Writing Advice

Cover of You Should Pity Us Instead side by side.
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Origin Stories: Amy Gustine’s You Should Pity Us Instead

Amy Gustine’s debut collection, You Should Pity Us Instead, is an unsentimental exploration of people in distress. I recently asked Gustine where she drew her inspiration. She told me that stories come alive for her when she opposes two equal forces, which explains why each one feels like such an exquisitely engineered work of tension….

Left human hand open.
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Body Language: What Writers Can Learn from Artists

Body language is the nonverbal expression of emotion and thought—a form of communicating arguably more effective than the system made up of words. Words are adequate for the less complex task of conveying information, but body language and tone do the heavy lifting. By some estimates only 7 percent of all communication is verbal. Our…

Cover of Private Citizen side by side.
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Origin Story: Tony Tulathimutte’s Private Citizens

Tony Tulathimutte’s debut novel, Private Citizens, charts the spectacular floundering of four recent college graduates. His eye is so sharp, his characters so recognizable, and his truth so pitiless that I sometimes had to close the book, as if he might read my soul through its pages. This is one of the most provocatively intelligent…

multicolored painting
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Structure: What Writers Can Learn from Visual Artists

Of all the rules that artists follow, this one is paramount: never ever fill in details before the structure is done. Painters sometimes spend hours sketching before ever touching the canvas. And when they finally do, they build their work slowly, layering in color, laboring on the drawing underneath, roughing in the composition before tightening it…

Woman in a yellow sweatshirt holding up eyeglasses.
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What Happens When We Read: The Mind’s Eye and How it Works

Reading is a cognitive experience and written language can elicit in the brain an array of sensory perceptions. A description of an apple pie once made me put the book down so I could bask in its warm smell. But what the brain does most readily is see. It’s the mind’s “eye” that engages when…