E. B. White’s Lesson for Debut Writers: It’s Okay to Start Small
Nicole Chung explains how an essay about sailing taught her to embrace her fears as she worked up to writing her memoir, All You Can Ever Know.
By Heart
Authors share and discuss their all-time favorite passages in literature.
The Chekhov Sentence That Contains Almost All of Life
Gary Shteyngart dissects one of the “most unexpected” lines in fiction and shares how it influenced his latest novel, Lake Success.
The Powerful Practice of Writing by Hand
The author Laura van den Berg on what inspired her newest novel, The Third Hotel, and how she accesses the part of the mind that fiction comes from
A Writer’s Fixation on Sound
The author R. O. Kwon reflects on the relationship of rhythm to writing and how she stopped obsessing over the first 20 pages of her new novel, The Incendiaries.
What J.D. Salinger Understood About Chance Encounters
A.M. Homes on the short-story writer’s “For Esmé—With Love and Squalor,” and the lifelong effects of fleeting interactions
What Richard Pryor’s Stand-Up Can Teach Writers
The nonfiction author Cutter Wood on how the comedian’s work helped him imbue minor characters with emotional life
How Gabriel García Márquez Created a World in a Sentence
The novelist Mary Morris explains how the opening line of One Hundred Years of Solitude shaped her path as a writer.
Writing a Feminist Novel With a Man’s Point of View
The author Tayari Jones explains what Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon taught her about the centrality of male protagonists in stories that explore female suffering.
The Necessity of 'Willful Blindness' in Writing
The memoirist Terese Marie Mailhot on how Maggie Nelson’s Bluets taught her to explode the parameters of what a book is supposed to be
The Technological Shift Behind the World's First Novel
The author Martin Puchner on the way advances in paper production helped pave the way for The Tale of Genji