October 04, 2016
Editor Phong Nguyen has a new novel out today, The Adventures of Joe Harper. The Adventures of Joe Harper picks up where The Adventures of Tom Sawyer leaves off. Twenty years after plundering with Tom, Joe Harper is a failed pirate turned vagabond, wandering in search of the perfect cave in which to die. What he finds instead is a philosophizing Chinese railroad worker and an Amish woman fleeing a forced marriage―a ...
October 01, 2016
This is a continuation of my posts on teaching revision, most recently this one. If you’d like to contribute a guest post or response, please contact me at m [dot] salesses [at gmail etc.].
ONE OF THE THINGS I've been thinking about is how grading can improve the workshop. No one seems to like grading students' creative writing itself, which I understand. But I've never found grading papers to improve papers, ...
September 23, 2016
This is a continuation of my posts on teaching revision, specifically this one, this one, and this one. If you’d like to contribute a guest post or response, please contact me at m [dot] salesses [at gmail etc.].
In my last post I wrote about how "Revision Notes" helped me teach craft as cultural, since it allowed the workshop to get a better sense of the individual context for the decisions the author was making in ...
September 12, 2016
I was at the Slice Conference this weekend and sat in on a novel structure workshop run by Ted Thompson, author of The Land of Steady Habits. Thompson had read people's synopses, but of course not the full manuscripts, and the workshop was only an hour long. He ran it more like a quick presentation of long and short lines of tension and then a lengthy Q&A. At the end Thompson gave students a prompt they could complete ...
