Author and GrubStreet instructor Katrin Schumann shares some tips and practical insight into how to present your work in the most compelling way possible for agents. You can learn more about this subject in Katrin's upcoming class "Time to Find an Agent: Perfecting Your Pitch" starting March 11th.

Ready to write your novel? Apply to the Novel Generator with instructor Henriette Lazaridis. 

Writing a first draft of a novel is a very different process from revising a finished draft

By Katrin Schumann

Editors often see projects at radially different stages of development. Truthfully, we sometimes see writing that is really, well, bad.

But does this mean it’s hopeless? When do you know if something is too "bad" to be worth fixing?

Of course, "bad" is a highly subjective term. Writing might seem "bad" to one reader, while another reader loves it

By Katrin Schumann

I'm deep in the throes of writing a new book. My first novel The Forgotten Hours came out in 2019, and my second one, This Terrible Beauty (which I actually wrote first) was published a year later. I also have a novel-in-a-drawer... and a bunch of nonfiction books and collaborations.

By Katrin Schuman

All writers are a crazy mixture of egotistical, manic, single-minded, optimistic on the one hand and sensitive, catastrophizing, scattered and pessimistic on the other - at least all the ones I know. How do we live and produce work in a world filled with such extremes? Especially now when our political and physical reality is so chaotic?