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Crafting A Better Writer

by Whitney Potsus

In the coming year, we here at T-zero are going to be working hard at expanding our Non-Fiction/Craft of Writing section. We're pulling together a talented group of writers who are passionate about their craft to help organize, manage, and edit this section.

We have several broad goals in mind:

• Help further solidify the already strong sense of community among the writers in WVU and T-zero's readership.
• Give writers the opportunity to share what they've learned about the various genres of writing with others.
• Give tips, guidance, support, and advice to aspiring and experienced writers as they seek to break into professional writing or into new areas of writing.

The topics we can cover run the gamut from business writing to science and nature writing to technology and business writing to finding ideas to writing effective query letters to doing market research. We also can talk about prewriting tricks, ways to recharge your creativity, improving your interview skills, learning from rejection and criticism, and getting the most out of the once-dreaded outline. And all this doesn't even begin to scratch the surface of the possibilities available to us. Share personal experiences, lessons, and revelations that affected you as a writer. Tell us what you learned about writers and their craft the year you entered a dozen competitions. Reminisce what you learned about receiving constructive criticism during the novel writing workshop you took at a local college or during your stint as a cub reporter for a metropolitan newspaper.

What we are not looking for is self-congratulatory essays that simply list the prizes you've won, rants about the editor who rejected your last query or edited your last article beyond recognition, or run-downs of the agendas of the last three writing workshops you've attended -- but by all means, use those as pre-writing exercises for the articles that we hope you'll eventually send to us. What we do want is to know what you learned from the experience that others can benefit from.

The pieces you propose can be reflective essays; top ten lists of do's and don'ts; Q&A's that provide solutions to common writing difficulties; how-to's; categorized lists of tips, tricks, and little-known resources; or expository articles on the essentials of writing for particular genres.

So please consider this an open call for article proposals. To facilitate quicker reviews and prompter responses, please take note of the following:

• Read T-zero's Submission Guidelines.
• Send us a query letter, not a completed article. (If you've never written a query letter, this is your chance to practice what you've learned.) The query should explain your topic and propose the approach you'll take with its presentation.
• Use the subject line of your e-mail message to tag the kind of article you're proposing. This will help us to direct the query to the appropriate editor.
• Make sure your query letter is in the body of your e-mail message, not in a file attachment.
• Don't pitch articles that have been published elsewhere. We only accept original content.

When in doubt about an article idea, query. It's impossible to list all the topics that we'd consider publishing, and we'd hate to think that we missed out on something good because our list was taken too literally, taken as all-inclusive and all-else-excluded. Simply stated, it never hurts to ask.

We look forward to hearing from you, reading your ideas, and working with you as we strive to make this T-zero's best year ever.