In my last blogpost, I touched on the inevitability of doubt in the creative process. It’s such an important issue, I thought I’d speak about strategies I’ve found for profiting from it. Getting in your own way In fiction, the first thing we do is give our characters obstacles. Both external and internal. The external …
Getting Off the Couch and Embracing Doubt by Lucian Childs Read More »
“On the path ahead, stepping out from behind a boulder, a man appears.” So begins Maggie O’Farrell’s I Am, I Am, I Am. In the next two sentences, we get some precise description, enough to start creating a world and convince us to inhabit it. And then, we get a look at the man again. …
Suspense, Regardless of Genre: Tips for Reading and Writing by Andromeda Romano-Lax Read More »
Live from Storyknife: August 2023 Recorded Tuesday, August 23, 2023 | 7-8pm via Zoom Leah Altman (Oglala Lakota) is a Native American transracial adoptee and was raised in the Portland area. She has written for several local and national publications, including Indian Country Today, Underscore, The Oregonian, Portland Monthly, Oregon Humanities, Portland State University’s Metroscape magazine, and Parents.com. Leah has an MFA in creative …
For years I kept a handful of John Steinbeck quotes on my office wall, among them: “The writer must believe that what he is doing is the most important thing in the world. And he must hold to this illusion even when he knows it is not true.” I loved how that quote captures the two …
The Writer’s Healthy Delusions by Andromeda Romano-Lax Read More »
This June something extraordinary happened. I published my debut novel, Dreaming Home. It has already gotten positive notice, including—unbelievably to me—a favorable review in The New York Times. I’m over the moon about this recognition for something I labored over for more than fifteen years. But here’s the thing, I didn’t write the novel alone. …
It Takes a Family to Write a Novel by Lucian Childs Read More »
So, yesterday I was writing this sentence, and the fancy grammar-check tool in my laptop caught me failing to practice what we preach in “flash” writing workshops: ie. writing precisely and economically. Our motto is “A Few Good Words”. The sentence: He reverts back to his usual snarly tone. It’s not the worst sentence I’ve …
Live from Storyknife: July 2023 Recorded Tuesday, July 18, 2023 | 7-8pm via Zoom Jane Kalu studies Creative Writing and Literature at the University of Southern California. Her short fiction has been featured or is forthcoming in American Short Fiction, Boston Review, The Hopkins Review, Isele Magazine, Munyori Journal, and elsewhere. Jane is a graduate …
Sometimes we just need the right word or phrase in order to bring a problem and its solution into focus. For me last month, that phrase was “Project Stacking.” I came across it in a newsletter by a comedy writer named Caitlin Kunkel, who learned it in grad school, in a program focused on writing …
EPISODE SUMMARY In her debut album, Sisters of White Chapel, Alaskan writer and musician Annie Bartholomew brings a fresh approach to traditional folk music, channeling the under told stories of some of the working women of Alaska’s Gold Rush. And as she tells 49 Writers Active Voice producer and host Katie Bausler, sex work was …
AVP 23: Annie Bartholomew, Writer-Musician, Sisters of White Chapel” Read More »
LIVE FROM STORYKNIFE SERIES: JUNE 2023 Recorded Tuesday, June 20, 2023 | 7-8pm via Zoom Kat Chow is the author of Seeing Ghosts: A Memoir, named a New York Times Notable Book of 2021. She was a reporter at NPR. Her work has appeared in The New York Times Magazine, The Atlantic, and on Radiolab. Renata Golden’s work has been …
