Craft and Creativity
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Newest Features
Better Endings: Surprising Yet Inevitable—and Astonishing
Tamara Dean’s stories and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Guardian, One Story, Orion, The Southern Review, Story Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essay collection, Shelter and Storm, is forthcoming in 2025. Several of her pieces have been nominated for Pushcart prizes. “Safer Than Childbirth” received a special mention…
Understanding Story Structure
How do you scaffold a story? You may have heard about things like Freytag’s Pyramid or the 3-Act structure, but while those tools are helpful in a vacuum, it feels hard to actually hang a working story off of this abstract scaffolding. Great stories don’t just follow certain pre-assigned trajectories—they use real life as a…
Introducing Readers to Life Itself
Essay Recommendation: “My Stint as the Adulterous Flavor-of-the-Month” Read it here, from the New York Times. I don’t think of myself as prone to righteous indignation, but this essay by Paz Pardo made me feel enough of it that I almost stopped reading a few paragraphs in. I’m glad I didn’t, because it shifted my…