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…
Choose a Strategy or Make It Up by David Massey
I want to say a few words about point of view and narrative strategy in fiction, starting with Henry James, from whom I learned so much when I first began trying to teach myself a little about the art of…
Suspension of Disbelief by David Massey
Samuel Taylor Coleridge wrote of “the willing suspension of disbelief” as being necessary to the enjoyment of a dramatic or literary work. The auditor or reader, he said, has to suspend disbelief if he is to enter the world of…
Sound and Sense by David Massey
I am an autodidact, which means I probably know next to nothing about my chosen craft. I do, however, have a few things to share. I came late to an earnest reckoning with the art of fiction but have made…
Silencing Your Internal Editor by Wendi Dass
The internal editor is an issue for every writer. Either it doesn’t speak enough or it never shuts up. For most, it’s the latter, and this has been the case for me. I call my internal editor Helga, the name…