Writing Historical Fiction (or, how I learned to love constraints and inconvenient facts)

I swore I’d never, ever write historical fiction. Don’t get me wrong, I love reading it, but do you realize how much work those writers have to do? Like all good stories, I set off on one journey not knowing I’d end up a changed person at the end of the trail. My grandmother left […]

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MFA Lesson Two: Stretch Yourself

When I started my MFA, I had a goal: I was going to learn how to write good middle-grade fiction, by golly. I love goals. (This is why my family avoids me on January 1st.) I set about achieving this goal with my usual dose of enthusiasm. I scoured the faculty list, I read their […]

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Six tips for Post-MFA life

Congratulations, July graduates! You just finished up two years of intense work and personal growth. Six months ago I walked across a stage to receive my MFA. Six months and one pandemic ago. You had a virtual graduation that embodied the spirit of community and dedication that the MFA experience brings. So much has changed in […]

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MFA Lesson One: The Writer’s Mindset

I sat down a few days ago, fully intending to start a collection of posts to share some lessons learned from my MFA program, but then my shower started leaking. Water streaming from the ceiling, down the cupboard, and pooling on the floor leaking. Talk about a procrastination opportunity! I mopped, I cleaned, I wiped […]

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Was the MFA Worth It? (spoiler alert: Yes!)

My phone pinged this morning with a text. The first words out of my mouth were, “What’s that? The airline telling me my flight’s cancelled?” Turns out…. That’s the power of putting words out there. So here I am, in the airport with a long layover, feeling grateful that I’ll be home by the end […]

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What the Author Isn’t Saying

As readers, we’re drawn though a book because we care about the character, or we want to know what happens. But for a book that is a meditation on grief, something else has to pull us through this dark and potentially boggy place. In We Are Okay, Nina LaCour offers a handful of narrative threads […]

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When Will Kidlit Leave the Printed Page?

The windowless Beinecke Library floats over a stone plaza. Inside its cool waffeled shell, sunlight makes the white marble walls glow. Nestled in this twilight is a six-story glass tower of old books. The muted leather spines rise just out of reach from the surrounding catwalk. It is a tower of bookish treasure. Tucked into […]

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How to bring your reader along: taking a page from comics.

When we write, we send a story on a journey from our mind to the reader’s. In Understanding Comics, Scott McCloud defines mastery in comics as the percentage of the artist’s original ideas that survive the journey to the reader’s mind. [1] Although we write without pictures, novelists are still sending images, via the written […]

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A fiction(al) magazine for writers Vol.2

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A fiction(al) magazine for writers

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