All posts in "craft of fiction"

Experimental Fiction

Aug 27, 2019

This semester I am teaching a workshop on "experimental fiction." "Experimental" is a term that gets thrown around a lot with very little meaning or with one specific meaning: outside of a Western psychological realist norm. If everyone were writing with the Western...

Revisiting the Novel, Plot, & the Inciting Incident

Jun 1, 2017

Two years ago I wrote about the plot of the American novel and the importance of the inciting incident(s) in The Millions. This post is a rewriting of that essay, charting a certain understanding of the novel's plot from where I left it then to how I conceive of it...