the work

Have I been doomed by competence? What if I die a better administrator than an artist?

Then also recognizing that there are certain effects in horror movies and weird movies that can be translated into fiction in a useful way. Not like jump cuts and crude stuff like that. But I pull from movies all the time in my fiction, I just try to translate it in such a way that it’s interesting in terms of craft and not just about scares or som... See more

He’s unlikable, but he’s also the only person on the expedition who actually does anything. He always takes action. I set up, hopefully, the situation where the reader maybe doesn’t like him but they still are like, “Oh, he actually tried to do something!” That’s useful in terms of how we think of characterization, because we’re often led astray by... See more

You didn’t know quite what you thought, and you didn’t know quite how to respond to the conversation you found yourself drawn into. Maybe it felt exciting; more likely, a bit embarrassing to be dumbstruck and tongue-tied. Now you have something—maybe preliminary, doubtless evolving, but recognizably your own contribution to an ineluctably social pr... See more

In the back of my mind right now is the AI “art” worshippers’ conviction that process is an obstacle to creation instead of being the whole thing. Like: what if we just removed the work part? What if we just removed the effort? I think it’s quite beautiful that Louise Gluck would say writing never gets easier. It shouldn’t! Ease isn’t the point.

Characters like Nikolai and Stoner, who react to life more often than they “take action”—whatever that term means—are often labeled by my students as passive characters. Sometimes a student is advised by his or her peers to give characters “higher stakes” or “more agency .” This tends to lead me to groan internally. Isn’t living from day to day eno... See more

Thinking through —rather than just thinking—is important. A thought or an idea is never that precious. People have thoughts and ideas all the time, many of them preliminary. Sometimes people mistake their feelings for thoughts and ideas, which are in turn mistaken for absolute truths. The point of writing and reading fiction is not to stay with the... See more

The recurring hypocrisy makes me wonder: Do we *actually* not want people to go through what we went through....or do we secretly think what we went through is foundational to good work?