Craft and Creativity
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The Myth of Likeable Characters
For most of my fiction-writing life, I’ve written about complicated women. Women who lie, deflect, self-sabotage. Women who want too much or want the wrong things. Women who are soft in one scene and sharp-edged in the next. And throughout that life, I’ve also received more feedback than I can count on the subject of…
Autofiction as a Doorway Into Truth
Some of my favorite novels are not-so-secretly autobiographical. I’m thinking of The Idiot by Elif Batuman, The Mandarins by Simone de Beauvoir, or A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce. None of these novels tell their authors’ stories with complete dedication to factual reality, but each of them are based on true, lived experiences, and they…
Reflect, Reset, Begin Again: A Summer Writing Check-In
Every year in January, I tell myself the same thing: This year will be different. I will be focused, disciplined, and wildly productive. I will know exactly what I want to write, how to write it, and I will do so without second-guessing every word or wandering off-course. And every July, I open whatever notebook or computer file I used to…