Suspend Your Disbelief

Posts Tagged ‘writing process’

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Under the Influence… of Robert Olen Butler

by Forrest Anderson

Three years into the doctoral program at Florida State University, my wife and I had tired of living like graduate students—the hard studying, hard partying, and hard poverty of it all. I thought I’d found a way out when I was offered a job and a place to live at a boarding school in western North Carolina. I called my dissertation director, Robert Olen Butler, to share my plans. “Is it money?” Bob asked. “Do you need money?” “You think it’s a bad idea? I’ll have time to write in the afternoons.” “If you fart on the squash court,” he […]


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"Work with the puppy that is your brain"

by Celeste Ng

It’s easy to be hard on yourself when you’re a writer. But does beating yourself up really help? For 99.9% of us, the answer is no. How do you learn to go easier on yourself? The Rejectionist is here to help: So imagine you have a new puppy, and your new puppy does the things that new puppies do, which are: pee on the floor, eat your favorite shoes, poop in your laundry hamper, chew on your plants, chase the cat. Right? Bad things. Now, how do you deal effectively with the misbehaviors of the new puppy, which does not […]


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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. […]


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The ten-year story

by Celeste Ng

How long would you work on a piece of fiction? We’ve talked before about the ten-year novel, and FWR contributor Margaret Dean shared her story of the “long hard slog” from MA thesis to published book. But okay, those are novels. How long would you work on a single story? The Grub Daily, which was our Thursday Morning Candy a couple weeks ago, recently featured this essay by Amin Ahmad in which he describes working on a story for a full decade: Had it really taken me eight years to write it? Thinking back, I realized that it had actually […]


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Flipbook: "The Work of Writing"

by Celeste Ng

Every few weeks, we launch a new Fiction Writers Review “Flipbook.” During the past two and a half years, we’ve featured more than 50 interviews with authors established and emerging. They’ve had such valuable insights into the writing life—from thoughts on process and craft to ideas about community and influence—that we wanted to find a way to further these conversations within our community. Each Flipbook highlights some of the very best of the conversations on our site, centered around a particular topic. Our latest Flipbook is now up on the FWR Facebook page, with an exclusive slide right here on […]


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Spider-Man, and killing your darlings

by Celeste Ng

Last week, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark fired its director, Julie Taymor. Already the most expensive musical in Broadway history, Spider-Man has been universally panned by critics—and it hasn’t even officially opened yet. The show’s decision to let Taymor go was apparently in part due to her refusal to alter the script, even when everyone around her agreed it wasn’t working. Reports the New York Times: According to four of her colleagues, Ms. Taymor boxed herself into a corner with the producers in the last few weeks by rebuffing their requests to allow outsiders to make changes to the show. […]


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Researching the details in fiction

by Celeste Ng

Mary Roach is my favorite nonfiction writer—partly because she’s wickedly funny, and partly because we share the same fascinated appreciation for the absurd. I’ve been a huge fan since her first book, Stiff, which is about the various uses of human cadavers. In it and all her other books (Spook, about science and the afterlife; Bonk, about science and sex; and Packing For Mars, about manned space exploration), Roach unearths details that are just too crazy to make up—such as the fact that a dead pope is struck on the forehead with a special hammer to be sure he’s really […]




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