Writing and Editing

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Wayne uses the example of his own published novel, Will's Dead Wife, to illustrate some aspects of literary fiction.

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This episode consists of an interview I did of Mike Ulmer, who’s a writer based in Hamilton, Ontario. He often writes for a business readership, but I was curious about asking him about the psychology of writing, about how and why someone thinks they might not be able to write any kind of book, or any kind of anything, at all. Mike’s latest book is Show and Tell Writing, and he was a lot of fun to talk to.

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Wayne talks about his messy relationship with Twitter, including about a half dozen break-ups, and one just last week.

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This episode consists of an interview I did of Mike Oppenheim, whose day job is compiling back-of-the-book indexes. I was interested in some of the nitty-gritty of practical indexing, and Mike came through with the details. He does a lot more than indexing though: he writes, podcasts, and makes music. He has a podcast about death with the great title of Coffin Talk, which I am looking forward to bingeing on a bit.

He’s published three novels and has a slew of other accomplishments. And yet with all of that he was super easy to talk to, explained things well, and had a great sense of humour.

If you’re looking for more info about him, check out his website at mikeyopp.com.

Have a listen to our conversation and find out a bit about those pages at the end of a book that can be so helpful to you …

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Wayne discusses the importance of an editor not editing a writer's ideas, but rather the writer's expression of those ideas. He ends with a half-remembered joke that ironically ended up getting him a fun editing gig with a great client.

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This episode of Editing Writing is an interview I did with my good friend Oscar Martens, who has published two collections of short literary collection with small presses. One is called The Girl with the Full Figure Is Your Daughter, and the most recent one is No Call Too Small. Both were very well reviewed—but there’s a but.

It’s that even though being published by a small press involves the same waiting for acceptance and publishing in literary journals that publishing with one of the big famous publishers does, often there is not the publicity machine to help sell copies. It can be discouraging for any author who has written high-quality work, but then doesn’t see a “return,” so to speak, on it.

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This episode of Editing Writing is an interview I did with Emily Enger. She runs a marketing service for writers of all kinds—though perhaps mostly those who have self-published or have published with a small press—called Good Enough Book Marketing. She’s a book marketing coach, and as she puts it, she is “helping authors cut through the marketing noise to stay true to their first calling of writing great books.”

If you want to find out more about her, or sign up for her service, check out her website.

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The comedian who’s my guest today is actually someone I’ve known personally for the past 5 or 6 years. Matt Balaker. He and I co-wrote a biography of the great standup comedian named Greg Giraldo, which was published in 2019. Matt is a really great guy, generous, easy to talk to, and very funny. It was a real hoot working with him. I’ve never actually seen Matt perform standup—he lives in the US and I live in Canada—and when I visited him while we were writing the book, we were concentrating on the book. So I wanted to ask him about the writing process in standup comedy, and also about his relatively new venture as a podcaster himself. 

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Wayne talks about two aspects of detail in writing: le mot juste and the telling detail. All inspired by another podcaster oversharing a little ...

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This episode of Editing Writing consists of an interview I did with Ashley Kalagian Blunt. Ashley is a writer with three books to her credit and is currently working on her fourth.

She also teaches writing as well as creativity generally, and co-hosts with her husband the podcast James and Ashley Stay at Home. She was really fun to talk to, and she has a lot of practical advice for writers.