CRAFT ESSAYS, ELEMENTS, and TALKS
Hybrid Interview: Diane Josefowicz
Essay by Shara Kronmal • I first met Diane Josefowicz through Necessary Fiction where she serves as book reviews editor when she edited a review of mine. Diane is one of those editors you love to work with, one…
Unraveling False Literary Binaries: Character Versus Plot and Other Mysteries
By M. Beth Zimmer • “What is character but the determination of incident? What is incident but the illustration of character?” Henry James, The Art of Fiction During the first month of my first semester as an MFA student,…
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.…