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How to Intimately Connect Character and Setting
The stories in Erin Pringle’s new collection, The Whole World At Once, reveal “how many strange shapes grief can take and how universal a human experience it is,” according to a Kirkus review....
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How to Use Mystifying Detail to Create Conflict
“Swift, Brutal Retaliation” by Megan McCarron was published at Tor.com and was nominated for a 2013 Nebula Award. A few years ago, one of my college-composition students read the Christian...
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How to Figure Out Who Is Telling Your Story
Juli Berwald’s book about jellyfish, Spineless, has received glowing reviews and been called “revelatory” and “thoroughly delightful and entertaining.” One of the most basic elements that writers must...
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Big Changes Are Coming to Read to Write Stories in 2018
I’ve been posting writing exercises and author interviews at this blog for five years, for a total of around 150 interviews and almost 200 exercises. It all started when the journal American Short...
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How to Start and Keep Writing After a Long Break
Publication Date: February 27, 2018. Pre-orders available now by clicking here. It’s the start of a new year, a time when dormant writing projects are taken out of drawers and dusted off and new...
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How to Keep Readers From Skimming Over Your Passages about Setting
Pre-orders available now. I’ve always felt conflicted about the term “page turner.” I love thrilling novels as much as the next person and remember lying on the mattress on the floor of my bare-walled...
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4 Strategies for Creating Compelling Characters
“An indispensable book that belongs on every serious writer’s desk.” Buy the book here. Last week, Austin experienced two days of real winter, which meant my 6 and 8-year-olds had no school. Because it...
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My Book Has a Cover!
One of the things I’ve always admired A Strange Object (beyond the inventive, smart story collections they have published) is the beautiful covers they create for their books. I couldn’t wait to see...
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How I Learned to Love (and Learn From) My Kids’ Favorite Books
When my wife and I decided to have kids, we felt pretty sure that they would grow to love reading as much as we did. Even before our oldest son was born, he was getting a taste for literature. In bed...
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How to Save Your Darlings, Not Kill Them
Everyone who has taken a writing workshop has, at some point, heard the advice, “Kill your darlings.” A lot of very confident writers have said or supposedly said it: Hemingway, Faulkner and Welty are...
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4 Strategies for Crafting Scenes (You Know, the Things Stories Are Made Of)
One of the regular questions writers and teachers are asked is about the difference between literary and genre fiction. There are differences, but one of the things I found while putting together The...
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How to Lift Your Story Beyond Its Outline
Tom Hart is the bestselling author of the memoir Rosalie Lightning and founder of the Sequential Arts Workshop. How to Say Everything is his book about the craft of storytelling. Sometimes you discover...
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How to Write a Great First Sentence
Belly Up, the debut story collection from Rita Bullwinkel, was a staff pick at The Paris Review and a highly anticipated book at several prominent websites. There are few sentences so vexing as the...
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Looking for Practical Exercises for Your Fiction Writing Class?
If you’re an instructor in a fiction writing class, you probably have moments where you’re trying to explain how good dialogue works—or plot or character building or descriptions of setting—but don’t...
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How to Build a Story with Logistics
Rahul Kanakia’s story, “Seeking boarder for rm w/ attached bathroom, must be willing to live with ghosts ($500 / Berkeley)” was published in Clarkesworld, which recently won a Hugo Award for best...
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How to Create Meaningful Spaces in Stories
Holy Ghost Girl by Donna Johnson portrays the author’s experience growing up as part of the inner circle of a revivalist preacher. The fall semester has now begun in earnest, which means that, in...
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What’s Next for Read to Write Stories
For the past six years, I’ve used this blog to explore the nuts and bolts of writing craft. The posts were an extension of what I was doing with students in the classroom, but it was also a form of...
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The Essential Parts of Any Book Pitch
Trail of Lightning is the debut novel from Rebecca Roanhorse. A book pitch, whether it’s in person or printed in a query letter or book jacket, must do two basic things: tell readers what the book is...
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How to Pitch a Memoir Without a Big, Fat Narrative Hook
Sarah Smarsh’s memoir, Heartland, about growing up poor in Kansas was recently longlisted for the National Book Award. The challenge of pitching a memoir is often the same as writing one: unlike...
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How to Develop Multiple Pitches for the Same Book
The New York Times Book Review said this about Varian Johnson’s ninth book, The Parker Inheritance: “Powerful…. Johnson writes about the long shadows of the past with such ambition that any reader...
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