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 and websites, centered on a certain theme to help you jump-start your week.
From Roald Dalh to Shel Silverstein, Ploughshares bloggers have explored children’s books and what we can learn from them about writing.
A crucial lesson I learned early on in my attempts at writing fiction is that every character is you–and not you. Characters have parts of you inside of them because you wrote them. But they are still not you. Chris Abani once said in a workshop that readers will always wonder if your characters are…
Poets don’t expect to be famous. We may fantasize about it of course—what if Terrance Hayes were to appear on Jimmy Fallon or Ada Limón had her own reality show? What if NBC televised the Poetry Society of America award ceremonies?
Philippe Besson clearly wants to discourage his readers from mistaking his novelistic creation for straightforward autobiography. Equally, though, Besson prompts us to question our assumptions, to pay attention not only to the fictiveness of his novel, but also to the narrative quality of our own life stories.
