Tag: writing tips
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“Your Darlings”
by Nicholas Wolf In this blog post, I will explore and deconstruct the aphorism “kill your darlings”. This aphorism is commonly directed at new and inexperienced writers. In many cases, the “darling” is commonly a sentence or paragraph which has invaded the writer’s mind like an earworm. This orthographic possession occurs because writers interpret the…
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The Aesthetics of Poetics
by Leah Duarte After taking a break from submissions to develop my poetry manuscript, in September of 2025, I published several poems in a literary magazine for the first time in two years. Following such a long pause, returning to publication felt different. Having these pieces selected helped soothe my fears that my earlier publications…
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A Half-Baked Cake Tastes So Good
by Chelsea Kowalski Why is writing so difficult? It should be the most natural thing; we come up with story after story as children and yet as an adult when you give yourself the label of “writer”, you start to feel like a fish on land. It can’t be that we don’t have anything to…
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The Relationship of the Written Word and the Image
by Paavan Agarwal Sometimes when I sit down to write or to read something, I start thinking about the relationship between writing and images and get irresolutely stuck in that conceptual rabbit hole. How can or should one describe a sight or a vision using the written word? Ezra Pound called it “phanopoeia”, “the throwing…
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Embracing the Creative Chaos
by Rahma Mohamed As a writer, I constantly come across writing advice on the web, from writers I know, or from any other number of sources. The advice usually varies and comes with a “it may or may not work for you, so figure out what works for you” caveat. However, one of the most…
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On First Drafts, Possibility and Spongebob
by Emma Graham Writing is, on paper, (ok, please forgive me for the horrible pun), such a magical and endlessly generative thing. Don’t believe me? Ok, let me sell it to you “sell me this pen” style: Are you with me? Imagine, with just one stack of paper and a pen, you could write anything.…
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Dispatches from the Submissions Process
by Leah Duarte I’ve been submitting my work again. After two years where my focus was on writing, then editing, my own manuscript as well as the WiT Forest Floor anthology, I was accepted into a poetry mentorship opportunity. With some coaxing, I acknowledged it was time to put myself out there again. I had…
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Immortality in Writing
By Lauren Redwood For centuries, the publishing of any form has been used to record history and the lives of humans that lived in those periods. We write to express our own emotions, to capture the beauty and travesty around us, and to immortalize the present moment. During times such as now, it is so…
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Balancing the Screenwriter’s and Director’s Voice
by John Bảo I started my writing journey a few years ago as a screenwriter. But becoming represented and selling a script takes time and a lot of finished scripts. So, when the opportunity to direct my own material (while getting paid for it!) popped up, I took the leap forward. At first, I was…
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A Pulitzer Prize for Your Thoughts
By Chelsea Kowalski There’s a well-known story about the origins of To Kill A Mockingbird by Harper Lee that is something of a writer’s fantasy. Lee was working customer service jobs in New York and publishing short stories on the side in 1956. She managed to get a literary agent (no small feat!) and one…
