A 1905 letter from Virginia Woolf offers comfort to anyone who lacks confidence in their own work. As a young, would-be writer, Woolf herself expressed doubt about her own abilities. It would be another 23 years before she published her...
Reading A Swim in a Pond in the Rain: In Which Four Russians Give a Master Class on Writing, Reading, and Life (Bookshop|Amazon) feels like auditing a class with creative writing professor writer George Saunders, author of the acclaimed Lincoln in...
William Shakespeare’s early schooling was less an English class than a Latin training ground for rhetoric, imitation, and argument. In How to Think Like Shakespeare: Lessons from a Renaissance Education, Scott Newstok explains that Stratford grammar...
Bonnie Hearn Hill’s essay “What I Wish I’d Known” offers aspiring authors lots of great tips gleaned from Hill’s long career of writing books. The essay won a contest sponsored by The Writer magazine. This is part of a...
What are you obligated to put into and leave out of a memoir? What kind of consequences should you expect if you’re completely honest about others in your life? Well-known writers, including Pat Conroy, Cheryl Strayed, Sue Monk Kidd, Anne...
Steven Pinker’s new book, The Sense of Style, which Martha cites among her all-time favorite books about writing, has just the right message: don’t worry so much about the errors, because you’ll make them, and if writing...