Why Every Writer Should be Reading Creative Nonfiction Essays
Enormous parts of ourselves are defined within a sliver of a moment. These moments often become personal essays. The personal or creative nonfiction essay is a necessary work that all writers should be reading. We expand our humanity by reading CNF. Simply put, the...
Five Tips to Overcome Writer’s Block
Five Tips to Overcome Writer’s Block Ah, writer’s block. The bane of every writer’s existence. It doesn’t matter how long a person has been writing, we all have a period of time where writing just doesn’t happen. Either nothing is good enough or the ideas just aren’t...
Exploring Poetry as a Fiction Writer
Last year, I took a poetry class for the first time. Despite being an avid reader and writer of fiction, I didn’t have much experience with poetry. I often found it boring, vague, or difficult to read. However, I was interested in learning more about the art form, and...
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...
