Writers' craft

My favorite thing to remember about novel-writing is an observation I saw taped to a friend's wall in her office in graduate school: "Nobody asked you to write that novel". Therefore novel-writing is a choice--you can always stop, always keep going. You are free to do whatever you want. Most novelists come to writing novels because they have been avid readers.  Read more

When asked, Marlon James is hard-pressed to name his favorite story. It's admittedly a nearly impossible request to make of anyone, and surely more so of a novelist, whose trade relies so deeply on both intake and telling, however tangled, of tales. Unable to name just one, James improvised.  Read more

Like most authors who don't sell a million books a year, I have a day job. I've been a journalist since before personal computers. It's a fun gig that pays the bills but also a challenging one that limits time for making things up.  Read more

Barbara Kingsolver says that people often get her titles wrong. "Once a TV interviewer asked me how writing The Beans of Egypt, Maine has affected my life," she recalls. "I was able to say honestly, ‘Not at all!' " That's of course because the interviewer mistook Kingsolver's 1988 novel The Bean Trees for a novel by Carolyn Chute.  Read more

You know the feeling: you're staring at the black computer screen, blinking occasionally-staring and blinking, staring and blinking, until the cursor starts to blink back and you have to go to bed for a while. Maybe you're staring and blinking at an actual, physical blank page, in which case you should definitely go to bed for a while if it starts to blink back.  Read more