As the author of Long Story Short, the Only Storytelling Guide You’ll Ever Need and What’s Your Story? A Workbook for the Storyteller in All of Us, I get asked a lot about how long a story for the stage…
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How to Keep a “Long Story Short” by Margot Leitman
Posted Tue, 2/04/2020 - 9:00am by Guest Contributor | Category: Hugo Classes, Writing, Writing Advice
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“I Was Ready to Head Out for Parts Unknown”: An Exclusive Q&A with Gish Jen
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Gish Jen is the author of five works of fiction, including Typical American, Mona in the Promised Land, and World and Town, as well as two books of nonfiction. Her work has appeared in The Best American Short Stories four…
Hearing Voices: Breaking Writer’s Block through Radical Listening by Matt Trease
Posted Tue, 1/21/2020 - 8:58am by Guest Contributor | Category: Hugo Classes, Poetry, Writing, Writing Advice
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In the many years since I decided to become a writer and teacher, I’ve heard numerous students, and even established writers, bemoan what they call writer’s block with some variation of the lament “I just don’t feel I have anything…
Micro Lesson: Writing the Dead and Other Magical Inclinations by Michele Bombardier
Posted Fri, 1/17/2020 - 9:53am by Guest Contributor | Category: Micro Lesson, Poetry, Writing, Writing Advice
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One of the best parts of being a poet is the outrageousness of it. “Out here I can say anything” Larry Levis famously wrote, and we understand viscerally what he meant. On the page, we get to say anything, go…
Micro-Lesson: Graphic Writing for Comic Characters by Greg Stump
Posted Tue, 1/14/2020 - 12:00pm by Guest Contributor | Category: Hugo Classes, Micro Lesson, Writing, Writing Advice
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When it comes to emphasizing, setting off, and differentiating bits of dialogue, cartoonists and comic artists have a wide range of graphic techniques at their disposal. Used in moderation, these approaches to visual writing can really add to your characters’…
How to Start Your Story (or Novel) with Its Best Foot Forward by Raymond Fleischmann
Posted Mon, 12/30/2019 - 9:42am by Guest Contributor | Category: Fiction, Hugo Classes, Writing, Writing Advice
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“If I can get that first paragraph right,” Stephen King once told The Atlantic, “I’ll know I can do the book.” Starting a story—or novel—can feel pretty intimidating. And to be sure, a compelling start can do more than encourage…
Micro Lesson: Writing From Nature by John Farnsworth
Posted Tue, 12/17/2019 - 9:22am by Guest Contributor | Category: Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Hugo Classes, Micro Lesson, Poetry, Writing, Writing Advice
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When people learn that I’m a nature writer, there’s a natural assumption that what I spend most of my time doing is writing about nature. While it would not be unkind or even inaccurate to characterize my work this way,…
Hugo House’s Best-Loved Books of 2019
Posted Tue, 12/10/2019 - 9:30am by Katie Prince | Category: Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Hugo Classes, Literature
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The end of the decade is here! As we move in to the ’20s, we’re looking back on this past year to celebrate some truly great books. End 2019 with a bang (or start 2020 fresh!) with these 19 fiction…
How To Write Several Poems in the Course of an Afternoon by Kelli Russell Agodon
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There is this belief that we can sit down at a laptop or open our notebooks and write a poem. While some can do that, there are many who, when they sit down and see the blank screen, follow that…
“You Have to Let Your Obsessions Guide You”: An Exclusive Q&A with Tom Perrotta
Posted Mon, 11/04/2019 - 9:52am by Megan Gallagher | Category: Events, Fiction, Word Works, Writing Advice
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Tom Perrotta is the author of nine works of fiction, including Election and Little Children, both of which were made into Oscar-nominated films, and The Leftovers, which was adapted into a critically acclaimed, Peabody Award-winning HBO series. His other books include Bad Haircut, The Wishbones, Joe College, The…
Three Strategies for Reclaiming Your Writing Time by Liza Birnbaum
Posted Tue, 10/29/2019 - 9:35am by Guest Contributor | Category: Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Hugo Classes, Poetry, Writing, Writing Advice
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At the top of every slippery slope is a spot that feels like solid, level ground. For me, the top of one such slope came around mid-May of this year. After holding out for over 10 years, I’d gotten a…
Writing Architecture through Fiction by Ayad Rahmani
Posted Tue, 10/22/2019 - 8:46am by Guest Contributor | Category: Creative Nonfiction, Fiction, Hugo Classes, Writing, Writing Advice
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The objective of this workshop is to practice architectural criticism through the lens of insight. Where most architectural criticism is evaluatory, leveling judgment on a given project, this form of feedback is not. It assumes that the world is complex…
“There Is Only the Joy of Hard Work”: An Exclusive Q&A with Chris Abani
Posted Mon, 10/14/2019 - 12:30pm by Katie Prince | Category: Events, Hugo Classes, Word Works, Writing
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Chris Abani is a novelist, poet, essayist, screenwriter, and playwright. Born in Nigeria to an Igbo father and English mother, he grew up in Afikpo, Nigeria, and published his first book at age 16. Jailed three times and sentenced to death…
Widening the Scope of Your Personal Essay by Santi Elijah Holley
Posted Fri, 10/11/2019 - 12:01pm by Guest Contributor | Category: Creative Nonfiction, Hugo Classes, Writing, Writing Advice
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Personal essays can do many things. They can help us navigate our experiences, our grief, our trauma, or our joy. They can help show others how to navigate these for themselves. And they can unite us—author and reader—in a shared,…
Looking at Ledes (in Critical Writing) by Kevin O’Rourke
Posted Thu, 10/10/2019 - 9:50am by Guest Contributor | Category: Creative Nonfiction, Hugo Classes, Writing, Writing Advice
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Openings are important in any piece of writing, but they’ve always struck me as particularly important to critical writing. Why? Well, because critical writing bears the burden of always being about something else, often something readers have heard of and…