Finding True North (even when it's called South)
Let us suppose that an era comes, an era of undetermined length, where words come unmoored from meaning. A word like “compassionate” say....
You Are Here Now: What Mothers Do
In the foyer of Monticello, Thomas Jefferson hung maps. All the continents are there, Africa, Asia and so on, cartographed as they were...
Why Stories Matter, Especially Now
We are in tumultuous times and it is easy to dismiss art, music, writing, maybe particularly writing fiction, as a luxury. I think it is...
On Writing the Other: 8 Resources
We write about the other with varying degrees of rigor and success. Homer’s default was narrow (white, male, hetero, warrior), but even...
Depravity Happens. Do We Have to Read About It? The Case for (and against) Violence in Literature
This spring I nearly declared a moratorium on violent fiction after reading three savage novels: The Orphan Master’s Son, The Sympathizer...
Love the Query: 3 Tips, 12 Stages of Despair, and 1 Playli
Fail Faster, Succeed Quicker The first time I saw “Fail faster, succeed quicker,” I was at an MIT robotics convention. Don’t ask. The...
How to Write a Page-Turner: What Essays Can Teach Novelists
The Da Vinci Code is fast paced, a “page-turner.” Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is not. We don’t need Writer’s Digest to define...
Dreamy, Haunting YA Thriller
At the center of Emily Ross’s YA thriller Half in Love with Death is Caroline. Caroline is the dreamy middle child, younger sister of...
Big-hearted Novel, Sweetie of a Protagonist
The day Peyton Honeycutt gets his first period it’s a near calamity. Peyton was born female but is a boy. He holes up in the girls’...
Without Geography You're Nowhere: Why Setting Matters
We are awash in narrative. It arrives on every platform in ever-shorter form. (A Little Life not withstanding.) Which has me wondering,...
