
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…
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…
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…
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’…
“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…
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…
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…
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…
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,…
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…
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…