A Momentary Taste of Being

Craft in Fiction via Brandywine Books

On Creative Writing What more recommendation can you have than this beginning: TO: My ungrateful students RE: An inspirational letter Oh, read it anyway. You may not need this postscript as much as I need to give it to you.

Stanford Online Writing Courses

From the previous post on how to write, I liked this so much I needed to keep it forever: Don't be one of those writers who sentence themselves to a lifetime of sucking up to Nabokov.

These ten rules, yeah, these 176 rules for writing fiction shall ye heed.

via Books Inq. Francine Prose on the question that has puzzled educators for some time. Like Ms. Prose, I tend to side with those who say that there are aspects that can be taught.  But there is a fundamental reality that sometimes we struggle to come to terms with.  While almost anyone can be taught to write acceptable prose, there are a very small number of people who are born writers.  And by this, I don't mean particularly good prose artists, all of whom are published, but rather, people for whom there is no other way of living. I think of myself, regardless of my occupation at any point in my life, as a writer because when I cease to write, there is a fundamental instability in my life.  That is, writing provides a framework, a real framework, for everything I do.  It allows me to process information and make sense of it.  In some ways, things do not become real until they have been written.  The process of writing is the process of reification-...