“Writing What We Run From” by Laura Roque
Currently, my people and perverse culture, our hybrid language and history, is all I can seem to write about, and are the stories I think I should be telling. This isn’t a claim that writers should stick to their own parts of the world, but that there’s a correlation between what we run from and why we’ve run from it, our personalities and the organic ways we manipulate language when we speak to those who know us best, and stories with a heartbeat.
“Strikethroughs and Strikeouts” by Peter Sheehy
Writing is some strange magic and we are foolish to try to understand it—the how, the why, the when—but writers try all the same.
It’s a numbers game. They say in baseball, a hitter can fail seventy percent of the time and he’s still a Hall of Famer. The odds seem worse for writers. Failure is a frustratingly large part of the game, at every level, from brainstorm to publication.
The variables are many, and there are countless ways to fail. Yet there is one common denominator: writers write.
The details beyond that—fascinating as they may be—are nearly irrelevant.