Why Write
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Naked People with Snakes
The Believer this month has a really good interview with designer / painter / comic arts legend Gary Panter — best known as the guy who did the sets for Pee-wee’s Playhouse, somewhat less well-known for his Jimbo comics, and…
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Unpublished foreword to William Wantling’s 7 on Style [circa 1974]
His writing didn’t contain the trickery and the sheen that the larger American poetry audience demands—and things never became easy for him, that’s why he continued to write very well.
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The Storymatic
I’ve always been a sucker for writing prompts, even though they have a way of sometimes being cheesy, forced, and ultimately silly. But recently I came across this interesting product, a paper-based prompt generator that would seem to strike the…
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Louis Menand on Creative-Writing Programs
Louis Menand has really been on a roll this year. First the must-read article about how the Village Voice changed journalism, then the article on Donald Barthelme, and now this week, an essay about The Program Era by Mark McGurl,…
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Raymond Chandler on Pulp, on Writing, and on Readers
My wife’s been steadily devouring Raymond Chandler, pacing herself so she doesn’t read it all at once (there is, after all, a limited supply). The other night she started in on the story collection Trouble is My Business and read…
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The Call For Collaboration
It would be nice to think there was another model, one that could inspire a pair of young, edgy writers to walk along lonely railroad tracks, kicking rocks and running dialog back and forth for the story they were writing.
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The Unhappy Writer, Links by Mark Pritchard
A recent entry on the publishing blog Galleycat told of the writer Molly Jong-Fast and how she was quitting writing to become an agent. Jong-Fast’s somewhat privileged complaints — she is the daughter of Erica Jong and the novelist Jonathan…
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Mortals—Norman Rush’s Novel For Grown-ups
If I have learned anything from years of recommending this book, it’s this: enthusiasm, by itself, accomplishes nothing.
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A Call for Writing Advice
Q: How Do You Crank Up to Write? A: “Discipline.” John Updike did it all the time, Richard Ford did it early in the morning, Nathaniel Hawthorne did it nonstop, Philip Roth and Thomas Wolfe while standing, and Jane Kramer…
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Do We All Have a Story?
To a certain extent, asking if we all get a passion is like asking if we all have a story to tell.
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Around the World in 100 Years
The best travel writing usually begins with an absurd proposition, so how could I not pick up an attic-sale book subtitled How to See Europe on Fifty Cents a Day?