Writing Archive
Since Feeling is First: Elements of Craft to Express Emotion
Emotions, feelings, desires—whatever you choose to call them—are central to writing. e.e. cummings wrote “since feeling is first / who pays any attention / to the syntax of things / will never wholly kiss you.” But how do we pay attention to syntax while retaining feeling? There are countless
Between Optimism and Pessimism: How to Set Our Baby Monitors?
Pessimism is not particularly hard. I thought of this last month when I spent an hour in my brother’s kitchen near the baby monitor through which I could hear my poor twenty-two-month-old niece hacking up phlegm. After an hour I began to mistake this noise for the wind, or
Second Time’s the Charm
We’re better at most things the second time around. Poaching eggs. Seventh grade. Guessing which hand the marble is in. Writers might not be better at things by the second book, but at least we’re better prepared. (And I’m talking here about the publication process, the “your book is
Is Anyone Reading Your Blog Posts?: Building a Literary Community in the Age of Facebook
In the creative writing for new media course I teach at the University of Iowa, we spend the first few weeks talking about ways in which technology has changed the way we communicate with one another, for better or worse. When it comes to Facebook in particular, it’s interesting
Etymology as Pedagogy: How Words Teach Me to Live
When I learned, not long ago, that the word “daisy” comes from the Old English word “day’s eye,” referring to how the petals open at dawn and close at night, I was delighted. Here was proof that the English language can be governed by a beautiful logic. It was
All-Time Favorite Writing Prompts
To round out this year of blogging about writing prompts, I polled writers and writing teachers for their favorite writing prompts–generally, simple prompts that have been useful to them as writers, students, and teachers. One such prompt that I found extremely useful in my early days of writing was,
Seven Under One Hundred
There are a lot of age-based lists of writers out there. A lot. Of. Lists. Here’s another one. Jake Strand, 34, after twelve years in the corporate world, recently found the courage to apply to MFA programs. He didn’t think he’d get in, but he did. His writing is
Triangular Relationships
In a previous blog post, I mentioned my difficulty with conflict and tension. For this reason, I love triangular relationships, which bring up conflicting desires, competing loyalties, and dilemmas. All the things that make a juicy story go. When I was just starting out writing fiction, when my writing
The Abstract Mathematics Behind Freelance Writing
About two and a half months into new motherhood, looking to get back into the swing of things, I applied to several blogging gigs. The editor at one publication, with whom I had been in contact in the past, emailed back almost immediately, saying she thought the rates might be a bit
The Tangible, The Visceral
Touch is the sense common to all species. So wrote Aristotle in Historia Animalum and De Anima. And so is the premise for the art show Ann Hamilton: the common S E N S E, which I’ve been helping out with here in Seattle, and which explores the sense