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 […]
The Writing Retreat could have been a decent little thriller, and there’s definitely glimmers in here of a better book under the overwhelming amount of baggage that comes packed in the 400 or so pages this one operates with. Between the angst-filled characters, the laborious pace, and the generous helping of the ludicrously incredulous, this […]
I’ve always thought of myself as a writer, although saying it out like that sounds a bit pompous, at least to me. Building something through my words never fails to thrill me, but I wouldn’t say I like to attach a defined role to it. I think the lack of pressure on my younger self […]
“THE WASTELAND GROWS,” wrote Nietzsche over a century ago. “Woe to him who hides wastelands within.” Since then, the wastelands have grown more indiscriminately within and without. Our social and spiritual lives wither on our cell phone screens. Our cities, habitats, and public arenas suffer from a blight whose causes remain obscure while the effects […]
I began listening to Wicca Phase Springs Eternal’s Full Moon Mystery Garden after I took two road trips through Death Valley, the first literal (in California) and the second figurative (in a hospital). So when I heard him say, “On a mountain under full moon / I could say goodnight and mean it” and then, […]
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 […]
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, […]
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