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“When you think you’re getting good, be humble. There’s no end to the learning.” In this video, Arthur Sze visits his high school, the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, and offers advice from his years of experience as a poet. Sze is the recipient of the 2013 Jackson Poetry Prize and won the 2019 National Book Award in poetry for his collection Sight Lines (Copper Canyon Press, 2019).
Writers and editors Victor Dwyer and Charlotte Gill discuss how they determine good writing from bad writing, what they look for in a first read, and the changing landscape of writing in this 2014 conversation moderated by journalist Ian Brown at the Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity in Alberta, Canada. “There’s the sense that the writer is being completely frank with their audience and yet at the same time, they’re completely in control and utterly trustworthy,” says Gill.
“Remember if you sit at your desk for fifteen or twenty years every day, not counting weekends, it changes you. It just does.” In this excerpt of an interview for CUNY-TV’s Irish Writers in America series, Booker Prize–winning author Anne Enright shares her ten rules for writing fiction.
In this 2007 Talks at Google event, Aimee Bender, the author of the short story collections The Girl in the Flammable Skirt (Doubleday, 1998) and Willful Creatures (Doubleday, 2005), reads from her work and discusses her writing regimen, favorite books, and her love of short stories.
“I don’t really think you can teach people to write, you can just teach them to read. Read everything you can about your setting or your characters or whatever it is you don’t know.” In this Granta video, Sarah Moss, author of the novels Ghost Wall (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2019) and Summerwater (Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2021), offers advice on first drafts, research, and the importance of reading to a writer.
“Writing can be beautiful, witty, and entertaining but it’s a serious commitment.” In this 2019 Louisiana Literature interview, Anne Waldman shares her advice to aspiring writers with emphasis on the importance of reading widely and respecting the act of writing.
It’s National Novel Writing Month! In this NaNoWriMo video, Rachel from the YouTube channel Rachel Writes offers five tips to help overcome perfectionism during writing sessions, which include short writing sprints and limiting revision time.
“Writing without purpose just becomes aimless words on the page,” says Roxane Gay offering advice on where to begin when starting a new piece of writing in this excerpt from a Skillshare class.
“If you don’t know where to start, remember that every single thing that happened to you is yours and you get to tell it.” In this TED Talk, Anne Lamott, author of Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life (Anchor Books, 1995), shares twelve truths she’s learned from life and her writing.
“What you can do is tell your best story, at that moment.” Camille T. Dungy, whose first essay collection, Guidebook to Relative Strangers: Journeys Into Race, Motherhood, and History (Norton, 2017), was a finalist for the National Book Critics Circle Award, offers writers advice on how to overcome roadblocks in this Austin Community College video.
