Dec 02, 2021
Bringing Acting Technique to Exploratory Writing
When beginning a new written work, apply acting exercises to explore the intent, sensory experiences, and focus of your writing.
Native Flowers and True Names: Using Research to Write Richer Narrative Fiction
To write her book ‘If You Leave Me,’ Crystal Hana Kim used research to be true to Korea, down to its roots.
Nov 30, 2021
What If We Taught Writing the Way We Teach Acting?
Actors studied movement, script analysis, emotional connection, our bodies, our voices. In my writing MFA, we got . . . workshop.
Nov 10, 2021
Drafting a Personal Essay Is Like Stumbling Through a Dance
You can study all you want, but it’s only in the act of doing that you learn what’s right and what isn’t.
Nov 08, 2021
Don’t Call It Writer’s Block
It’s rare to hear writers—especially more established ones—claim that term in public.
Sep 23, 2021
Writing Down the Ghosts
My whole process of writing is tricking my brain into writing without realizing what I’m doing, to make myself write even when the idea of writing instills a vomity feeling in my gut.
Sep 20, 2021
The Memoir Time Machine
As a writer of personal nonfiction, I worry that with every memoir or essay, I risk fragmenting and simplifying my life into words living on pages.
Aug 18, 2021
A Memoir Should Be a Conversation, Not a Monologue
It’s about suggesting, right there on the page, that the writer is no more important than the reader.
Aug 16, 2021
Branching Infinity: Exploring the Many Structures of Interactive Fiction
The difference between interactive and traditional fiction isn’t a clear binary at all: Both require an approach to structure that balances openness and control, and each contains lessons for the other.
Jul 26, 2021
A Cow with a Hole in It
The thing that’s so difficult about personal essays is that they’re awfully personal. There’s an answer to this conundrum, and it has to do with cows.
Jun 28, 2021
Is Your Idea Better Suited to a Novel or a Short Story?
You’ll start to note the difference between your longer- and shorter-form ideas—but if you’re not sure, there are some questions you can ask.
Jun 22, 2021
What Matters Most Is Showing Up
If I can write a novel on no sleep, no time, no artist’s life, no fancy residency, and under massive amounts of pressure, someone else can too.
Jun 07, 2021
Opening the Gate to the Stranger and Strange Thought
Toni Mirosevich explains the writing process behind one of her Catapult essays and explores one of her craft theories, which she calls “opening the gate”
May 18, 2021
A Musical Key to Earth’s Wild Music
Here are five animals, each with the music it makes or inspires, and each with a bit of its story, selected from Earth’s Wild Music.
Apr 20, 2021
A Case Against Killing Your Darlings
I want any novel I write to be full of darlings. If possible, all darlings.
Apr 05, 2021
