One hundred years after Virginia Woolf explored the limitations of language in On Being Ill, the Piranesi author reflects on the power of storytelling to shape our experience of sickness
I’ve often heard the advice that if you get blocked creatively, you should do something other than writing. Go for a walk, listen to music, visit a museum. Yes, yes,…
No matter how you begin, pay attention as you write to the consequences of whatever newness you’ve introduced to the world of your story: How will life on Earth, or…
More than one hundred fifty years ago, Henry James wrote an essay about the art of fiction that remains today an important guidepost for all fiction—including the historical novel. And…
What makes for a great thriller? In a word, suspense. Thriller writers know that readers expect high stakes, compelling characters, and a twisting plot to keep the pages turning. Top…
Years ago one of my students captured the idea of this slippery beauty. We were talking in class about “The Twelve Dancing Princesses.” In the tale the princesses take boats…
Okay, you might be saying, “That’s all well and good, but how do you avoid the pitfall of exploitation, being gruesome simply for its own sake?” The genre is often…
I taught a seven-week course on revision in a church basement. I had about a half dozen students, all of whom brought either a chapter from a longer work-in-progress, a…
Dissolving boundaries expands my craft arsenal. Openness to new mediums and genres expands my ideas and problem-solving. What if—for the sake of a good stretch and a cracked back, because…
by Randon Billings Noble | From the window to the wall.