Writing When Your Day Job Is Also Writing
The Believer‘s blog has a really splendid interview with writer, editor, and UN employee Summer Brennan. Brennan talks to Nicolle Elizabeth about what it’s like to write non-creatively for a living,…
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writing
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Shocking News: Writers are Poor
If anyone was still laboring under the impression that writing is a lucrative business, a new report from Digital Book World is here to pulverize your hopes and dreams. After…
Writing on Writing
Let’s face it, writers love to write about writing. Whether it’s for the beginning writer or the seasoned vet looking for a renewed sense of inspiration, check out the ten…
Writing Even Though You Can’t Make A Living Off It
The best things on my CV—the ones I almost want to use comic sans for, just so they’ll stand out—haven’t paid me. In an essay for The Toast, Jilly Gagnon…
FUNNY WOMEN #110: Ten Billion Tips to Becoming a Better Writer
There are a lot of writing tips out there, but here’s a comprehensive list from someone who’s been “there.”
Trapped Inside the Novel
My problem with the grand traditional novel—or rather traditional narrative in general, short stories included—is the vision of character, the constant reinforcement of a fictional selfhood that accumulates meaning through…
Do you want to write or do you want to be a writer?
“Maybe you write because you’re lonesome. You might stop once you fall in love. Remember we’re each just a self and the page is always there. Maybe you write because…
Breaking Out of the “Reservation of My Mind”
Sherman Alexie always loved to read, but it never occurred to him that he—or any other Native American, for that matter—could become a writer. That all changed when he read…
Beyond Good Writing
Either in content or in style, in subject matter or in rhetorical approach, fiction that is too much like other fiction is bad by definition. However paradoxical it sounds, good…
826 VALENCIA DAYS
The school year has begun, and this essay from Tom Kealey illustrates an afternoon-in-the-life of a volunteer at the San Francisco tutoring center 826 Valencia
The Only Woman in the Room
At the Tazewell County Justice Center, on a Monday night in May, five women gather for a creative-writing class. They microwave plastic cups of instant coffee, then drag chairs up to the conference table where we’ll write.
The Second Art Form
One summer day in 1985, a doctor calls my mother and tells her that there is empty space where parts of my brain should be. “I don’t understand it,” he…