Category: Craft Discussion

Working Through Research Anxiety

On almost every night around 9:30, you will find me enthusiastically darting up and down the street in front of my house, treat bag wrapped around my waist, my dog Zephyr at my side, wearing the human equivalent of noise…

Friday Feast: In Defense of Villainesses, Women Taking Charge, a Writer’s Guide to Hacking the Reader’s Brain (in 5 Steps), the Importance of Empathy as Craft, and What Happens When a Book Is Fatally Flawed

Maybe it’s because I’m writing a novel with two female leads who flirt with a whole heap of trouble. Maybe it’s because of the stunningly sexist commentary from the Olympics and the policing of women’s bodies on the regular. Whatever…

The Other!

Shakespeare did it. Flannery O’Connor did it. Jonathan Franzen does it all the time. Every playwright, short story writer, and novelist does it as a matter of course, yet there is still plenty of debate over the writer’s right to…

Friday Feast: Frank Ocean, Harper Lee, and the Reclusive Artist; Stranger Things Characterization Lessons; Jumping the Line vs. Waiting; Why One Trans Woman Writes; and Carrie Brownstein’s Reading List

My writing process involves marinating on a topic for a while. One way I do that is through music. The musician I listened to most during a period of revision angst and relationship turmoil was Frank Ocean. I put Channel Orange on repeat while…