If you’re used to writing fiction and poetry (or not writing at all!), writing a blog can seem a little intimidating—but it doesn’t have to be. In fact, blogging can be some of the most fun and rewarding writing you’ll ever do. There’s no publishers to answer to, no editors to cover your [...]

Keeping your prose razor-sharp can be hard. As writers, we’ve all felt the urge to describe something with lavish swaths of adjectives, laying down layer after layer of description like a builder slathering on more and more concrete. It’s what writing’s all about, we tell ourselves. It’s our job to make the [...]

As I’ve mentioned before, familiarizing yourself with the historical context of a work of literature is extremely helpful, and often necessary, for its full understanding and analysis. One way to go about this is to research the context of each individual piece, but that’s a lot of work. It turns out that having [...]

Remember the moment you first dreamed of becoming a writer?
Maybe it was high school English class studying Dostoevsky’s social commentary on czarist Russia. Maybe you wrote a story and a teacher encouraged you to submit it to a school magazine. Maybe you majored in creative writing in college, mentoring under [...]

Most of you probably have a favorite novelist, or even a favorite poet, but how many have a favorite playwright? It seems as though most people associate plays with performance and theatre, but they are works of literature above all else. And although reading a novel or a poem is arguably more fluid [...]

Welcome back, recruits. In the last installment of Poetry Boot Camp, we learned about the basics of meter and about the most common type of metrical foot in the English language, the iamb (an unstressed beat followed by a stressed beat, or: x / ). You probably won’t be surprised to hear [...]