The Joy of the Tortured Artist: Why We Write, Even When We Hate to Write
A celebrated memoirist considers why putting pen to paper can be so emotionally taxing—and what the rewards are when we persist.
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Article Archive: The Literary Life
Articles from Poet & Writers Magazine include material from the print edition plus exclusive online-only material.
Disclosures: Earning, Sustaining, and Honoring Your Readers’ Trust
While writing a novel containing themes of sexual abuse, an author worked hard to earn and sustain her readers’ trust, which was reciprocated by readers in the form of unexpected, personal disclosures at launch events.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem using a variety of sounds to convey complex feelings, a story in which the setting reveals the mindset of a character, or a portrait of your life using overheard, seen, or invented language as it occurs throughout your day.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a series of formal poems to reflect on a complicated aspect of your life, a story in which you pose as the recipient of letters from a nonhuman character, or a hybrid essay that incorporates elements of memoir and criticism.
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Sowing Season: On ASL Poetry, Deaf Art, and the Queer Archive
The author of Last Psalm at Sea Level considers the different shapes of language through a reflection on curating Deaf art and signed literature for programming at the Guggenheim Museum.
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Blurring the Borders in Fiction: On Mapping and Naming, Unmapping and Unnaming
A novelist explores the decision to name real places in fiction, the way maps circumscribe those places, how locales heavily defined by tourism are susceptible to those projections, and what it means to push against those expectations.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem that reflects on the passing of time, a story that uses anonymity to build themes of disappearance and loneliness, or a personal essay about your relationship to a specific technology.
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Truing the Narrative: Revising for Symmetry to Make Your Manuscript Sing
When a memoirist studies her manuscript for patterns in theme and style, the symmetries she cultivates bring powerful shape to her book.
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Dare to Defamiliarize: In Praise of Fluidity
The acclaimed fiction writer, essayist, comic book writer, and screenwriter cautions against growing too rigid in your practice and suggests kicking down some doors and using writing as a multi-tool.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Begin writing a series of poems in the epic tradition, a story with a frenetic narrative voice, or short reflections on animals.
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Long Live the Longer Short Story: Depth Without a Novel’s Commitment
The acclaimed fiction writer unpacks the art of the longer short story—a form with space for ambitious plot and rich characterization, with the pressure and punch of concision.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a sparrow poem, a story about the loss of self during a period of social upheaval, or a series of vignettes that look back on several past jobs you’ve had.
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Reimagining Place: Setting as Convergence
A novelist explores the craft of imagining a fictional setting based on a real-world location that holds a capacity for convergence, a place where many threads intersect and many stories are born.
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The Value of Our Work: What Writers Can Learn From the Harvard Business School
An author who worked for years as a scribe at the Harvard Business School shares the lessons she learned that can be applied to writing, most notably: Believe that what you do is valuable.
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A Strong and Simple “I Must”: Rebuilding Confidence in the Wake of an Agent Breakup
After an unexpected split from her longtime agent, an author reconnects with her sense of calling and remembers who she writes for: herself.
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In the Shadow of a Homeplace: One Writer’s Life in Mississippi
A Nigerian professor and fiction writer describes how a new place like Starkville, Mississippi, becomes a home and how the color, texture, and form of her surroundings make their way into her storytelling.
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The Author’s Wife Is Also an Author: On the Fantasy and Reality of Writing and Partnership
A writer discusses the impact of perceived literary success on her marriage to another writer, drawing attention to the domestic and quotidian labor behind the privilege of being able to pursue one’s creative dreams.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem that creates unexpected connections, a story from the point of view of someone older than you, or a pair of lyrical essays that explore your personal responses to losses and gains.
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9,131 Sentences: How One Enormous Spreadsheet Taught Me to Be a Better Writer
Writing a book is a daunting challenge—but the texts we know and love can help. A nonfiction writer describes how a methodically organized spreadsheet of favorite quotes aided her journey from proposal to finished memoir.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem that uses the language of flowers to share a secret, a scene where a young person expresses their thoughts about a parental figure, or an essay based on the logic of your own dreams.
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On Discomfort: The Creative Gift of Being Out of Your Depth
A novelist describes her exposure to a multitude of scientific disciplines as the writer-in-residence at the Wisconsin Institute for Discovery and shares how exploring something completely new has lent fresh energy to her work.
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The Ungrateful Stranger: Whose Story Deserves Welcome?
An immigrant novelist reflects on the opportunities extended to her by the American publishing industry—and challenges the notion that she should be grateful to be given any kind of welcome.
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The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Write a poem that uses the metaphor of a bridge to represent a complex family dynamic, a short story that reconceptualizes historical fiction, or a lyrical essay that reflects on the stages of returning to a former self.
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Dismantling the Mother Shelf: Expanding Our Thinking About Women’s Stories of Parenthood
Books centering mothers are often lumped into one category by the publishing industry, flattening the nuanced and varied experiences of this group into a one-size-fits-all niche. A memoirist asks the industry to do better.
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The United States of Writing
Writers share how they approach the writing life where they live, their personal points of view on the literary community (both small and large) and their place within it, and what resources are available to them as writers who don’t live in a metropolitan area.