I read with interest the article “Literature and Life” in the June 9/16 issue of The New Yorker.[1] This is the first I’ve heard of trigger warnings, defined as “preemptive alerts, issued by a professor or an institution at the request of students, indicating that material presented in class might be sufficiently graphic to spark […]
You’re sitting there, steaming cup of tea next to you, several hours blocked out for writing and…no words are coming. Worse, you can’t even seem to settle enough to get to any words. What’s going on? There is an obvious check-list to look at, the one involving emotional and physical issues: are you going through […]
I love reading books about writing. I love workshops. I love classes and seminars. I love being in a room with other writers, learning a fresh new way to bring my stories to life on the page. What I don’t love is how I feel about pretty much everything I’ve ever written after said books, […]
We toil away writing, getting all our words just right, wonderfully lost in our own created worlds. Day in and day out we struggle with plot holes and microtension lags and settings where we changed the color of the furniture but now all we’ve accomplished is we can’t find all the places we mentioned the […]
“How autobiographical are your stories?” We’ve all heard this question. And we’ve all struggled with how to answer it. My initial answer to this question used to be “not very much at all”—after all, I can honestly say I’ve never been in the situations I put my characters in. But then I thought about that. […]