Writing Tips
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How to Write About Your Disability
It’s like having the hiccups, you write instead. Everyone has had hiccups, after all. Accuracy is secondary to relatability, because you are tired, now, and twitchy, and the giant’s hands are pressing harder as you write.
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Greatest Hits of the Heart
Patience. Curiosity. Repetition. Looking again and again. Not imposing a story line. Letting composition emerge through pattern, rhythm, shape, sound, movement. Occasionally … you hit upon a moment of grace. You can’t plan for it. You just have to practice…
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How to Write (for Actual Legal Tender)
Over at The Awl, Heather Havrilesky, a writer without an MFA, has some humorous and candid freelancing tips for her MFA students and us readers. Havrilesky knows we’ll appreciate this advice, since she’s “one of the only writers [her] students know…
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Insert Short Story Here
[Beginning in media res in mother’s house.] [Sufficiently dramatic exposition with an obvious, planted echo to the story’s climax.] Story in need of kindling? Take a gander at this short story template from McSweeney’s. Use it as a guide— —Ok.…
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10 Tips On Writing From Joyce Carol Oates
Write your heart out. The first sentence can be written only after the last sentence has been written. FIRST DRAFTS ARE HELL. FINAL DRAFTS, PARADISE. You are writing for your contemporaries — not for Posterity. If you are lucky, your…
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Writing Rules From Colson Whitehead
Want a free writing lesson? Colson Whitehead has some helpful tips over at The New York Times’ Sunday Book Review. If you missed it, be sure to read Nancy Smith’s Rumpus interview with Whitehead right here.
