Latest Craft Articles
What Home Does Your Writing Live In?
Is your story a hundred unit apartment building? A cottage in the woods? A skyscraper?…
Brains Don’t Do Random
How do we abandon the concept of being good, or getting it right? How do…
Mail 100 Stories
You can write faster than editors read their slush.
How To Speed Write
Every year, I go to a group of cabins in the mountains on the banks…
Writing the “Deep Stuff”
When we craft stories, essays or memoir, the “deeper” elements are the last thing on…
Reading Like a Writer
Members Exclusive Craft Series “The question of craft is the question of what flavors you…
Setting Up Your Characters
We usually think of Characters and Setting to be separate elements of storytelling. But they…
Opening with Dread
In her Sentence to Paragraph interview, Karen Thompson Walker talks about the way she sees…
A Bubble Off Plumb
“Whatever traits you want the reader to remember need to be magnified and exaggerated, even…
Trust Me, I’m An Editor
“Try to resist the urge to prune a few bushes while the forest burns.”
Listen to Your Story
“I had been neglecting to follow my story’s lead. I’d been so adamant about what…
Double Trouble: Put Your Setting to Work
“…require that characters deliver their news while climbing three flights of stairs, place a protagonist’s…