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How to Write Sentences that Offer Unexpected Views
Natashia Deón is a Los Angeles writer who directs the Dirty Laundry Lit reading series. Her Facebook posts about her son were republished in Rockwell’s Camera Phone. I recently heard a discussion on a...
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How to Make the Familiar Seem Strange
Sequoia Nagamatsu’s story, “Placentophagy,” was published at Tin House and will be included in his forthcoming collection, Where We Go When All We Were is Gone. Any discussion of writing horror,...
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How to Withhold Crucial Plot Information
Sarah Layden’s story, “Bad Enough With Genghis Khan,” appeared in Boston Review. When I was a kid, I devoured Agatha Christie novels, sleuthing along with Hercule Poirot, determined to solve the...
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How to Write Multifaceted Characters
Herpreet Singh’s essay, “Choking Out the Natives,” appeared in The Bitter Southerner and tells the story of a mixed marriage in Louisiana. There are two ways of thinking about personality. In one,...
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How to Dig Deeper into a Scene
Justin Taylor’s story, “So You’re Just What, Gone?” appeared in The New Yorker. If there’s anything I’ve learned as a writer, it’s that I tend to create a potentially interesting scene and then exit it...
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How to Raise the Level of Analysis in an Essay
Sarah Smarsh’s essay, “Poverty, Pride, and Prejudice in Kansas,” about legislation that would limit the amount that food stamp recipients can withdraw from ATM machines appeared in The New Yorker. We...
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How to Give a Story’s Plot Enough Fuel to Finish
Andrew Malan Milward’s collection, I Was a Revolutionary, takes a fresh look at the complex history of Bleeding Kansas, from the burning of Lawrence to the aftershocks still present today. As writers,...
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How to Frame Chronology
Will Boast’s memoir Epilogue describes a family tragedy and revelation the force Boast to reconsider his definition of family. When we sit down to write about our real lives, it’s easy to fall into the...
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How to Create Structure with Teasers
Julia Fierro’s debut novel, Cutting Teeth, was called “comically energetic” by The New Yorker. I often argue that, from a craft perspective, there is almost no difference between literary and genre...
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How to Write Descriptions that Cut Both Ways
J. Ryan Stradal’s novel Kitchens of the Great Midwest was called, by The New York Times, an “impressive feat of narrative jujitsu” and “a terrific reminder of what can be wrested from suffering and...
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How to Direct the Reader’s Gaze
Steve Adams’ essay, “Waiting Till the Wait Is Over,” is a meditation on hunting and writing and the surprising connection between the two. If anything defines great writing, it’s the ability to...
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How to Fast Forward to the Real Story
Matthew Salesses’ novel The Hundred-Year Flood has been called “epic and devastating and full of natural majesty.” It follows a young man to Prague as he struggles to understand his identity and how it...
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How to Jump Out of Scene into Backstory
Seeing Off the Johns, the debut novel from Rene S. Perez II, is a BookPage Teen Top Pick and has been called “a searing, mature novel.” Some famous writer or another once said that stories and novels...
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How to Create Depth of Time in Dialogue
A Chicago Tribune review called Debra Monroe’s memoir, My Unsentimental Education, “a genuine look at how ‘sometimes you go sideways or down before you go up.'” Good prose isn’t tied to any moment,...
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How to Merge Literary and Genre Stories
Lincoln Michel’s collection Upright Beasts is a “genre-bending debut” (O Magazine), full of “monstrous surprises and eerie silences” (Vanity Fair). Perhaps the most significant movement in American...
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How to Create Moments of Clashing Subtext
Since Caille Millner’s story, “The Surrogate,” appeared in Joyland Magazine, it has been the subject of several admiring essays, including in The Rumpus. In high school English classes, students are...
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How to Escape from a Plot
Homer Hickam is the author of the bestselling memoir Rocket Boys, which became the film October Sky. The novel Carrying Albert Home is a prequel to that memoir. When I was a kid, I had a book called...
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How to Keep Your NaNoWriMo Novel Alive
November is National Novel Writing Month, and if you’ve taken the challenge, that means you’ve written approximately one-third of a novel. Since novels tend to follow a three-act structure, this also...
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How to Portray a Relationship with One Well-Chosen Detail
Michele Serros was a groundbreaking Latina writer from Los Angeles who recently passed away. Her essay, “A Bedtime Story,” appeared in Huizache, a journal dedicated to Latino Literature. It’s probably...
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How to Put a Mind into Conversation with Itself
Megan Kruse’s debut novel Call Me Home left the writer Dan Chaon “astonished by her talent.” Dialogue involving only one person might seem, on its face, impossible. In plays, a character can talk to no...
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