The Time Is Now: Writing Prompts and Exercises
Explore your inner soundtrack, make your character sweat, and embrace your many identities—three prompts to keep you writing this summer.
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Explore your inner soundtrack, make your character sweat, and embrace your many identities—three prompts to keep you writing this summer.
After the death of her mother, a writer considers the ways we increasingly write our own obituaries in this excerpt from The Art of Death, forthcoming from Graywolf Press.
Compose a collaborative renga with a friend, inject surreal motifs into your fiction, and explore your relationship with a parent or child through the lens of one embarrassing memory—three prompts to keep your pen on the page this spring.
Six writing instructors offer strategies for allaying students’ anxieties, engaging critically with their work, and responsibly giving them what they most desire: praise.
Try your hand at poetry translation, write a story with a deeply flawed protagonist, and reflect on your relationship to the natural world—three prompts to ignite your imagination this spring.
After decades away, a decorated poet returns to his hometown in rural Wisconsin to read from a recent collection inspired by the very people he now finds himself addressing.
A fiction writer reflects on the meandering and far-from-perfect path that led to the publication of his second novel, Perfect Little World.
A poet explains how allowing ourselves to write badly is not only generative, but can also break the habit of self-censorship and can lead to our best work.
The often playful process of writer-artist collaboration is explored through a close examination of the book Alphabetique: 26 Characteristic Fictions by poet Molly Peacock and visual artist Kara Kosaka.
A precarious attempt to swim across the Hudson River helps a fiction writer explore the pathways of plot—through shifting currents, pain and exhaustion, and an unanticipated twist.