SASFest Writer’s Craft—TIMOTHY SCHAFFERT

KISS YOUR DARLINGS: AN EDITOR ADVISES YOU TO ABANDON ALL ADVICE

Maybe you’ve followed the classic maxim and killed so many of your darlings, you can’t find a pulse in your latest draft. In this interactive session, bring your questions, your assumptions, your anxieties, and we’ll explore what happens when we shut out the exterior voices and listen for our own. But what voices, exactly, are acquiring editors listening for, and how should that influence our writing? We’ll discuss the editor’s role in publishing, past and present, art vs. commerce, and storytelling vs. style. Timothy Schaffert is Director of Creative Writing and founder/co-editor of Zero Street, the LGBTQ+ fiction series at the University of Nebraska Press. He is the Author of seven novels with the latest being the national bestseller The Titanic Survivors Book Club and The Perfume Thief, both from Doubleday/Penguin Random House.