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While attempting to look beyond the borders of North Korea—where there is no such thing as art for art's sake and authors must describe reality as the government defines it—contributing editor Stephen Morison Jr. discovers just how far the Communist state's ideology reaches.
Having won a fiction prize in college, Laura Maylene Walter entered postgraduate life with instant fame, but it wasn't long before she found herself disappointed both by her lack of commercial success and her work itself. Only after she returned to her writing roots did she regain her belief in the power of her prose.
From Pavlov's bell to Francis Ford Coppola's orange, fiction writer Benjamin Percy discusses how ordinary objects, setting, and speech can generate electricity in every story.
After graduating from an MFA program, Renée K. Nicholson's focus on awards and publication credits began to affect her ability to write. It took knee-replacement and a reengagement with her other art form, dancing, to remind her of the real reason she writes.
While most writers feel vulnerable showing their work to first readers, the potential rewards far outweigh the risks. Contributing editor Kevin Nance asks esteemed authors such as Barbara Kingsolver, Naomi Shihab Nye, and Steve Yarbrough about their relationships with the people they trust to read—and judge—their work first.
With so much uncertainty surrounding the publishing industry, writers need to dismiss notions of their own irrelevance and embrace the importance of their work.
For today’s memoirist, it seems, the more sensational the story the better. But for former Newsday columnist Mike McGrady, the decision in the late 1970s to write Ordeal—the first-person story of Deep Throat star Linda Lovelace—not only tainted his relationships with some of America’s most renowned authors but also threatened his promising career.
A writer examines how his stuttering, though a hardship in childhood, helped shape his writing.
A writer weighs the importance of factual accuracy while writing fiction based in history.
Author Benjamin Percy has learned that, for the professional writer, real revision means moving beyond the tweaking of punctuation and word choice and freeing oneself to slash, burn, and reshape a work to fruition.
