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…

1) An essay doesn’t begin with a statement, but with a question An essay is something you write to try to figure something out. Figure out what? You don’t know yet. And so you can’t begin with a thesis, because you don’t have one, and may never have one. An essay doesn’t begin with a…

By Douglas Rushkoff From an entry on his June 1, 2002 weblog (an excerpt) One great function of the blog is to reach more people with the same message. Since I receive a few emails each week asking me to explain the best ways to “get started” as a writer or journalist, or to find…

1) Your true writer’s voice is rarely an expression of intention When I was 21 I wanted to write like Kafka. But, unfortunately for me, I wrote like a script editor for The Simpsons who’d briefly joined a religious cult and then discovered Foucault. –Zadie Smith, “This is how it feels to me,” The Guardian,…

The following riff on the cliches of creative writing (and science fiction writing in particular) was featured in the “Readings” section of the July 2004 issue of Harper’s. [Cliches] STRANGELY FAMILIAR From a list of plots and themes of stories submitted “too frequently” to Strange Horizons, an online magazine of “speculative fiction.” The document was compiled…