Craft and Creativity
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The World as Writing Prompt: 9 Ways to Invent Inspiration
Look around you, whether just glancing across your kitchen table or taking in the building thunderheads and blossoming lilac right outside your window. The world is our writing prompt, and not just the world supposedly external to us: the worlds of our memories, insights, and connections can spark new poems, stories, essays, and more as…
When a Life Becomes a Story: Balancing Emotional Truth & Narrative Skill
While I’m primarily a fiction writer, I love to read memoir. The in-depth peek into someone’s private life fascinates me. I always feel a bit like Dorothy pulling back the curtain on the Wizard of Oz. Over the past couple of months, I’ve read three memoirs by three different women, and what struck me most…
A Story I Had to Unlearn: How Flash Fiction Changed My Writing
Flash fiction is everywhere lately. At least, I’m seeing it much more often than ever before. Not as a sudden trend, exactly, but as a steady presence that keeps surfacing in places where writing lives. It shows up on Substack, in literary magazines, writing competitions, and even on social media. The term “flash fiction” is…