Get Off My Damn Lawn! Says the Internet
As many of you know, November is National Novel Writing Month. To help folks blast through their 50,000 words in 30 days, GalleyCat has been providing writing prompts, tips, and words of encouragement. Most notable is this roundup where they collected two years worth of tips into a single post. This week, they referred to…
continue readingJim Harrison and Admitting Ignorance
In the October issue of Outside, Tom Bissell recounts his conversation with Jim Harrison in “The Last Lion.” Bissell is the author of Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter, Chasing the Sea: Lost Among the Ghosts of Empire in Central Asia, and The Father of All Things: A Marine, His Son, and the Legacy of…
continue readingTen Tips for Submitting Stories
Over at The Millions, Josh Rolnick presents a great overview of helpful hints for submitting short stories to journals and magazines. Ten Things I’ve Learned Over 12 Years of Sending Out Stories provides classic, evergreen things that we should all remember. Tip #3 the list is to shoot for the stars at the beginning of…
continue readingNPR Writing Contest, Judged by Michael Cunningham
I don’t enter many writing contests, although lots of people do so with surprising regularity. Some folks approach contests as a way of generating a name and building up a resume. I don’t follow that prescription, but I do like to sometimes use contests as an exercise, to try something a little different, and pursue…
continue readingMitchell Points Out the Limits of a Writing Cliche
Novelist David Mitchell was featured on the San Francisco Chronicle’s webpage and he pointed out the limitations inherent in one of writing’s most beloved sayings: “‘Write what you know’ will only get you so far,” Mitchell says. “You need to write what you can imagine, write what you can research about, write what you can…
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