Most-read posts
To the man on the phone who called me today at my university office and asked if I had a few minutes to help him figure out how to get published.
First, wow, the phone rang. That hardly ever happens. I wasn’t sure it worked.
Second, no, I don’t have a few minutes. I’m getting ready to go teach a class, and I’m frantically trying to grade a few more quizzes. Continue reading
If you focus on the stuff that matters to you, everything else will fall into place: finding readers, an audience, your tribe.
Pay attention to what you Tweet and share on Facebook.
Maybe that’s the material you should be blogging about. Every time you share an article or tweet or retweet a link, you’re microblogging. Why not blog-blog it? Take a few extra minutes and say something about that link and you’ve got a blog post.
I was on Facebook for a few years before I started blogging. I thought, What the hell do I have to blog about? After about a year or so on Facebook, I found that most of my friends were other writer/teachers. People I worked with. People I’d gone to school with. People the people I worked with had gone to school with.
Continue reading
This is important: no matter what Chad Harbach and John Stazinski say, my little informal survey did NOT indicate that MFA programs concentrate solely on short stories. They are not “anti-novel.” At least not on purpose anyway. The perception that they are “against novels” (discussed here) is a product of the fact that they try to fit novels into a workshop pedagogy that’s built to accommodate shorter forms.
A lot of people showed up for the panel “A Novel Problem” at AWP 2012. David Haynes told the packed room at the Chicago Hilton that it’s not just a question of whether or not individual instructors “allow” novel chapters to be brought to workshop. It’s this: Do the primary pedagogies of workshop serve novel writing?
Exactly.
While the set and costumes of Downton Abbey are early 20th century, the plot is thoroughly 21st century: fast and full of tension. People call it “addictive.” Gawker even says “It’s like crack.” What makes a narrative “addictive,” and what can we learn from it as novel writers?
Here’s a close reading of the first 15 minutes of Downtown Abbey, series 1, episode 1.
Here are some specific and potentially provocative things about that interesting little document called a Statement of Purpose. If you agree or disagree with me, great! Put it in the comments. I’d love to get some more do’s and don’ts archived here.
Don’t talk about how, as a child, you loved to read and write. Everyone says that. For perhaps the first time in your life, you’ll be with your kind of people! I know that it’s important to YOU that your journey started when you were a kid, but it is not as important to me as what happened to you from that point on.
Do talk about who you read now, who influenced you. Everyone’s journey starts in a very similar way (at the library, at a desk making up weird stories, etc.), but then those journeys take lots of interesting forks. Don’t focus on how your story started, on your Act I. Focus on Act II. Because what you’re trying for is an Act III. Continue reading
Dear former student o’ mine,
Thanks for your email/Facebook message asking for a LOR. I’m glad to hear that you want to pursue a graduate degree in creative writing.
This is one of those moments in life—like graduation, marriage, the birth of a child, getting a job—in which you proceed through a gauntlet of people’s attentions, and thus, you need to follow rules of etiquette—not just with me but with every single person you are about to encounter. Not to go all Emily Post on you, but mind your P’s and Q’s. If you aren’t sure what those are, pay attention. I’m going to talk explicitly about implicit subjects related to the MFA Program Biz. Continue reading
Note: If you’d like to follow the progress of my book, follow Linda on Twitter, @MrsColePorter. Believe me, if Linda were alive today, she would totally use Twitter.
Linda Lee Thomas Porter died on this day, May 20, 1954. She died in her apartment in the Waldorf Towers after a long battle with emphysema.
Linda described her illness as “smothering spells.” Imagine that: smothering to death over the course of a decade. She once said, “I suppose I shouldn’t want to stop coughing as I have coughed for so many years, if I stopped, the shock might kill me.” Continue reading