Notes on Craft
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.
Finding the Secret Door Into Your Novel
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.
Invite the Vampires Inside (and Other Rules for Genre Writing)
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.
What Translators Mean When We Talk about Reading
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.
The Art of the Funny Metaphor
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.
Did I Get My Memoir Wrong?
I was confident in my narrative and wrote a memoir about it. But turns out the facts were questionable.
The Way Into the Poem Is the Decision to Write the Poem
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.
As an Indigenous Writer, I Push and Protect My Readers, My People, and Myself
Redactions can be both silence and explanation. They function purely on my own terms and for my audience, my community.
Writing Social Media Into Fiction
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.
To Write for Middle-Grade Readers is to Write About Elsewhere
We’re not writing for us as we are now, but us as we were, or could have been, or should have been.