Oct 03, 2019
So, You’ve Finished Your Book
When my students finished a draft, all I wanted them to do was sit inside of it for longer than was comfortable. To acknowledge and celebrate what they’d accomplished.
Lynn Steger Strong's first novel, Hold Still, was released by Liveright/WW Norton in March 2016. She received an MFA from Columbia University and her non-fiction has been published in Guernica, LARB, Elle.com, Catapult, Lit Hub, and elsewhere. She teaches both fiction and non-fiction writing at Columbia University, Fairfield University, and the Pratt Institute. Lynn's second novel, Want, is forthcoming from Henry Holt in spring 2020.
When my students finished a draft, all I wanted them to do was sit inside of it for longer than was comfortable. To acknowledge and celebrate what they’d accomplished.
Three ways of thinking that might help you get the damned novel done, from our beloved 12-Month Novel Generator instructor, Lynn Steger Strong (author of HOLD STILL)
When you give birth to a life, you are also giving birth to a death.
Fitzgerald was ground down, I imagine, consumed by how to take care of her family. This didn’t make her any less the thinker, writer, reader, that she was.
I was embarrassed each time I got out my camera.
I want to write about space and time, and feeling like somehow we’ve always had less of it than our male counterparts.
In fiction, one needs motivations, wants, and fears; one needs cause and effect. In life, it’s messier.
On Virginia Woolf, making hats, escapism, and how to write a novel that readers will read.
