Most of us learned at some point about , the ancient Greek concept that tragic stories give us a kind of emotional cleanse, which is meant to explain the enduring appeal of tragedies—a reason Achilles...
On Writing
“No book can ever be finished. While working on it we learn just enough to find it immature the moment we turn away from it.” - Karl R. Popper Karl Popper was not referring to fiction when he said th...
The question is completely legitimate and likely innocent (and of course reminds me how much I hate the word blog). Yet I can receive the query as a request for justification—maybe because I have aske...
(Also published on Stuff Writers Like) If you have ever been struck by the thought, “I’m a fraud; I can’t really do this,” you know that it feels very isolating. But in fact, research shows that as ma...
I regularly pray that no copies of my earliest adult attempts at fiction writing are ever unearthed. I was making at least half of the common writing mistakes in them: telling when I could be showing;...
