“Whatever you do, stay in the room.” So advises Ron Carlson in his book on the craft of writing, appropriately titled Ron Carlson Writes a Story. He knows what world exists on the other side of the door: a world full of televised sports, dirty dishes, iced mochachinos. A world full of distraction from the task at hand. Writing, he argues, is about staying in the room, pushing beyond the point where your eyes glaze over and your fingers refuse to type. That’s where the magic lies.

I am secretly envious of Star Wars and Star Trek geeks, because they get to decorate their desks (and cubicles and shelves and windowsills) with action figures in heroic poses. It’s like saying to the world: I’m letting my geek flag fly. I also suspect that when no one is around, they play [...]

Dana Kletter sits down to talk with famed fiction writer Allan Gurganus. Their conversation ranges from sexuality to southerness, from his affinity for the 19th century to how reading the work of fellow writers can be a shaping force in one’s fiction, from gardening between paragraphs to Halloween political activism, and plenty more about teaching and the craft of writing.

The classic The Things They Carried is being re-released in honor of its 20th anniversary, so unsurprisingly, Tim O’Brien keeps popping up in my radar lately. Besides being a powerful writer, O’Brien is also a great teacher, and in his recent interviews he offers useful thoughts for writers of all levels.
In this interview for [...]

Charles Johnson taught creative writing at the University of Washington from 1976 to 2009. He is the author of numerous books, including the National Book Award-winning Middle Passage. Zachary Watterson, one of Johnson’s former students, talks with his mentor about the literary friendships that have influenced the author’s more than forty-year writing career.

“Were I called on to define, very briefly, the term Art, I should call it ‘the reproduction of what the Senses perceive in Nature through the veil of the soul’.” –Edgar Allan Poe

If you’re reading the FWR blog furtively, hunched in your cubicle over your TPS reports, this post is for you. You are not alone: almost all writers need a day job to support their art. Lapham’s Quarterly reveals the day jobs of some famous writers, such as Charlotte Bronte, Franz Kafka, and William [...]

This morning I woke to hear the sad news that Barry Hannah died yesterday afternoon. He was 67, and the apparent cause was a heart attack, according to the Jackson Free Press. Barry had had several bouts with cancer over the last ten years, yet I was still shocked to hear that he was gone. [...]

We’ve seen a lot of book adaptations lately, from Where the Wild Things Are to Precious to The Lovely Bones. Screenwriters and directors cut scenes here and add scenes there to transform the book into a cohesive viewing experience. A good adaptation can be a brand-new work of art. But in the [...]

We still miss David Foster Wallace, and we’re not alone.
In GQ, Deborah Treisman (head of the New Yorker’s fiction department) discusses working with the late author:

You’ve edited a lot of great writers—what was the process like with him?
David was wonderful to edit because he was so involved with the minutiae of his work—he had a [...]