writing advice
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Writing with Your Fears
It is easy to forget that fear isn’t a thing—it’s just a feeling to which we have attached a word. It’s a powerful feeling, however, It is so powerful that if I sit in my living room and imagine a killer is…
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The Sunday Rumpus Essay: How To Make Sure Your Writing Is Forgotten
Do you really want to have to listen from the grave as students discuss your themes and scholars analyze your syntax and trace your influence?
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How to Write Something
Keep a close eye on your Twitter account. Important things may be said there that you will be expected to weigh in on, and if you don’t, everyone will wonder if you fell asleep in the bathroom stall of the…
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Feel Less Dumb
Debut novelist Adrienne Celt (The Daughters, 2015) has some advice for you. Not writing advice, of course. No, Celt would like to help you with your taxes: I think it’s nice when people stand up and say “I HAVE BEEN THERE.…
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The Submitting Editor
At The Review Review, Allison Linville offers some tips on submitting based on her time working as a managing editor for a major literary magazine.
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The Writing is the Ball
In an excerpt from Why We Write About Ourselves, National Book Award-winner James McBride writes about that question, among other things—the ethics of memoir writing, diversity in publishing, the necessity of struggle, writing in the age of Twitter—and shares some…
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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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The Rumpus Interview with Dean Koontz
Dean Koontz talks about his newest novel, Ashley Bell, overcoming self-doubt, and “what this incredibly beautiful language of ours allows you to do.”
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Anna March’s Reading Mixtape #12: The Art and Craft of Writing
The writing advice I give is this: 1) Sit down 2) Write These wise and talented writers have more to say.
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We Think Writing Is Sexy
So I’m here to tell you that you can make a living as a writer, but you (might) have to let go of some notions of what “making a living as a writer” means. Over at Huffington Post Books, a…
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Submitting, from A to Z
I am not trying to brag, humble or otherwise, but merely establishing that perhaps the only thing I’m actually qualified to talk about in this world is literary magazine publication. Does the world need another submitting guide? Personally, I’ve found…
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The Skeleton of a Story
Over at Brevity’s nonfiction blog, author Janice Gary talks about how to structure a nonfiction story: Fiction writers start with nothing and create a world. Memoirists start with an entire universe that already exists. We are more like sculptors than…