Craft and Creativity
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Newest Features
On Living the Questions
Poets are incessantly curious people, driven by both big questions (what is the meaning of life?), small questions (what should I have for dinner?), and craft questions (where should I use a line break?) One way to approach the craft of poetry writing is to think of the poem as an answer to a question….
Better Endings: Surprising Yet Inevitable—and Astonishing
Tamara Dean’s stories and essays have appeared in The American Scholar, Creative Nonfiction, The Georgia Review, The Guardian, One Story, Orion, The Southern Review, Story Magazine, and elsewhere. Her essay collection, Shelter and Storm, is forthcoming in 2025. Several of her pieces have been nominated for Pushcart prizes. “Safer Than Childbirth” received a special mention…
Understanding Story Structure
How do you scaffold a story? You may have heard about things like Freytag’s Pyramid or the 3-Act structure, but while those tools are helpful in a vacuum, it feels hard to actually hang a working story off of this abstract scaffolding. Great stories don’t just follow certain pre-assigned trajectories—they use real life as a…