That’s how I’d have capitalized this recent article by The Atlantic, which asked that rather big question. Describing Alex Jenni, a French biology teacher who recently won the Prix Goncourt, France’s top literary award, the article noted,
In the Alexis Jenni school of thought, a writer may be someone, anyone, with a compulsion to scrawl or [...]

On New Year’s morning this year, I was sitting at a kitchen table in Cleveland, Ohio. I grew up in Cleveland and love it, but (like most people) in the way you love your old rusty car with the duct-taped mirror and muffler tied up with a string, or your dingy old house with [...]

Everywhere you look, there are reasons not to write. If you believe in omens–as I do–you may start to wonder if the universe is trying to tell you something.
You may feel like you shouldn’t even start writing. Recently, the Huffington Post offered 10 reasons not to write your novel. And some [...]

Like many writers, I tend to think of job-related writing–like copywriting, or editing, or ghostwriting memos–as Not Really Writing. In the Huffington Post, though, Holly Robinson expresses a very different point of view:
“Doesn’t it bug you to write other people’s books when you could be working on your own?” another writer asked me recently.
Not [...]

So November is halfway over–you’re half done writing your novel for NaNaoWriMo, right?
Right?
Whether you’re doing NaNoWriMo or not, there are always those days–or weeks, or months, or, let’s face it, years–when you just feel like you Cannot. Write. Anything. I don’t claim these are foolproof solutions, but here are my own personal tips to [...]

The Millions has a wonderful essay by Jeffrey Eugenides on his process of writing his latest novel, The Marriage Plot. It began with what he called “an act of literary adultery”:
In the late 90s, during an impasse in the writing of Middlesex, I put the manuscript aside. (I hadn’t fallen out of love, exactly, [...]

Some frustrated soul on Facebook has started an “I Hate Reading” page. Even though–in keeping with the “I hate reading” theme–there’s nothing actually on the page, over 475,000 people “like” it. AbeBooks issued the following video, entitled “Long Live the Book,” in response:

Okay, so some people hate to read. Some people aren’t [...]

I’m now in year 5 of working on my (first) novel, which seems like a long time to me. But according to everyone I’ve heard, 5-7 years is average for a first novel. For some, though, novelists just work Too Damn Slow. At least, that’s what Dwight Garner suggested in a recent [...]

I don’t mind admitting that I get stuck as a writer—occasionally. Well, pretty often. Okay, I mean constantly. And I’m not talking about jamming up over a flowery paragraph or a pivotal scene. I’m saying that I’ll be four pages into a new story (on what I’ve come to imagine on my worst days as [...]

Shawn Mitchell talks to Elif Batuman and Geoff Dyer (and they talk to each other) about obsession and addiction, the permeable line between labeling work fiction or nonfiction, Stendahl syndrome, and future projects.