Craft and Creativity
Craft essays, criticism, and creative pieces. To get them in your inbox for free, join our newsletter.
Newest Features
A Guide to Greatness
About the Author: Tamara Dean’s stories and essays are forthcoming or have appeared in The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Guardian, One Story, Orion, The Southern Review, Story Magazine, and elsewhere. Five have been nominated for Pushcart prizes and one was a 2021 National Magazine Award finalist. She’s the author of best-selling textbooks…
Prufrock Howls: A Look at Inverted Story Arcs in Poetry
Most fiction writers and dramatists are familiar with the classic story arc: an inciting moment, rising action, climax, and resolution. Poems, while not always plot driven, contain story arcs as well. Here we will look at two examples of atypical story arcs: poems with falling action, and narrative momentum that is cyclical—in what I am…
On Timing and Tension
Fiction, like time, contracts and expands in surprising and unexpected ways. The relationship your story has to time reveals something crucial about your characters and the conflicts they navigate. By manipulating time, fiction writers can heighten the tension that makes a reader keep reading. Storytellers have two useful tools for playing with time: scene and…