Outside the Lit Community, Looking In
Most writers, especially those who are just starting out, feel lost and lonely in a literary world that seems to have pre-constructed cliques that are so hard to infiltrate. Anne…
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writing advice
86 posts
You Have to Get Up
Corporate escapee-turned-author Xu Xi shared a few choice fiction writing tips with the Jakarta Post. She suggests utilizing the formulas in spreadsheets to calculate timelines and characters’ ages, and recharging your…
No More Writing Advice Listicles
The Internet is flooded with copied and re-copied lists of writing advice from “legendary” writers from all genres and time periods, shuffled over and over in “Top Ten Quotes About Writing”…
Admit It! You’re A Writer
For The Millions, Marcia DeSanctis shares how she learned to become a “second-career writer” after resisting her literary ambitions while working as a television news producer: A stifled artist was scratching…
Pressing Send
A writer friend recently asked me a brief but not-so-simple question: How do you decide where to send your work? Over at Lit Hub, Erika Dreifus answers this simple yet…
Writing Badly
Bad writing is almost always a love poem addressed by the self to the self. The person who will admire it first and last and most is the writer herself.…
Advice for Writers Anxious of Rejection
I know of no level of success where writers stop getting rejected (and stop at least occasionally feeling bummed about it). People generally make more noise about publications than rejections,…
The Art of Losing Isn’t Hard to Master
Just as there is subjective rejection, there’s subjective acceptance—the editor who sparks to your characters, your plot, your manuscript because of their personal experiences—and you want someone who understands your…
Disquiet at the Finish Line
The idea of art-making as a refuge from reality has become a cliché. But a cliché often becomes a cliché through the repeated force of being true. Jonathan Lee, author…
Author in the First Person
There’s humor and advice on the long haul of novel-writing in an interview with Porochista Khakpour over at Prairie Schooner. Khakpour describes “problem-solving a chunk at a time,” and pushing through a…