When we talk about a writer’s work, we are talking about the things she makes: poems, essays, books. It’s a mercantile word to apply to the artistic process, and yet it’s an inescapable one. Short
Every writer knows the rule of ‘write what you know,’ but the interesting thing is that you don’t really know what you know until you write it.
An interview with Anna Noyes
Southerners think that West Virginia is the north, and northerners think West Virginia is the south.
The term “unreliable narrator” was first coined in 1961 by the critic Wayne C. Booth, and since then it has become one of fiction’s most recognizable elements. While initially viewed as something
I think everyone has heard this a lot but it’s still true — read with curiosity and hunger — reading is as important as writing, more important, probably, when you’re first starting to write.
I don’t have any goals except to make the reader think and feel. What they think and feel is up to them.
I had written a few aborted short stories before, but really I specialized in aborted novels.
As the real world feels increasingly devoid of magic, we are correct to admire those writers who attempt to interject some magic back into it.
Within its pages, the reader is invited to discover those wondrous things that only great short fiction can offer: an abbreviated window into disparate lives, intense and intricate moments of distress and disclosure, completely self-contained and executed in twenty-five pages or less (Deagler on Gustine's Collection).
The Millennial aspect is important because, like many Millennials, its protagonist does not wear labels easily.
But the true malevolence of Majka’s world—the thing that traps her characters in a state of lifelong discontent—most often manifests in mundane hauntings: regret and remorse, vanished love and vanished youth, feelings of dislocation and the inability to belong
The goal of short fiction is up for debate, but it seems to me that, if a story has a single job, it is to subvert the expectations of the reader.
I want as a reader to be transformed and thrown off balance by what I read, and I try to do that for my reader as well.
