CRAFT ESSAYS, ELEMENTS, and TALKS
The Truth About Post-Fact Fictions
By Ryan Habermeyer • My mom used to say I hated getting my hair cut. I would cringe, squirm, fidget, even cry out of an irrational fear the barber might cut my ears off. I was allergic to idleness,…
Two Strategies for Working with Reticent Characters
By Evan Calbi • I’m drawn to characters who don’t easily express themselves. If they won’t share how they’re feeling, their emotions often manifest in behavior that can set a story in motion. But how do you reveal an…
Hybrid Interview: Elyse Durham
Essay by Sonja Srinivasan • Russian writers never shy away from penetrating insight into all facets of the human psyche: we read Russian novels precisely because they “go there.” There is also a strong dramatic element to much of…
The Fiction Writer’s Free Will Problem
By Ayşe Papatya Bucak • I imagine many of us have heard the common textbook wisdom that story is dictated by a character’s desire, plot is generated by what characters do in the face of their desire, and endings occur…
The Hybrid Essay: A Trial of the Metals
By Alexa Will • 1867–nonfiction, noun. Prose writing other than fiction, such as history, biography, and reference works, esp. that which is concerned with the narrative depiction of factual events; the genre comprising this. —From Oxford English Dictionary This…
Erasure: It’s For Nonfiction Writers Too!
By Kristine Langley Mahler • Some of the most fascinating creative nonfiction lives on the fringes of genre-play, borrowing from both fact and fiction, both poetry and prose. Essayists, memoirists, and nonfiction hybridists frequently use tools from fiction to create…
Creative Nonfiction Techniques: Perhapsing and the Truth of Gaps in Memory or Knowing
By Lexi Lilly • Growing up, I was scared to swim in Kentucky Lake, a reservoir created after the construction of Kentucky Dam, just outside my hometown of Murray. One day, my fiancé wanted to go cliff jumping, having…
Hybrid Interview: Salma Ibrahim
Essay by Paul Chuks • As far as immigration stories go, Salutation Road is about as political as can be in the way that it anchors readers into the realities of immigrants in Britain and applicably the Western world.…
Ambiguity in the Speculative Impossible
By JB Andre • Not all speculative fiction is equally speculative. While much engages with the unreal (vampires, superpowers, ghosts), or the possibly real (future technologies, alternative timelines), a very small sliver of speculative fiction will try to capture something…
Hybrid Interview: Peter Mountford
Essay by Shehrazade Zafar-Arif • What do short stories have in common with jazz? Like the innately improvisational quality of jazz, the nature of the short story genre—constrained by the need for a high amount of drama in a…