Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘writing and spirituality’

Shop Talk |

How to Squeeze a Story Out of the Soul; Or, How to Squeeze the Soul Out of a Story

Something I often heard in my experience as an MFA student was that one should write “painfully slow,” making every sentence count by tinkering with each word before moving on to the next one. In short: the story stalls, or never soars. The sentence is god. Typically, creative writing courses focus on the language of scene, character, plot, and dialogue the way we learn the parts of speech. This is the predicate; it should follow the subject sounds incredibly similar to This is the denouement; it should follow the climax. Even at the graduate level, workshops expend their energy with […]


Reviews |

Contents May Have Shifted, by Pam Houston

Pam Houston’s Contents May Have Shifted is made up of journal entries that recount the main character Pam’s travels, troubles, and search for meaning. In Michael Byers’s review, he wishes the novel were braver, and argues that the literary novel must take itself seriously, while considering why we hold genre fiction to a different standard.