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…
Seek the Unknown in the Familiar: Lessons From Historical Fiction
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…
Cultivate Suspense: Lessons From Thrillers
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…
Embrace the “And Then”: Lessons From Fairy Tales
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…
Conjure the Strange: Lessons From Horror
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…
Truing the Narrative: Revising for Symmetry to Make Your Manuscript Sing
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…