Michelle Witte's Blog

Image above created by Stefano Vitale for Broadway musical production of Like Water for Chocolate. This is the fifth in a five-part series on Magical Realism. If you haven’t read the previous posts, I recommend starting with Part 1: What Is Magical Realism? “When you throw everything up in the air anything becomes possible.” –Salman Rushdie, The Satanic […]

This is the third in a five-part series on Magical Realism. If you haven’t read the first two, I recommend starting with Part 1: What Is Magical Realism?   “I began to wonder whether anything truly existed, whether reality wasn’t an unformed and gelatinous substance only half-captured by the senses. There was no proof that […]

Last week on Twitter, some agents got to talking about pitch sessions at writing conferences. It was a good discussion with responses that pretty much echoed the others: While we love attending conferences and meeting writers, pitch sessions themselves are ineffective and painful for everyone involved. Why, you ask, are pitches so terrible? Doesn’t it get writers in […]

This is Part 2 in a 4-part series on Magical Realism. But first, if you haven’t read Part 1: What Is Magical Realism? yet, I’d recommend starting there. “Eddie had come to understand that what a man saw and what actually existed in the natural world often were contradictory. The human eye was not capable of […]

“It was as if God had decided to put to the test every capacity for surprise . . . to such an extreme that no-one knew for certain where the limits of reality lay. It was an intricate stew of truths and mirages that convulsed the ghost of José Arcadio Buendía with impatience and made […]

Writers seem to really like the visual post I did recently on the types of picture books and illustrations I’d like to see in my inbox, so I figure, why not do some more for other genres/age groups I rep. This one will be slightly different since I’m not looking for specific types of illustrations, […]

Once again #MSWL day is upon us. For the uninitiated, #MSWL is a Twitter hashtag that agents and editors use to indicate the kinds of manuscripts they’d like to see in their query inbox. These include a variety of genres, age groups, subjects, ideas, characters, issues, and any number of things that tickle an agent’s interest. It’s […]

In the past year I’ve expanded my interests from middle grade and young adult to encompass books for the littler crowd. I’ve found some incredible author-illustrators whose work is so amazing I can’t even describe, and I want more.* Especially since editors who’ve seen the work I rep are begging for more. I love getting picture book […]