What Stories About Racial Trauma Leave Out
The poet and essayist Cathy Park Hong depicts the everyday effects of prejudice in a way readers can’t leave behind.
The Frank Bidart Poem That Sums Up How Artists Innovate
In writing, originality doesn’t have to mean rejecting traditional forms.
How Solitude Feeds the Brain
The novelist Jami Attenberg shares a poem that helped her understand her own relationship to isolation.
The Hemingway Scene That Shows How Humanity Works
The novelist Téa Obreht describes how a single surprising image in The Old Man and the Sea sums up the main character's identity.
The Problem With ‘Good’ Taste
Chuck Klosterman, the author of Raised in Captivity, believes that art criticism often has very little to do with the work itself.
A Moby-Dick–Inspired Memoir of Menopause
On a quest to make sense of what was happening to her body, the author Darcey Steinke sought guidance from female killer whales.
The Purgatory That Comes After Losing a Child
When his 2-year-old daughter died, Jayson Greene turned to writing to survive his grief, and to Dante’s Inferno for words to describe it.
What Some of the World’s Last Hunter-Gatherers Have to Say
An ancient saying he learned from his subjects, the Lamalerans, showed the journalist Doug Bock Clark how to tell the story of a tribe with no recorded history.
The Joyce Carol Oates Story That Shares DNA With 'Cat Person’
What the debut writer Kristen Roupenian learned from a masterful tale that dramatizes the horrors of being a young woman
The Closest of All Possible Encounters
John Wray describes how a wilderness survival guide taught him to face his fears while completing his most challenging book yet.
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.
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
What Writers Can Take Away From the Bible
The National Book Award finalist Min Jin Lee on how the story of Joseph, and the idea that goodness can come from suffering, influences her work
Cujo's Unexpected Lesson About Parenting and Art
The comedian and writer John Hodgman explains what Stephen King’s 1981 horror novel taught him about risking mistakes in storytelling—and fatherhood.
How Surrealism Enriches Storytelling About Women
The author Carmen Maria Machado, a finalist for this year’s National Book Award in Fiction, discusses the brilliance of an eerie passage from Shirley Jackson’s The Haunting of Hill House.
What Writers Can Learn From Goodnight Moon
The Little Fires Everywhere novelist Celeste Ng explains how the surprising structure of the classic children’s book informs her work.
Jenny Zhang: 'Tiny Stories' Are Vital to Literature
The Sour Heart author discusses Roberto Bolaño’s “Dance Card,” humanizing minor characters through irreverence, and homing in on history’s footnotes.
How Rudyard Kipling Turned His Guilt Into Fiction
The novelist Scott Spencer on the English author’s short story “The Gardener” and what it reveals about transforming shame into art
Finding the Emotional Truth in Horror Writing
The novelist Victor LaValle on how dark material hits hardest when it’s balanced out with wonder
Keeping Track of Every Book You’ve Ever Read
A New York Times editor on the coffee-stained list she’s kept for almost three decades
When Memories Are True Even When They’re Not
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Elizabeth Strout discusses Louise Glück’s poem “Nostos” and the powerful way literature can harbor recollection.
When Writing Is Actually About Waiting
Hannah Tinti, the author of The Good Thief, explains what she learned about patience and risk from the T.S. Eliot poem "East Coker."
Colum McCann on Facing the Terror of the Blank Page
The award-winning author discusses the poetry of Wendell Berry, and the importance of abandoning yourself to mystery.
When a Writer’s Great Freedom Lies in Constraint
The memoirist Melissa Febos discusses how an Annie Dillard essay, “Living Like Weasels,” helped refocus her life after overcoming addiction.
The Peculiar Power of a Zadie Smith Sentence
Dissecting a line from the author’s story “The Embassy of Cambodia,” Jonathan Lee questions his own myopia as a novelist.
George Saunders on Chekhov's Different Visions of Happiness
The Lincoln in the Bardo author dissects the Russian writer’s masterful meditations on beauty and sorrow in the short story “Gooseberries,” and explains the importance of questioning your stance while writing.
The Key to Writing a Mystery Is Asking the Perfect Question
The veteran author John Rechy discusses the powerful enigma of William Faulkner and the beauty of the unsolved narrative.
Finding Meaning in Going Nowhere
Ottessa Moshfegh, the author of the novel Eileen, opens up about coping with depression, how writing saved her life, and finding solace in an overlooked song.
Opening Paragraphs Don’t Always Have to Be Exciting
The author Emily Ruskovich discusses the uncanny restraint of Alice Munro and the art of starting a short story.
Making Art at the Painful Margins
What the violent suffering in Dostoyevsky’s The Idiot taught the author Laurie Sheck about finding inspiration in torment and illness
Writing With Infinite Pity
The Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Michael Chabon discusses what he learned about empathy from Borges’s “The Aleph.”
When Novels Frustrate, and Enthrall
Franz Kafka’s work taught the writer Jonathan Lethem about how to incorporate chaos into narratives.
Writing for an Audience of One
The novelist Nell Zink discusses the psalm that inspired her, and what she learned about the solitary artistic process from her Catholic upbringing.
Emily Dickinson’s Mysterious ‘You’
The poem “Wild Nights! - Wild Nights!” taught the novelist Emma Donoghue about sexuality, ambiguity, and intimacy.
Characters Don't Change, but Readers Do
The novelist and poet Alice Mattison discusses finding inspiration in the unconventional short stories of Grace Paley.
Art Should Be Uncomfortable
For the writer Mark Haddon, Miles Davis’s seminal jazz album Bitches Brew is a reminder of the beauty and power of challenging works.
The Lorax and Literature’s Moral Obligation
Despite critics’ dismissal of activist-minded fiction, the author Lydia Millet believes that Dr. Seuss’s classic children’s book is powerful because of its message, not in spite of it.
To Write, Stop Thinking
The writer Kathryn Harrison believes that words flow best when the opaque, unknowable aspects of the mind take over.
The Deeper Truth of Fiction
Dostoyevsky taught the writer Charles Bock that inventive writing is the most effective way to conjure reality.
When Art Is an Act of Survival
Melissa Broder of So Sad Today finds solace in Ernest Becker’s The Denial of Death and in her own creative process.
Can Writing Be Both True and Beautiful?
The author Ethan Canin probes the depths of a single sentence in Saul Bellow’s short story “A Silver Dish.”
Good People Don’t Make Good Characters
Philip Roth taught the author Tony Tulathimutte that writers should aim to show all aspects of their subjects—not only the morally upstanding side.
Alexander Chee on What Writing Parties Reveals About Characters
The author of The Queen of the Night describes how a scene by Charlotte Bronte showed him the dramatic stakes of social interaction in fiction.
The Promise of Flawed Characters
The author Paul Lisicky describes how Flannery O’Connor pulls her subjects apart to make them stronger.
How to Write: A Year in Advice From ‘By Heart’
Highlights from 12 months of interviews with writers about their craft and the authors they love
How Fiction Can Survive in a Distracted World
The writer Kevin Barry believes that the medium’s best hope lies in the mesmerizing power of audio storytelling.
Lorin Stein on the Power of Ambiguity in Fiction
The Paris Review editor discusses why the best stories ask more questions then they answer.
When People—and Characters—Surprise You
Mary Gaitskill, author of The Mare, explains how a single moment in Tolstoy’s Anna Karenina reveals its characters’ hidden selves.
‘Stories Are a Living Thing’
The ex-Granta editor John Freeman on how the author Louise Erdrich perfectly interprets Faulkner
Lauren Groff on Writing With Lightness
The Fates and Furies author describes how Virginia Woolf’s To the Lighthouse portrays the span of life.
The Magic of Where the Wild Things Are
The author and illustrator Brian Selznick discusses how Maurice Sendak showed him the power of picture books.
Subverting the Rule of ‘Write What You Know’
The novelist Angela Flournoy discusses how Zora Neale Hurston helped her imagine characters and experiences alien to her.