In almost every movie or show featuring writers, you’ll see it—that one scene with the awkward pause as their fingers hover over the keyboard. A cursor ominously blinks onscreen, its on-and-off motion magnifying the intense whiteness of the blank page….
Dialogue for All by Katherine Koller
I began writing for radio drama, so for me, dialogue is everything. Music, sound effects, and silence also contribute to audio plays, but the main ingredient is dialogue. When I read fiction, nonfiction, or poetry, I’m attracted by the dialogue…
Agent Alchemy Feedback Program with Literary Agent Leah Pierre is Back!
Black Fox Literary Magazine’s literary agent feedback program, Agent Alchemy, is back! Every novelist faces hurdles when shaping their manuscripts or on their road to representation. Who better to offer you craft-based insight on your pages than a literary agent? Black Fox…
Train Your Pet Words by Noelle Sterne
I was elated when I received an acceptance for my short story “Casey.” But seeing the critique that followed, I was horrified to learn this story housed an entire menagerie of unwanted editorial pets—words, phrases, and grammatical constructions. Pets can…
Five Mysteries of Publishing by Lev Raphael
Despite two and a half years in a top-ranked MFA program, nobody told me anything about what the writing life was like—especially outside the shelter of academia. In our writing workshops we analyzed the short stories everyone was writing in…
Celebrating the Clipboard by Noelle Sterne
Clipboards? Those remnants of the writer’s Stone Tablet Age? In this explosive Age of iPads, tablets, laptops, endlessly propagating apps, smart watches that make your coffee, and GPS trackers that pin down your editor in the Hamptons and remind her…
3 Questions for Literary Agent Leah Pierre
A Texas native, Leah Pierre briefly moved to the East Coast to attend Rosemont College to pursue her dream of working, in publishing. Not long after graduating with her B.A. in English and History, Leah found an agency home at Ladderbird Literary…
“Method Writing”: Where Acting and Creative Writing Overlap by Charissa Roberson
I attended a theater camp every winter when I was in high school. Usually, I played a background character who delivered a line or two during the production. But my senior year, I got a small, yet substantial role that…
Writing Advice from the Murder Hornet by PS Nolf
I look at the newspaper photo of the latest invader of the Pacific Northwest, where I live. The yellow ruler with its black calibration documents the two-inch “Murder Hornet.” A thing of nightmares, the Asian Giant Hornet sports huge, black, demon…
Second Person: Write down, not up by Adam Dove
Second person is like the lonely middle child of writing perspectives. Everybody knows first person, because it’s always talking about itself. It just feels kind of natural, like it’s always been there. And third person – everybody wants to be…
Leaning on the Senses by David Massey
The senses are all we have. Without them we would be only a blob of protoplasm without even a sense of touch, and therefore with no ability to survive. Fiction is much the same. The fiction writer who best deploys…
Building a Writing Life out of Hard Work, Passion, and a Dash of Involvement by Heather Humphrey
Most of the writers I know keep some sort of motivational support handy: a clever phrase written on a post-it note, a poster of a beloved writer, a highly dog-eared copy of “Bird by Bird,” the photograph of a stern…