To Use or Not to Use First Person
The author of Short War offers some perspective on whether a first person narrator can enhance or inhibit a story.
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Tags: narrative
Family Stories: Alternatives for Load-Bearing Clichés
The author of Family Family explores why tired tropes proliferate in fiction—and how to avoid them.
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Withholding and Revelation: Managing Information in Fiction
The author of The Last Language considers how to strike the right note of ambiguity in a novel.
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How to Trick Yourself Into Writing a Novel
The author of The Museum of Human History offers a method for moving from short stories to longer-form narratives.
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The Fullness of Omission
The author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story explores what is gained by cutting elements of a narrative.
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The Erotics of Brevity
The author of The Art of Brevity: Crafting the Very Short Story ponders the seductive power of laconic prose.
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Storytelling in Poetry
The author of What Can I Tell You?: Selected Poems examines poetic approaches to narrative.
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In Defense of Interiority and Backstory
The author of The Boundaries of Their Dwelling considers how best to get into characters’ heads.
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Story Dynamics in Poetry
The author of Selected Books of the Beloved illuminates the power of narrative to move a poem forward.
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Craft Capsule: The Arc of Epiphany
The author of Thin Places considers how to write an essay (or essay collection) that follows the arc of epiphany.
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