I didn’t tell him the deer bones were a substitute for human bones, or that I wanted to know if a man could be cooked in a smokeless, homemade oven in the backyard. Here, in certain circles, you don’t tell people you make up stories for a living. There’s no practicality, nothing to grasp with […]
...moreWriting fiction, to me, feels a bit like the moment in those Roadrunner cartoons where he runs off the cliff and the bridge builds itself underneath his feet. You see the planks of wood flying up, supporting him, but if he stops—that’s it, he plummets. If he keeps going, though, he’ll reach the other side. […]
...moreAt the New York Times, novelist Roxana Robinson considers the criticism fiction writers receive when they write stories far from their own experience. Some people ask, “Do novelists have the right to write stories that aren’t their own?” Can someone who’s never been in combat, for example, write about war? Robinson writes: Some of the […]
...moreDavid L. Ulin writes about his first book(s) in an essay featured by The Paris Review. He recounts boyhood ambitions, drafts that never came to be any more than that, and the labors that resulted in a book that he could call his own. The book scared the shit out of me; can I say […]
...moreAlright fiction writers, put down your pens for a moment and let’s talk math. If you recoil when hearing the “M-word” or brace your index fingers into a cross at the sight of algebra or calculus books—you’re not alone. But according to Alex Nazaryan’s article, “Why Writers Should Learn Math,” writers could improve their prose by […]
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