Creating a compelling main character is essential to any work of fiction, but creating a character that is perfectly good in every way can be a recipe for a dull story. That’s why it’s important to make your main character flawed. By making your main character flawed, you can create tension, conflict, and depth that […]
Writing is a hard way to make a living, which is why a whole ecosystem exists to help you feel like you’re succeeding at it. Hashtags like #amwriting provide steady pep talks for people wading through the muck of a first draft. Dubious-seeming ads on Facebook peddle frictionless methods for selling thousands of copies of […]
We are delighted to announce that on April 4, at our Spring Revel, Harriet Clark will receive the George Plimpton Prize, and the inaugural Susannah Hunnewell Prize will be presented to Ishion Hutchinson. The George Plimpton Prize, awarded annually since 1993 by the editorial committee of our board of directors, recognizes an emerging writer of […]
Writing a personal narrative is probably one of the most enjoyable writing assignments. People, by nature, are very fond of talking about themselves and sharing their experiences as a part of a text, and this is what this type of writing requires of you. Whether you’re a beginner blogger and share your life story with […]
If a group of people is presented with a body of text, will they be able to spot the human-written passages over the AI-generated ones? The answer is, well — maybe. AI detection work is at the center of a University of Pennsylvania study in its School of Engineering and Applied Science. Chris Callison-Burch, an […]
ChatGPT is Not the End of Writing A longtime university president and writing expert advises against banning the new AI bot — but to use it to teach more effective thinking that is purely human A Writer’s Resource, my co-authored college writing textbook, is about to be published in its seventh edition. While finishing the […]
I was sitting poolside at a San Juan, Puerto Rico, resort bar, minding my own business, when ChatGPT settled into a barstool next to mine and ordered a pina colada. It was a bold move, considering the sun was not yet over the yardarm, as we like to say in the islands. I took another […]
The counterintuitive truth about “the love that dare not speak its name” — a late-19th-century term of art for love between men — is that precluding the name “homosexuality,” it was allowed to be quite loud: It was sung, written, verified and moaned about everywhere, from retellings of classical myths to the dormitories of the […]
David James, editor of the Alaskan literature anthology “Writing on the Edge,” during a signing at Title Wave Books on March 4. James will be at Barnes & Noble in Fairbanks this Saturday from 1 to 3. PHOTO BY Karen Jensen Alaska means different things to different people. A new anthology of 33 Alaska stories, […]
Of journalism and artificial intelligence, “only those who create the best original content will survive,” says the CEO of German media group Axel Springer, which owns Bild and Die Welt. Mathias Deopfner said this in a letter to staff but you’ll forgive me for having read it as being shouted in a German accent to […]
Edgar Allan Poe, born on January 19, 1809, in Boston, Massachusetts, is one of t...
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Ray Bradbury, born in Waukegan, Illinois, in 1920, is a towering figure in Ameri...
In the heart of Paris, amidst the buzz of avant-garde creativity, Gertrude Stein...
Discovering Ploughshares: An Online Haven for Writers Ploughshares, an esteemed ...
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