Maile Meloy in an interview From the Archives: “I think you have to find an emotional connection to the story, to make anyone else care about it, but I would find writing only what I know to be limiting.”
From the Archives: “Grace Paley shows us one way in which the heretofore old-fashioned, third-person omniscient perspective might be one of contemporary fiction writers’ greatest tools to elicit empathy for characters.”
From the Archives: “One frustration of writing a single essay about David Jauss’s craft essays and short stories is that every one is worthy of its own in-depth examination.”
From the Archives: poet, publisher, and literary agent Lucas Hunt with a few thoughts on why fiction writers should read poetry.
From the Archives: In this 2011 essay, Baxter writes that a trustworthy review has “a kind of doubleness: the reviewer manages to assert somehow that the book under discussion is of some importance for one reason or another; and second, a good review provides a formal description of the book’s properties, so that you could reconstruct it from the reviewer’s sketch of it.”
Learning from your teachers’ teachers: Elizabeth McCracken, V.V. Ganeshananthan, and Rebecca Scherm discuss the writing chain of influence.
“I perceive fictionalized history as a terrific device for not only the artist’s explored interest in perhaps a previously unfamiliar subject, but as an opportunity to dust convention”: David Ebershoff talks with Brian Bartels in a 2010 interview From the Archives.
“By peppering his prose with subtle, sinister details,” Jacob M. Appel argues in this craft essay, “Chaon manages to create a subtext of tension that supports the weight of the story’s content.”
From the Archives: The title of Jim Shepard’s 2011 collection, You Think That’s Bad, could also be a creative mantra. Here the veteran writer discusses his research process, the apocalyptic state of the world, the (possible) irrelevancy of literature to the apocalypse, his epic mustache—and other matters of importance.
Depicting inarticulate speech patterns in fiction should be easy, right? Somehow, it isn’t—but it’s necessary, because humans are generally an inarticulate bunch.
