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How to Use Showing and Telling in a Personal Essay
In her essay at the Washington Post, Melissa Stephenson tells the story of how running helped her cope with the stress of being a single mom. The personal essay genre can be found across the Internet...
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How to Avoid the Mirror in Character Descriptions
Kelli Jo Ford’s story, “You Will Miss Me When I Burn,” was published in Virginia Quarterly Review. We’ve all written this type of character description: the character walks past a mirror, stops, and...
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How to Set Up a Happy Ending
The Curious Charms of Arthur Pepper is Phaedra Patrick’s first novel, and it’s been called “tender, insightful, and surprising.” In a workshop I teach, a student recently pointed out that a lot of...
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Create Tension by Using Character Stand-ins
Man and Wife is the debut story collection by Katie Chase. The title story appeared in Missouri Review and Best American Short Stories 2008. For my money, one of the most intense scenes in any film is...
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Develop Character with Plot
Alexander Chee’s novel The Queen of the Night is a national bestseller and, according to Vogue, “brilliantly extravagant in its twists and turns and its wide-ranging cast of characters.” For some...
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How to Hook a Reader with Cool Stuff
The Yoga of Max’s Discontent, the latest novel by Karan Bajaj, tells the story of a “quest for answers that bother all of us at some level.” I recently read a picture book version of The Odyssey to my...
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How to Develop Characters Using Degrees of Intensity
John Jodzio is the author of the new collection Knockout, which includes the story “Lily and Annabelle.” Most of us have had the experience of liking something (ice cream, for instance) and then...
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How to Use Plot Spoilers in a Story
Sean Ennis’ debut story collection, Chase Us, follows two boys through skateboarding, drugs, crime, and stolen school busses on the outskirts of Philadelphia. Every writer will likely at some point...
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How to Spark the Imagination
Once you’ve got your butt in the chair, how do you get your head in the right place? An exercise on sparking the imagination from Callie Collins’ story, “Tropical Storm Bill Washes Up Alligator Gar in...
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How to Defy Readers’ Expectations for Characters
D Watkins’ essay, “Too Poor for Pop Culture,” was one of the most-read essays of the year in 2014. In fiction and essays, it’s tempting to write about characters and people so that they’re merely...
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How to Set Up Dialogue with Declarative Statements
Robert Boswell’s story, “The House on Bony Lake,” appeared in the October 2014 issue of Harper’s Magazine. The best writers have a way of making their prose seem light and effortless. It’s the effect...
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How to Make the Familiar Seem Strange
Sequoia Nagamatsu’s story, “Placentophagy,” was published at Tin House and is included in his collection, Where We Go When All We Were is Gone. Any discussion of writing horror, sci-fi, or fantasy...
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How to Stretch Present Action
The New York Times called Jeffrey Renard Allen’s novel Song of the Shank, “the kind of imaginative work only a prodigiously gifted risk-taker could produce.” Some books come with warnings, a heads-up...
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How to Set Up the Second Half of Your Novel
Natalia Sylvester’s debut novel, Chasing the Sun, tells the story of a kidnapping and its effects on a marriage. A USA Today review called the book “a page turner.” Almost everyone who tries to write a...
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How to Use a Character’s Emotions to Hook the Reader
Adam Soto’s story, “The Box,” appears in the most recent issue of Glimmer Train. As a short story writer, one of the realities that you must accept is that your story is one of hundreds or thousands...
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How to Turn Information into Scene
Amy Gentry’s debut novel Good as Gone “draws our attention to the self that’s forged from sheer survival, and from the clarifying call to vengeance,” according to a New York Times review. When I was a...
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How to Describe a Character from the Perspective of Others
Tristan Ahtone rode Greyhound buses around America and wrote about it for Al Jazeera America‘s project, “The United States of Bus Travel.” Photo credit: Tomas Muscionico, Al Jazeera America The easiest...
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How to Write Ideas into Fiction
Aliette de Bodard’s story, “Immersion” appeared in Issue 69 of Clarkesworld and won the Nebula and Locus prizes for Best Short Story. When I was in an undergraduate fiction workshop, my teacher told us...
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How to Use Conflict to Give Your Novel a Sense of Direction
Idea Novey’s debut novel, Ways to Disappear, about the search for a vanished Brazilian writer has been called a “tour de force” and “seared to perfection” by reviewers. Anyone with small kids is...
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How to Introduce Conflict in Multiple POV Stories
Julie Wernersbach’s story, “Happiness,” appears in the latest issue of Arcadia. We’re all familiar with novels that are told through multiple points of view. The challenge for the writer is not only...
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