writers on writing

Practical things you can do to make your text clearer.

Open two copies of the same document and put them side-by-side. Edit in one, while referring to the other.

Rewrite your first draft using this rule: no significant words from the first draft are allowed in the second draft.

If your sentence has more than two commas in it, it’s probably too long.

I... See more

Look at how the writers you love are doing things, and then copy them. I’m such a believer in copying. When I was teaching writing, I used to say: “Leave off this paragraph of an Elizabeth Bowen story; write the next paragraph.” And they all thought that they were copying Elizabeth Bowen. It didn’t sound like her at all. It sounded like them, but... See more

At the heart of the Review is the writing, which is always notably strong and impressively varied. How do you pull together all the excerpts, interviews, and original writing?

We organize The Analog Sea Review around unannounced subthemes, each beginning with a piece of visual art. The themes, which readers have to figure out for themselves, often... See more

In the fall of 2017, July started to feel a second novel coming on. This time, though, she wanted to do things differently, to embrace the mystery of not knowing—what the writer Grace Paley called “the open destiny of life”—for as long as she could. “I felt like there was a way in which one’s anxiety is very calmed by having a plot,” she told me... See more