writing process
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Don’t Look Away
Leah Mirakhor interviews Homegoing author Yaa Gyasi for the Los Angeles Review of Books. On her novel and Ness, a primary character, Gyasi says: This novel was an attempt for me to say: We cannot look away when something like…
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Imagining Orsinia
I begin to find my way about, to feel myself at home, here in Orsenya, matrya miya, my motherland. I can live here, and find out who else lives here and what they do, and tell stories about it. And so…
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Writerly Conversation
In a Salon interview, authors Teddy Wayne and Alexandra Kleeman talk to each other about their recent books, character- and world-building, and alienation and anxiety in their novels. “Every story I write begins with a different distribution of knowns and…
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The Sunday Rumpus Interview: Christine Sneed
Floyd Skloot interviews Christine Sneed about her latest story collection, The Virginity of Famous Men.
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In Conversation with Jesse Ball
There are two things in writing: one is to say something with the form of what you’re saying, and the other is to say something with the content of what you are saying. … I think content is not completely…
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Remembering Killed-Off Characters
In an epic confessional letter at Lit Hub, author Stuart Nadler mourns all the characters he’s abandoned, maimed, and murdered for the sake of the grueling writing process. These lost creations and their universes live on in his memories and drafts…
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In Conversation with Elizabeth Strout
I love all my characters; every single person I write about, I love. So as I write them, I don’t care how badly they misbehave, because they are who they are, they do what they do. In an interview with…
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Writing the Ukulele
Over at the Los Angeles Review of Books, Steph Cha talks to Sean Carswell about his new collection of short stories, The Metaphysical Ukulele, and his writing process. Carswell recalls: Every time I thought about consciously writing a collection, it…
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In Conversation with Ramona Ausubel
Desire is the center of everything. We want because we are lonely, regretful, hopeful. We want because we don’t feel at home in our bodies or our lives. Want is this pivot point between whatever happened before that we’re trying…
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The Universal Truth of the Body
At Guernica, Jennifer Sears talks to Mary Gaitskill about her recent novel, The Mare, emotional accessibility, love that crosses social norms, and the challenges—technical and empathic—of developing a characters very different from herself. Gaitksill credits the body, her own, for…
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From Pen to Pentium
For many writers, after all, a word processor was as much an appliance as it was a deeply individualized instrument—more fax machine than fountain pen. … Still, the plastic, glass, and silicon devices had stories to tell, just as did…
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The Joy of Poetry
For the Boston Review, Jericho Brown shares why he identifies with poetry and what it means to find “joy” in the writing process: I love writing because it is the moment at which I am at once both completely present (paying close…