
Bonny Reichert – Award-winning journalist, chef, and author of the upcoming memoir, How to Share an Egg: A True Story of Hunger, Love and Plenty.
Abby Maslin – Bestselling author of the memoir, Love You Hard, and a contributing essayist in Moms Don’t Have Time to Have Kids.
Ronit Plank - Award-winning writer, teacher, and podcaster who hosts Let's Talk Memoir. Author of the memoir, When She Comes Back.
Each 40-minute session will be followed by a 20-minute Q & A in which delegates get to ask the presenters all their burning questions.
The retreat will be taped, and the recording will be sent out the next day.
The registration fee is US $ 149.00
For more information and to register, click below!
Be part of Carly’s masterclass 😍📝
Have you heard?! Carly’s new course is available! If you didn’t bag the early bird pricing, Substack subscribers can claim it now with a discount for the month of April! Use code SUBSTACK15.
Releasing The Mother Load by Erica Djossa is out now! 🎉 Erica is one of Carly’s fabulous clients, so why not show Erica your support and purchase this excellent read through our Bookshop.org affiliate page!
A quick poll 🧐
That’s all for this week’s news! If you enjoyed it, why not share the love? 🥰
Until next week, happy writing! Tune in again then for more invaluable wisdom from our wonderful hosts! 😍
❤️ The Shit No One Tells You About Writing Team
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Carly Watters and CeCe Lyra are literary agents at P.S. Literary Agency, but their work in this newsletter is not affiliated with the agency, and the views expressed by Carly and CeCe in this newsletter are solely that of themselves and do not necessarily reflect the views, opinions, policies, or position of P.S. Literary Agency.
I just finished reading Sara Koffi’s novel within 24 hours. I couldn’t put it down. Such a great mystery, well-paced, and an interesting study of POV. I read it as both and reader and a writer, thinking about the authorial choices we make and how they land with an audience who trusts the writer to guide them along.
I’ve been grappling a lot lately with the stories I’m reading and watching on serial tv shows that have what I’ll call ‘holes.’ These aren’t missing things so much as deliberate choices made by the storytellers to include and exclude certain details. For example, in The Three Body Problem tv series, the first episode starts off with science and physics not working properly. But smart phones and the internet, not to mention electricity, keep on working until about episode 5, where they all blip temporarily. In another science fiction novella I read an idiom that was distinctly human but narrated as if a non-human character was using it. Writers must balance the needs of the audience (to connect, invest, and suspend disbelief all at once) with the needs of the story, characters, and setting.
Why I’m grappling with it is because as I am finishing the draft of my second space opera novel, I am looking for that balance in my story. And without the right mix, I believe, the fourth wall becomes too thin or broken. It was broken for me in these two examples above. I find myself constantly thinking that every little decision has to be justifiable within the story. It has to be logical. To keep the holes from becoming too glaring and distracting. Interested in other peoples’ take on this.
Ah, the "novel query". We're endlessly told to work on this, but does it really make any difference? What self-respecting agent says, "the sample was gorgeous but the query needs tweaking, so hard pass." Come on!