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…
Dare to Defamiliarize: In Praise of Fluidity
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…
Tumblr Dialogue how-to thread
“This is your daily, friendly reminder to use commas instead of periods during the dialogue of your story,” she said with a smile.
Our Opinions Are Correct: We’re Still Traumatized By This Writing Debate
Not long ago, everybody was arguing about whether characters need to be "relatable". We get to the bottom of a debate that still makes us intensely grouchy. Plus we talk…
5 Over 50: 2025
For a decade we’ve devoted space in each November/December issue to celebrate debut authors over the age of fifty with first books published during the current calendar year. The writers…
Long Live the Longer Short Story: Depth Without a Novel’s Commitment
Our attention spans are being whittled to nonexistence by an increasingly impatient feedback loop, with social media, the internet, and AI competing to devour our attentional capacity. Yet when leafing…
Homecoming: the small web and release from the unitary public self
In 1776, a Quaker living in Philadelphia recovered from a severe illness with a peculiar conviction: they had died and been reborn as the Public Universal Friend. The Public Universal…
Reimagining Place: Setting as Convergence
Something useful that writers can do when setting fiction in a real place is to leave. Choosing projects that allow us to write about a place after we’ve moved away…
The Ungrateful Stranger: Whose Story Deserves Welcome?
On a spring evening in 2016, the day after Donald Trump won a series of primaries cementing his candidacy, I stepped into a hushed auditorium in midtown Manhattan and found…
Writers With Day Jobs: Earning a Living Outside of Literature
In 2018, as a younger writer in a different phase of life, I was thrilled to interview prolific author William Vollmann. A digital magazine employed me at the time, but…