“I started ‘writing’ before I knew how to write” explains the first author in this anthology, “I began my apprenticeship telling and hearing stories.” What follows is a “chorus of female voices,” in keeping with an oral... Read More

Students often speak of wanting to “be a writer,” glossing over the vast amount of doing required to occupy that particular state of being. The contributors to this volume agree that writers don’t necessarily choose to be writers;... Read More

It was May, 1985, and the author, a professor at the University of Rochester, was grading papers “with the usual sense of futility” (as he recalled in a letter to his father) when he noticed that the sentence through which he was... Read More

Robert Pirsig’s Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance received over a hundred rejections before it became a best seller. This fact helps many writers not take rejection personally, but the author of this writing book argues that... Read More

Writing about storytelling is itself a form of storytelling. Acknowledging this, and granting that “anyone who writes about revising stories must be acutely conscious that the story she is telling is one of many possible versions,”... Read More

“It used to be that everything you needed to know to write a magazine article was the topic,” says the author. “Writers who believe this is still true will be left out of the money.” In her book, the forty-year publishing veteran... Read More

Underdescription and overdescription are the two most common mistakes that writers make with setting, according to the author. These are symptoms of an ailment he calls “wallpaper settings.” In this book he gives diagnosis,... Read More

One of the most beguiling aspects of fantasy fiction, as any fan can attest, is the imagery evoked by the writers’ words: places, creatures, settings far beyond those of every day. In this book, a brief but fairly thorough treatment of... Read More