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Doug McLean The Frank Bidart Poem That Sums Up How Artists Innovate
In writing, originality doesn’t have to mean rejecting traditional forms.
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Doug McLean How Solitude Feeds the Brain
The novelist Jami Attenberg shares a poem that helped her understand her own relationship to isolation.
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Doug McLean The Hemingway Scene That Shows How Humanity Works
The novelist Téa Obreht describes how a single surprising image in The Old Man and the Sea sums up the main character's identity.
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Doug McLean The Problem With ‘Good’ Taste
Chuck Klosterman, the author of Raised in Captivity, believes that art criticism often has very little to do with the work itself.
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Doug McLean A Moby-Dick–Inspired Memoir of Menopause
On a quest to make sense of what was happening to her body, the author Darcey Steinke sought guidance from female killer whales.
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Doug McLean The Purgatory That Comes After Losing a Child
When his 2-year-old daughter died, Jayson Greene turned to writing to survive his grief, and to Dante’s Inferno for words to describe it.
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Doug McLean What Some of the World’s Last Hunter-Gatherers Have to Say
An ancient saying he learned from his subjects, the Lamalerans, showed the journalist Doug Bock Clark how to tell the story of a tribe with no recorded history.
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Doug McLean The Joyce Carol Oates Story That Shares DNA With 'Cat Person’
What the debut writer Kristen Roupenian learned from a masterful tale that dramatizes the horrors of being a young woman
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Doug McLean The Closest of All Possible Encounters
John Wray describes how a wilderness survival guide taught him to face his fears while completing his most challenging book yet.
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Doug McLean E. B. White’s Lesson for Debut Writers: It’s Okay to Start Small
Nicole Chung explains how an essay about sailing taught her to embrace her fears as she worked up to writing her memoir, All You Can Ever Know.
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Doug McLean The Chekhov Sentence That Contains Almost All of Life
Gary Shteyngart dissects one of the “most unexpected” lines in fiction and shares how it influenced his latest novel, Lake Success.
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Doug McLean The Powerful Practice of Writing by Hand
The author Laura van den Berg on what inspired her newest novel, The Third Hotel, and how she accesses the part of the mind that fiction comes from
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Doug McLean A Writer’s Fixation on Sound
The author R. O. Kwon reflects on the relationship of rhythm to writing and how she stopped obsessing over the first 20 pages of her new novel, The Incendiaries.
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Doug McLean What Writers Can Take Away From the Bible
The National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee on how the story of Joseph, and the idea that goodness can come from suffering, influences her work
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Doug McLean What Writers Can Learn From Goodnight Moon
The Little Fires Everywhere novelist Celeste Ng explains how the surprising structure of the classic children’s book informs her work.
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Doug McLean Jenny Zhang: 'Tiny Stories' Are Vital to Literature
The Sour Heart author discusses Roberto Bolaño’s “Dance Card,” humanizing minor characters through irreverence, and homing in on history’s footnotes.
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Doug McLean Finding the Emotional Truth in Horror Writing
The novelist Victor LaValle on how dark material hits hardest when it’s balanced out with wonder
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Zak Bickel / Katie Martin / Paul Spella … The Best Writing Advice of 2016
Highlights from 12 months of interviews with writers about their craft and the authors they love
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Doug McLean When Novels Frustrate, and Enthrall
Franz Kafka’s work taught the writer Jonathan Lethem about how to incorporate chaos into narratives.
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Doug McLean Writing for an Audience of One
The novelist Nell Zink discusses the psalm that inspired her, and what she learned about the solitary artistic process from her Catholic upbringing.
