Strategic Submissions: Best Practices for Your Pursuit of Writing Opportunities
The best method of getting the literary community to regard you as a serious writer and not a dilettante—even though you have yet to publish the Great American Novel or…
The Writers Group as Teacher: Lessons in Showing Up
A good writers group isn’t defined by rules. It isn’t defined by size. A writers group is working when it teaches you how to read and how to revise, and…
What’s So Bad About Being a Monster?
What I liked about monsters was never that they taught me to love my body. If anything, that would have reproduced the same representational problem in a slightly more gothic…
The Five Things Essay
An all-purpose writing prompt to help you find your voice, lose your voice, beat writer's block, or figure out what the hell you want to write about in the first…
The Self-Taught Writer: Crafting a Bespoke Education
On the book tour for my debut novel, the question I was asked at every event was why I did not give up—even as it took me seven years to…
I want to hide and to be seen
I suppose I see where we are right now like this: the media and political parties refuse to call racists, racist or bigots, bigots. They editorialise as if racists have…
Printing Money: The Economics of Small Press
We’re obviously in a really strange time for the arts in general: you’ve got a crap economy, everything costs more money, arts funding has dried up, and nobody has a…
Susanna Clarke: ‘I had been ill for 11 years. I felt like I was about to fall off the world’
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
A Computer-Free Day: How One Small Mistake Changed My Perspective on Productivity
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,…
Brave New Metaphors: Lessons From Science Fiction
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…