The Renegade Writer Blog

Calling all food writers … Michael Ruhlman recently conducted an interesting interview with Judith Jones, who edited Julia Child’s Mastering the Art of French Cooking, on the present state of food writing in the U.S. Fascinating stuff. I got to hear Jones speak at a food writing conference at BU last winter. If you’re in […]

Are you the type of person who always has a long list of to-dos? Do you manage to check off items fairly easily, but never feel like you accomplish much despite being “busy”? Or maybe you’re a writer who has a lot of projects on the burners, but you rarely complete them to your satisfaction?
If […]

(Reprinted from Writer’s Digest)
by Linda Formichelli
The business article came out great, but I was stuck for an ending. Finally, I hit upon the conclusion: “Follow these tips and boost your bottom line.” Perfect! Snappy, fun, alliterative. Just one problem — I had used that same phrase to end my last five business articles.
My sense of […]

LinkedIn is a professional networking site that works on the “six degrees of separation” principle: Find someone you want to meet, and chances are you know someone who knows that person. You invite friends and colleagues to “link” to you, and then all their contacts are your contacts, too. LinkedIn is free unless you want […]

I’ve been a subscriber to Marcia Layton Turner’s free monthly e-zine, Become a Six-Figure Writer, since the spring, and I’ve gotten a lot of good tips and advice from it. I rarely recommend e-zines, but this one is really quite useful — and with only one issue a month, you’ll actually look forward to reading […]

Monica Bhide is the author of two Indian cookbooks, and has also written about food for The New York Times, The Washington Post, Chicago Tribune, Christian Science Monitor, Bon Appetit, Town and Country Travel, Food & Wine, Cooking Light, and more. We’re thrilled that Monica will be teaching Introduction to Food Writing through the […]

A writer’s forum I frequent has been discussing the acronyms often used when talking about writing. It can be hard to understand a post or article that’s riddled with terms like WIP, RPP, and WFH, so here’s a handy list I came up with. You can see acronyms that are more related to fiction writing […]

Renegade readers, I don’t know the answer to this question. Can you help? Please post your advice in the Comments section below. Thanks so much! [lf]
Melissa writes: How do you wrangle photos for your articles? I just sent off a holiday roundup that entailed getting photos (about 3-5 per) from about 15 sources. Captions, credits, […]

If you want to e-mail a magazine editor but don’t have her address, don’t fret — I’ve compiled the e-mail formats of some of the bigger publishing companies. Of course, there are always variations, such as when an editor has a hyphenated last name…but this list will still help in many cases. You can find […]

In January I wrote about my experiment using what I called “scheduled procrastination” to boost my efficiency. I’m a big proponent of “planting seeds” for future work by doing little things now, so I was excited to find the website for the book The Seven Minute Difference by Allyson Lewis. Lewis says that doing […]