Fiction Brain Essay Library Shelf
These essays are our musings across the world of fiction writing. While everything in the Fiction Brain Library is fact based, here we permit ourselves some latitude to offer opinions and observations.
More to come.
Writing in the Zone
The creative state that reality cannot tamper with. An exploration of ego dissolution, the Default Mode Network, and why the truest work arrives when the writer steps back.
Read EssayMentoring the New Writer
Saying yes to mentoring feels like a small thing. It is not. An honest examination of what emerging writers actually need from you — and what you need to bring before you agree to guide them.
Read EssayPersistence, Failure, and the Long Road
What the Drawer Full of Drafts Is Actually Telling You. It’s occasional failure that teaches you, that says, not yet, but soon. The drawer is where the tuition gets paid.
Read Essay5 Words
A quote from Gary Provost. Write with a combination of short, medium, and long sentences. Create a sound that pleases the reader’s ear. Don’t just write words. Write music.
Read EssayThe Past begins a microsecond before the Now.
There’s a sentence writers hear so often in workshops it stops meaning anything. “Try it in present tense, it feels more immediate.” Almost nobody stops to ask why the advice works when it works, or why it produces something clunky and mechanical when it doesn’t.
Read EssayThe Lens and the Mirror.
Writers hear it early and often. “Every reader reads through a personal lens”. It reminds writers that they can’t control everything a reader will take away. But the lens leaves something out. It explains why readers differ. It doesn’t explain why they so often agree. The mirror does.
Read EssayOn Titles
There are three ways a piece of writing comes to be named, and the differences say more about the writer’s task than they do about the title itself. The novelist or short story writer names something they’ve built. The essayist names something still in motion. The memoirist names something found. A focus on a real, often life-changing event
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