By Phillip Lopate In writing memoir, the trick, it seems to me, is to establish a double perspective, that will allow the reader to participate vicariously in the experience as it was lived (the confusions and misapprehensions of the child one was, say), while conveying the sophisticated wisdom of one’s current self. This second perspective,…

“One of the things that young writers falsely hope exists is inspiration. A lot of young writers fail because they aren’t putting in the hours. …I think it’s crucial that we have some kind of rhythm. Whether you can write all day every day, or whether you can write four hours on Sunday. Whatever it…

1) To convey a dynamic nonfiction narrative, one must build oneself into a character on the page The problem with I is not that it is in bad taste but that fledgling personal essayist and memoirists may think they have conveyed more than they actually have with that one syllable.  In their minds, that I…

1) As a writer your only job is to make the reader turn the page As a writer you have only one job: to make the reader turn the page. Of all the tools a writer uses to make a reader turn the page, the most essential is the plot. It doesn’t matter if the…

Some of my most popular Deviate podcast episodes have been about the craft of writing (and, often, travel writing specifically). This has dovetailed nicely with the creative writing classes I offer in Paris each summer — and I have, over the years, featured interviews with such Paris co-teachers as Major Jackson, Hala Alyan, and Elena…

1) Most schools employ outmoded models of learning We learn and teach in institutions that were designed to train citizens for the Industrial Age. From compulsory public schooling for K-12, to the birth of the research university, virtually all of the apparatus of “school” was designed to retrain farmers and artisans to the Industrial mode…

Every so often university students interview me about my travel-writing career — particularly its origins — and some of these exchanges are worth publishing here, since these questions are relevant and worth making public for the sake of other aspiring writers. The exchange below was initiated in 2018 by Marleigh Love, a creative writing student…

1) A reader of books is a reader of himself Every reader, as he reads, is actually the reader of himself. The writer’s work is only a kind of optical instrument he provides the reader so he can discern what he might never have seen in himself without this book. The reader’s recognition in himself…

Literature is created on both sides of the frontier that divides fact from fiction, and it is crossed by writers quite casually. But it is a border that should be defended. Orginally published in The Guardian, November 16, 2002 (an excerpt) For much of my life, I have worked on frontiers. Night, fog, armed guards,…

5 examples of primal desires in movie storytelling 1. The desire to save one’s family (Die Hard) 2. The desire to protect one’s home (Home Alone) 3. The desire to find a mate (Sleepless in Seattle) 4. The desire to exact revenge (Gladiator) 5. The desire to survive (Titanic) 9 rules for finding and fixing…