“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…
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,…
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…
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…
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…
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…
It was an essay about climate change. At least that is what I wanted the essay to be about. I wrote passionately about finding trash on the trail, the bear hunter who passed us on the road, a meadow in…
In a workshop, the writer Dorothy Allison had us go around the room and all fake an orgasm. She critiqued the authenticity and then had us write a sex scene where sound was present. This idea came up when she…
Writing for the stage offered me an opportunity to explore the mechanics of dialogue. In a play, the spoken word carries a weight that in other genres it shares with written descriptions, insights into situations, references… On stage the word…
Do you write fiction? Maybe you’ve got a shoebox full of short stories, or the drafts of various novels. Maybe you haven’t yet found the right form in which to realize the full potential of your story. Maybe you’re wondering…
Creativity is a slippery thing. There’s nothing so thrilling as being in the flow of the creative zone…until the day your inspiration is gone. Then it’s like you’ve been dumped on the side of the highway. You’re lost, tired, stuck,…
There are a lot of names for these two ideas. Whatever we call them, they can shape some of our biggest decisions as storytellers. The Goal, or what Robert McKee (Story) calls the “conscious desire,” is the concrete and unconcealed…
It was July 2007 and I was in line outside the bookstore at quarter to midnight. I was in Maryland and the mosquitos were still biting and the heat of the day clung to the sidewalk. I was only a…
Writing a title for a flash fiction or nonfiction piece is like dipping your oar into the roaring water while whitewater rafting. That oar stroke had better do some major work. The flash title is the oar that steers your little…
What really exists is not things made but things in the making. —William James How other kinds of beings see us matters. That other kinds of beings see us changes things. —Eduardo Kohn In my upcoming class, Memory Space: Inherited…
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