Now that he’s reached mid-life, Jeff in San Diego, California, is eager to start writing fiction, but he worries that creative writing classes may be simply self-indulgent or otherwise unhelpful. He shouldn’t be. Across the nation, older...
Our discussion about cursive handwriting and whether it should be taught in schools brought a tremendous response from listeners. Most agreed that there are so many benefits to learning to write this way that it’s well worth the time and...
Alexander Chee’s essay in The Morning News about studying writing with Annie Dillard includes a memorable description of how it felt to get back papers that she’d marked up. This is part of a complete episode.
The novels Gadsby by Ernest Vincent Wright and A Void by Georges Perec are examples of constrained writing or lipograms. Lipogrammatic writing is composed entirely with words that don’t contain a particular letter, such as, in this case, the...
The anatomy of effective prose, and the poetry of anatomy. Ever wonder what it’d be like to audit a class taught by a famous writer? A graduate student’s essay offers a taste of a semester studying with author Annie Dillard. Also, what...
Joe Moran’s essay on writing well suggests that his forthcoming book is a great read. It’s called First You Write a Sentence: The Elements of Reading, Writing … and Life. This is part of a complete episode.