Authors Electric

Image source: International Writers' Collective   Every term, my students at the International Writers' Collective ask: how do you develop a writing practice? If you’re taking one of our core writing workshops, you already have a rhythm. It might be the last minute sprint to finish your exercise in time for the deadline. Any schedule is better than none. Try to hold onto it, even after the term is over. Need a hard deadline? Set yourself a realistic goal. Need a spanking when you miss your deadline? Find a writing buddy. Do what works for you. I have it easy. Writing is my work. This is what my daily practice looks like. 08.00 Wake up. 08.05 Make coffee. Unless you’re the novelist Jennifer Egan , in which case you reach for your journal and start to write. She doesn’t mind that her handwriting is illegible, even to her. She wants to surprise herself. There are monsters and plot points and character arcs to be found in the grey space betw...

This week marks the start of my third term of teaching creative writing at the International Writers’ Collective , a creative writing community here in Amsterdam. It seemed like a good occasion to revisit a blog post I wrote in December 2017, wondering out loud in truly Hamlet-like fashion, whether I should be teaching at all. My existential doubts stemmed from a question Francine Prose asks straight up in Reading Like a Writer : Can the love of language be taught? Can a gift for storytelling be taught? … The answer is no. What then was I expected to teach? Image source: Pixabay the first time When I was in college, I worked as a tutor. One semester, I taught math to local high school students. Another semester, I’d help premed students learn to write an essay.  The latter was a deeply painful experience because it turns out that, in order to write you need to be able to think. When all you’re trying to do is pass your freshman humanities class, then writing is...

Poster for my master class for the International Writers' Collective Last summer, I gave a master class in novel writing for the International Writers’ Collective . Or rather, I squirmed in the hot seat while director Sarah Carriger peppered me with a series of home questions about my novel The Dancing Girl and the Turtle . I did my best to answer her as well as the lively crowd that kept lobbing new ones at me. There’s so much more to say in response to all those questions but here I want to zoom in on two aspects of that class: the use of violence and historical fact in fiction. silence The inciting incident of my novel is the rape of Song Anyi. The event is horrible in every possible way but, to my mind, the real violation comes later.  The Dancing Girl and the Turtle is set in Shanghai 1937. The city is a no-holds-barred kind of place where everything and everyone is available for sale at the right price. In that market, Anyi would be damaged goods if her...