Trying to cram a novella into the space of a short story Knowing that you’ve tried to cram a novella into the space of a short story space yet refusing to write the novella Writing five, non-overlapping drafts without reaching a workable story Reading “Heart of Darkness” eight times while writing this story before realizing […]
I’ve added a new page for short story collection publishers in the right sidebar. This isn’t meant as a substitute for the legwork necessary to determine where to send your collection — the best research is to check the publisher of your favorite collections — but hopefully it might help some people at the beginning […]
Garrett Calcaterra is a fantastic editor and writer. I should know: I’ve been in a writing group with him for the last five years. I’ve got a lot of respect for him because he works harder than anyone else I know, both at writing literary fiction and fantasy/speculative fiction, not to mention all the editing he […]
Free Online Submission Interpretation: We really like you and respect you. There are diamonds in the slush pile and we want to find them. It’s virtually free for us to accept online submissions so we won’t charge you on some trumped up charge. We get undergrads and MFA students to wade through all the slush […]
Brian Evenson, the director of Brown University’s MFA program and an excellent writer (I gave love to his collection Fugue State), recently finished reading a wheelbarrow full of MFA applications. He saw plenty of mistakes, and handed out some free tips on Facebook. With his permission, I reprint his advice here. Tips for MFA Applications by Brian Evenson Now that […]
Elizabeth Costello, a character in the eponymous novel by J.M. Coetzee, on the purpose of the novel and how it compares to history: “The novel, the traditional novel, she goes on to say, is an attempt to understand human fate one case at a time, to understand how it comes about that some fellow being, […]
Marilynne Robinson, in her latest collection of essays, When I Was a Child I Read Books, explores how to create a character: For me, at least, writing consists very largely of exploring intuition. A character is really the sense of a character, embodied, attired, and given voice as he or she seems to require. Where does this […]
This is the way that Paul Elie, in an essay in the New York Times, describes the state of faith in novels: “Belief as upbringing, belief as social fact, belief as a species of American weirdness: our literary fiction has all of these things. All that is missing is the believer.” I’d call what Paul […]
“Many years later, when he had become famous — extremely famous, truth be told — Jed would be asked numerous times what it meant, in his eyes, to be an artist. He would find nothing very interesting or original to say, except one thing, which he would consequently repeat in each interview: to be an […]
Among the many literary podcasts eking out hardscrabble lives, the Book Fight podcast has won my heart. God knows I’ve listened to a spate of book podcasters, some of them talking about the wrong books and some of them talking about the right books but doing so drearily and some of them with voices nasally enough to […]
