Welcome to the new Ploughshares website! For answers to commonly asked questions, read here.
I don’t know about you, but when I write my rough drafts, I’m staggering around in the dark. There are plot holes, dropped story lines, and unanswered questions—all the good, gnarly stuff that goes into the early part of the writing process. The key for us writers is—when the time is right—to find the answers…
One of the perks of working in academia is ordering desk copies of books. While more often than not these things are tedious tomes that would put me to sleep, never mind my students, sometimes I happen upon gems, such as The Twentieth-Novel: An Introduction by R.B. Kershner. I’ll admit I don’t remember ordering this…
Like Whitman, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” And in my case, the multitudes are on Facebook. I have eight different profiles to my name—or rather, not to my name. The characters in my harem—born of inside jokes, fictional stories, collaborative projects, and, of course, procrastination—are each their own unique and special flower, complete with birthdays, profile…
When I used to teach intro fiction classes, I noticed that students often turned in stories that featured omniscient third-person narrators, and I can remember doing this when I started writing fiction, too. There’s something very alluring, especially when you first start writing, about being able to access the thoughts of multiple characters, since we’re…
In our Writing Lessons series, writers and writing students will discuss lessons learned, epiphanies about craft, and the challenges of studying writing. This week, we hear from Matthew Wimberley, an MFA student and Starworks Fellow at New York University. You can follow him on Tumblr at matthewwimberley.tumblr.com. —Andrew Ladd, Blog Editor My mother spent three months looking…
It snowed today. It was supposed to snow, but only for a minute, and it was not supposed to stick. Instead it snowed all day and as the sun went down at 4:30 (alas) the snow was still there on the lawn. And while part of me is so not ready for the onset of…
After one year of writing my novel, I took stock of what I’d accomplished—which seemed like very little. Would writing always feel like flailing? How do novelists find their way through? For guidance, I turned to published novelists, whose interviews are presented in One Year In: Writing the Novel. Today’s novelist is Dean Bakopoulos, author of Please Don’t Come Back…
Rick Moody is author of the novels The Four Fingers of Death, The Ice Storm, Purple America, The Diviner, and Garden State, which won the Pushcart Press Editors’ Book Award. He is also the author of two collections of stories, The Ring of Brightest Angels Around Heaven and Demonology, as well as a memoir, The Black Veil, winner…
A while back a friend of mine contacted me with a good idea: he wanted to collect one piece of advice from a number of writers he knew and pass all of them on to his advanced undergraduate workshop students. If you’re anything like me, this is the kind of assignment/favor you’ve thought a lot…
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