The Art of Romantic Tension
For our Romance Week series, novelist LaQuette shares essential lessons on building narrative tension by manipulating your characters’ goals, motivations, and conflicts.
For our Romance Week series, novelist LaQuette shares essential lessons on building narrative tension by manipulating your characters’ goals, motivations, and conflicts.
If you’ve ever written a novel or tried to write a novel, you’ll understand the immensity of building out a book from nothing.
In defining your monster, you’re also building your world. By saying what the big, spooky creature can and can’t do, you’re eliminating convenient and easy plot mechanics your protagonist will inevitably exploit.
Make sure you save a little of the “joy of discovery” for the actual translation process by not reading your source text too closely before translating it.
Ben Sandman elaborates on two strategies for crafting the comic metaphor—and shows us that the recipe for inducing laughter is different from what we might whip up for more serious writing.
I was confident in my narrative and wrote a memoir about it. But turns out the facts were questionable.
The fear of writing a “bad” poem keeps me from writing at all. But I can’t write a “good” poem without writing any poem.
Redactions can be both silence and explanation. They function purely on my own terms and for my audience, my community.
Social media is often portrayed as the enemy of the writer—but like any good enemy, perhaps it’s best to keep it close. Don’t miss this craft essay by Isle McElroy for our Social Media Week series.
We’re not writing for us as we are now, but us as we were, or could have been, or should have been.
A personal essay of the Steven Hotdog form needs the interior experience, the exterior fact, and the meaning that connects them—in order to work its magic.
After another breath, I return to the sentence “This is because that is.”
Writing a memoir is a process of curation. But I kept wanting mine to reflect my up-to-the-moment present.
My exclamation points are part of a decades-long project to be as truthful as possible to my lived experience as a child of immigrants.
As part of our Education Week series, Jaime Green describes how teaching the fundamentals in undergrad writing comp made her a better writer.
I discovered that storytelling is also just as much science as art.
Translating trauma and violence is not just about deciphering pain but also about recreating an emotional language that helps us to understand each other better.
What happens to your writing project if you are unable to find a particular source? Adin Dobkin shares two options: either you carry on or decide the project is valueless without it.
Ingrid Rojas Conteras speaks to Naima Coster, Alexandra Kleeman, R. O. Kwon, Laura van den Berg, and Bryan Washington about the language they use to describe writing novels.
When beginning a new written work, apply acting exercises to explore the intent, sensory experiences, and focus of your writing.