Here’s what I learned from Joanna Rakoff:

• How many characters do you really need? Make a list. Every character needs to be fully-fleshed, each with their own motivations. In order to make them real, you need to find them interesting, complicated. You need to be curious. Then, you need to write from a place of love and cold-bloodedness at the same time. 

• “If you really want to write something great, if you’re really aiming at greatness, at things truly working, not at just like getting something out there, you have to be okay with letting some time pass. … You ultimately know what you want to do. You know what your book is, even if you don’t think you do, you do, and you just have to do be patient with yourself.”

• Book proposals are difficult to write (it took her two years to write her most recent book proposal). It’s not something to write on your own; it’s something you tackle with an agent. 

• You should not consider hiring a publicist until you sell your book to a publisher. 

• Favorite writing conferences:

• Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference

• Sewanee

• AWP Conference

• Unbound Festival 

• Newburyport Literary Festival 

• Nantucket Literary Festival

• Book recommendations:

• Fairyland by Alysia Abbott

• Poser by Claire Dederer

• Wild by Cheryl Strayed

• When Skateboards Will Be Free by Saiid Sayrafiezadeh

• The Mothercode by Ruthy Ackerman

• Permission by Elissa Altman

• All You Can Ever Know by Nicole Chung

• All of Donna Tartt’s novels

• The Girls from Corona del Mar by Rufi Thorpe

• Faith by Jennifer Haigh

• Write Through It by Kate McKean