Best Writing Tip: Fail Better
BY TOM BENTLEY When I first started sending article queries out in the eighties, callow youth that I was, I sent them to all the major venues: The Atlantic, Esquire, The New Yorker, The Paris Review. I eagerly awaited their replies and expected a gilded chair at the Algonquin Round Table. I didn’t know that […]
The Best Writing Tip I Ever Received Was Not to Write
BY RUSSELL MICKLER The best writing tip I ever received was not to write. It began with an essay, a critique of Chaucer’s ‘The Miller’s Tale’ from The Canterbury Tales. Mrs Lovejoy returned my paper savaged, bloodied with merciless, unkind annotations, insisting on a rewrite. Passive, she wrote. Splice. D.M. Run-on. Frag. Mechanics. (Young, I’d […]
Not Having the Time to Write Makes Me Angry
By KIM PATTON Because my stories keep my heart pounding at night with the possibility of it all, when I can’t get words on paper, I want to scream. All my energy pools at the bottom of my core, where it proceeds to yell at me all day long, ‘Write! Write! Write!’ I have to […]