Writing For Your Brain
Being a writer has never been easy; many of us aren't taken seriously compared to those who become lifesaving doctors or multimillion-dollar businessmen who travel to space. Many times, writers take these kinds of comparisons to heart, and underestimate the power we...
Five Uncommon Ways to Outline Your Fiction
When you hear the word outline, you may think of the bulleted list you had to write for some academic paper. But when you’re writing fiction, that method doesn’t always work. Sometimes you need something different, something new. Here are five alternative approaches...
Integrating the Lived and Written: Lessons Learned from Shirley Jackson and Sylvia Plath
As writers, our lives and shared histories all serve as fodder for our work. Not only does our medium allow us to immortalize these instances, but to process our feelings, cultural contexts, and preconceived notions. Even still, the act of artistic self-disclosure can...
Interview with Elise Hitchings: An Inside Scoop into Freelance Editing
If you’re like me, then you love the thought of going into publishing as your future career. But you also struggle to navigate the world of literary jobs, especially editing jobs. Where do you even start? Well, to give some insight on freelance editing, I spoke to...
An Athlete’s Guide to Creative Writing
Being a creative writing major, one could expect me to be writing five days a week. Instead, I get punched in the head five days a week. I’ve been training Muay Thai for the past year and a half and recently had my first fight. There’s a level of guilt I hold for not...
American Wallpaper: Misrepresentations Through the Decades
Being an adopted Korean in the late 1990s and early 2000s in the peak of boy bands and sparkly pop princesses was, for a lack of a better word, hard. Sometimes, I would cheer for the white brunette just to feel relevant. While all my friends drooled over Justin...
Disability Representation Across Literature: What Can You Do?
I have very weak hands, and I mean that quite literally. For one, I didn’t learn how to tie my shoes until the ripe age of twelve. Even as a college student, I’m dropping things left and right and frantically trying to cool off my fingers when they swell from holding...
Short Stories: The Bane of the Novelist
If you’re a long-form writer like myself, you know the struggle of reigning in your desire to provide every detail of your character’s life, or else risk your work becoming a massive info dump. You may also suspect that trying to start your career as a novelist with...
Superheroes: the Patron Saints of Infinite Suffering
Batman lost his parents at gunpoint at age nine. At the same age, I lost my mother to breast cancer. Ever since, feeling like half an orphan, I’ve always felt a special kinship with Batman and people that have felt the devastation of losing others. Since 2020, we all...
The Language of Flowers: How to Use Emotional Metaphor
“Yes, flowers have their language. Theirs is an oratory that speaks in perfumed silence, and there is tenderness, and passion, and even the light-heartedness of mirth, in the variegated beauty of their vocabulary. To the poetical mind, they are not mute to each other;...
Sculptors, and Painters, and Writers, Oh My!
For many writers, gaining experience and knowledge are major parts of the writing process. Barbara Kingsolver, the author of the creative nonfiction book Animal, Vegetable, Miracle spent a year focusing on eating locally in order to write a book about her experience....
Invitation to My Literary Dinner Party
Ever wondered what it might be like to meet a writer? To engage in conversation or to hear the perspectives from literary creators themselves? I present to you my literary dinner party with five writers sharing their insights over drinks, dinner, and conversation. ...
