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Jon Lovitz’s Writing Tips
Jon Lovitz does AV Club’s Random Rules today. Here, he gives some pretty good writing advice. Context: he’s describing coming back as the host of the show in 1997, and going to the writer’s meeting on...
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Sam Lipsyte on Teaching Creative Writing
Sam Lipsyte discusses teaching creative writing at Financial Times (yeah, Financial Times, I know). A few excerpts– When you teach creative writing, you are already on the defensive. People love to...
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“Writing Is Like a Struggle to Get Back to a Kind of Belated, Quite Impure...
Harold Brodkey at the The Paris Review— Often writing is like a struggle to get back to a kind of belated, quite impure virginity where the issues are not entirely those of corruption and despair....
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Ezra Pound’s Composition Exercises for Young Writers
From Ezra Pound’s literary study, ABC of Reading— 1. Let the pupil write the description of a tree. 2. Of a tree without mentioning the name of the tree (larch, pine, etc.) so that the reader will not...
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Biblioklept Interviews Novelist Lars Iyer
Lars Iyer’s first novel Spurious (Melville House) is by turns, witty, sad, and profound, and garnered serious acclaim on its release earlier this year. Spurious originated in a blog of the same name....
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RIP Harry Crews — A Rambling Riff on a Southern Great
Harry Crews died today at 76 in Gainesville, FL, where he lived and worked for years. This isn’t an obituary—I’m sure you can find them elsewhere (I haven’t looked yet, but they’ll be out there)—it’s...
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“On Getting Started”— John Steinbeck Shares Writing Tips
From John Steinbeck’s 1969 “interview” in The Paris Review (the piece reads more like a series of short writings than a conventional interview): ON GETTING STARTED It is usual that the moment you write...
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John Steinbeck on Work Habits
Mark Twain used to write in bed—so did our greatest poet. But I wonder how often they wrote in bed—or whether they did it twice and the story took hold. Such things happen. Also I would like to know...
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Does Bret Easton Ellis Consider Himself a Serious Novelist?
INTERVIEWER Do you not consider yourself a serious novelist? ELLIS I recently got into one of those weird, terrible fights writers can find themselves in with a friend who has for a long time been...
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W.G. Sebald’s Former Students Share His Writing Advice
In the fall of 2001—only a few months before his too-early death—W.G. Sebald taught a fiction workshop at the University of East Anglia. Two of the students from the workshop, David Lambert and Robert...
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“On the Art of Fiction”— Willa Cather
“On the Art of Fiction” by Willa Cather One is sometimes asked about the “obstacles” that confront young writers who are trying to do good work. I should say the greatest obstacles that writers today...
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