How can you avoid bad dream-writing? Part One of this post appeared on Monday. All right, let’s talk about the good things dreams can do for your writing process. Let’s have some nice dreams. Real-ize Your Dream Have you ever used a dream as inspiration for writing? George Saunders did this in “Pastoralia,” which, as he puts it,…
In our Roundups segment, we’re looking back at all the great posts since the blog started in 2009. We explore posts from our archives as well as other top literary magazines, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week. This week we have posts on story endings. So you’ve got a great story, but don’t…
I had the strangest dream about you last night, my husband said. You were surrounded by wood. There were wood walls, floors. All this old furniture everywhere. Of course, a wife is keenly interested in her husband’s dreams, especially if she’s the star. But what struck me about my husband’s dream was its accuracy: I’m…
I dreamed of calves’ feet for two weeks, wondering if I could actually boil four of them in my kitchen. The goal? Homemade gelatin according to the recipe in Helen Cramp’s 1913 edition of The Institute Cookbook. I wanted to engage the cookbook the way I had the other vintage books, to get underneath the…
The Story of My Purity Francesco Pacifico Farrar, Straus and Giroux, March 2013 304 pages $26.00 I don’t know much about providence, but it seems extraordinarily lucky that Francisco Pacifico’s first novel to make it into English translation—a ribald picaresque of Catholicism, breasts, and a conspiracy theory wherein Pope John Paul II was a Jewish…
I’ve said it before: you have to play to win. And I’m sorry to say, in terms of the slush pile, “winning” is a bit of a crapshoot. To rise out of the slush pile you must submit and keep submitting. It’s a numbers game and resiliency and pluck pay off. And there’s the…
You know you’re reading something lovely when you come across a line in a story that makes you stop reading, get out a pen, and draw a dark line across the page. (And you know it’s exceptional if you even have to get up out of your seat to search for that pen.) “There are…
I have favorite books. And then I have favorite books, as in, the objects themselves, the ones made weird and irreplaceable by the extra markings in or on them—the annotations, the inscriptions, the love notes. When people ask for my “favorites,” this is the list I actually want to give. Item #1: Ken Kesey’s One…
For Those About To Write (We Salute You) will present a writing exercise to the Ploughshares community every few weeks. We heartily encourage everyone reading to take part! It was mid-morning but there were no shadows on my wall; the sun was being shy, so I knew it was grey and drizzly outside without even…
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