As a writer, I often get the question, “Where do you get your ideas?” I also hear it often at book readings when they open up the floor to questions. I love watching other, more famous writers, grind their teeth as they struggle to answer.
Category: Writing Life
Our Writing Life column archive, which features an array of guest contributors.
The Writing Life: Writing About It by Michael Suppa
It’s the first moment of normalcy in the last four and a half months. Then, I glance at her walker, the portable table, the flowered box holding a mass of medication, and the moment is gone. I’m back at the hospital.
The Writing Life: Writing from the Sidelines by Lisa Ahn
I finished my first novel when I was forty years old and the shock of it, the rifting amazement, nearly carried me away. The pages hadn’t begun as a Book. I hadn’t intended to be a Writer.
The Writing Life: To Hear the Softly Spoken Magic Spells by William Henderson
Steal time to write, as if time is a commodity, something to hoard and, well, steal. From my children and from my friends and even from myself…
The Writing Life: Publish Envy by Hilary Meyerson
Jealousy is a bitch. Professional jealousy is a bitch with a book advance.
Writing Life: What if I never get that book deal? by Lisa Ahn
Most writers are seekers, restless. If we were satisfied with the here-and-now, the exactly-as-it-is, there would be no call to wander, to imagine otherwise. We pick at all the seams. We pry the edges of “what if?” We are good at doubt and wonder, at the possible and maybe.
Writing Life: The fact of the matter: Mythology as creative nonfiction by William Henderson
No matter your opinion about John D’Agata, recently under-fire for his slippery (some might say sloppy) handling of facts in his 2010 book, About a Mountain, the use of innovation (read: fudged facts) in nonfiction – which he argues is his right as the author, especially when helping foster a more artistic truth – created a genre, of sorts, situated between fiction and non, creative nonfiction, which even this magazine uses to define what it publishes every month.
The Writing Life: Notes from an AWP Virgin by mensah demary
The so-called “writing life” will sweep me toward Chicago as the 2012 AWP Conference and Book Fair draws near. This is my first time attending the event; I don’t know what to expect beyond the advice and wisdom espoused by AWP veterans.
The Writing Life: Tricking the Eye — Beating Writer’s Block with the Dutch Golden Age by Lisa Ahn
The blank screen. The blinking cursor. The sudden, irresistible urge to dig out that last chocolate bar from the Halloween stash in the back of the pantry. Writer’s block can take a lot of forms, but it still plays the same old tune, a tick-tock insinuation that maybe, this time, the words are really gone.…
The Writing Life: Revising by William Henderson
Revision. The idea of revision is interesting, especially in terms of revising a memoir, because I have to decide which moments from my life, from the year covered in the book, should stay and which moments should go.
