From the Archives: “When structure is done well, it should be like architecture: you sense the overall feel of the building—tall, or airy, or strong—but you’re not looking at the buttresses that hold it up or the seams where parts are fastened together.”
With the impending release of his debut novel, The Step Back, J.T. Bushnell meditates on intersections and departures in our fiction.
Scott Nadelson on disorientation as a craft technique in the work of writers like Jamel Brinkley, Mansoura Ez-Eldin, and Eduardo Halfon.
“If writing is kintsugi on the page, kintsugi is the art of losing”: Ellen Prentiss Campbell on returning to the writing life, her debut novel, and piecing together lives and art.
From the Archives: J.T. Bushnell on Amy Tan’s “Rules of the Game,” a “quintessentially American story, one that has roots in a literary tradition that dates back to Flaubert and Chekhov.”
From the Archives: Celeste Ng offers compelling proof that storytellers aren’t so different from scientists: both explore the same very large, very dark, very crowded room, poking and prodding and tirelessly asking, what if?
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: “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.”
“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.”
David Galef reflects on the writing of his new book, Brevity: A Flash Fiction Handbook
