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Should You Get a PhD in Creative Writing?

Photo by Wrote courtesy of Creative Commons

At AWP in February, one of the best panels I attended was titled “What’s a PhD in Creative Writing Worth?” The conclusions I drew after hearing each panelist speak were:

A) You should only get a PhD in Creative Writing if you plan to teach and […]

Author Interview: Tom Barbash

Today I want to welcome Tom Barbash, author of the short story collection Stay Up With Me, which hits bookstores TODAY. (See below for a list of Tom’s Bay Area readings.) Tom is the author of the novel The Last Good Chance and the bestselling nonfiction work On Top of the World: Cantor Fitzgerald, […]

Common Writing Mistakes to Avoid

First, I want to announce that the winner of the BlogHer ’13 swag and copy of Guy Kawasaki’s ebook APE: Author, Publisher, Entrepreneur, is …

ANNE ALLEN!

Congratulations, Anne! Please email me your mailing address so I can send you your swag!

Now I want to talk a little about craft and […]

Translating Trauma into Memoir

Some of you may remember that in July 2003, an 86-year-old man drove his car through the crowded Santa Monica Farmers’ Market outside of LA, killing ten people and injuring dozens more, many of them critically. That story struck a chord with me because I used to shop at the Santa Monica Farmers’ Market when […]

Are You Listening to All the Wrong Voices?

Today I’d like to welcome guest blogger Laura Joyce Davis, who is here to talk to us about shutting out those nagging voices that tell us to do the laundry, make more money, and clean out the basement—instead of doing what we’re meant to be doing—writing.

Laura Joyce Davis was the winner for fiction […]

Forget NaNoWriMo—Take The Writerland Challenge

Let’s Set Our Own Writing Goals This Month Yesterday marked the first day of the 14th annual National Novel Writing Month, and I wish all participants the very best success. For those of you who, like me, do not plan to participate because you’ll likely write 1666 words of crap every day in order to […]

Constance Hale Has a Crush on Verbs

I am thrilled to welcome wordsmith Constance Hale, bestselling author of Sin and Syntax and the just-released Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing. Constance is here to talk about … you guessed it: VERBS.

My Crush on Verbs By Constance Hale

How can a person write a whole book, just on […]

How to Write Kick-Ass Character Descriptions

I’m guilty of it, too: The description of a new character who has just entered your story as having “big brown eyes and frizzy black hair” or “ginger hair that cascaded down her shoulders and eyes the color of jade.” No matter how creative you get, describing a person according to his or her hair […]

Five Things I’ve Learned About Memoir Writing

1. Your protagonist (you) should be 80-90% sympathetic with only a few flaws.

I used to think that the more flawed a character was, the more people would be able to relate to him/her. I quickly learned that too many flaws make a character unlikable. Readers don’t want to read 200-300 pages about a […]

Ben Fountain: Author Interview

Today I had the pleasure to meet Ben Fountain, who came to lunch at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Ben’s first novel, Billy Lynn’s Long Halftime Walk, debuted this month. His short story collection, Brief Encounters with Che Guevara, won a PEN/Hemingway award, a Barnes & Noble Discover Award for Fiction, a Whiting Writers […]

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