Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘writers on writing’

Interviews |

The Humpbacked Minaret: An Interview with Mahmoud Saeed

Over the past six decades, Iraqi writer Mahmoud Saeed has used his novels, stories, and nonfiction to deconstruct the political and social turmoil of his beloved homeland. In a wide-ranging conversation with Stephen Morison, Jr., Saeed describes the difficulties Arab authors face in getting published, the institutionalized barriers to freedom of expression, and his constant attempt, through fiction, to “solve the puzzle of man and his actions.”


Interviews |

Perfume from Whale Vomit: An Interview with Keith Scribner

by J.T. Bushnell

When WTO protestors mobbed downtown Seattle in 1999, breaking windows and burning dumpsters, Keith Scribner was a new father, and it made him wonder how it would feel to have that chaos on his own street. In an interview with J.T. Bushnell, Scribner talks about how those thoughts sparked his newest novel, The Oregon Experiment, what it means to pursue the writing life, and why perfume labels don’t list the ingredients.


Essays |

The Sorrow and Grace of My People’s Waltz, by Dale Ray Phillips

by Forrest Anderson

Forrest Anderson on the semester he “caught fire as a writer,” when Ron Rash handed him a life-changing copy of Dale Ray Phillips’s debut, My People’s Waltz. Anderson describes the exquisite moments of grace in the collection when “all of the bad things to come are brewing on the horizon but haven’t yet managed to fully snag the family.”


Interviews |

The Cruel Riddle of History: An Interview with Jonathan Evison

by Aaron J. Cance

Aaron Cance interviews Jonathan Evison about his new novel, West of Here, a rich and complex self-examination, a study of the struggle between the human need to move forward and the historical inertia that is the result of our congested lifestyles. Its flawed, yet sympathetic cast of characters is compelling, as are the philosophical questions it poses. Although it will assuredly take its rightful place in the canon of American Western fiction, readers would do well to think of this work as something more than just another novel.


Shop Talk |

Plotting out "Plot"

by Celeste Ng

How can graphs and charts help you with your writing? Blogger Derek Sivers shares these story grids from Kurt Vonnegut to help you visualize the plot of your story. (via.) Here’s one of the story of Cinderella: And if nothing else, a graph might put things in perspective. Witness blogger Ed Yong’s graph of what the writing process feels like (via). He’s a science writer, but this could apply just as well to fiction writing: My favorite point, and one I’ve been at all too often: “Regurgitated a plate of idea spaghetti. I’ll never extract a single strand from this. […]


Shop Talk |

Short Stories vs. Novels: The Final Smackdown

by Celeste Ng

Just kidding. I don’t mean versus as in fight to the death / zero-sum / there can be only one winner. I mean versus as in: what’s the difference? How are these two forms alike and where do they diverge, and if we’ve been speaking the language of one for a while, how can we shift our thinking so as to be fluent in the other? Because let’s face it: novels are what sell. Send a bunch of agents short stories, and they’ll ask, “But do you have a novel?” That’s the hard-headed, business side of writing—writing a novel is […]




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