I’m writing this post late on a Sunday evening because my wife and I spent the afternoon traveling from our home in Ohio to her hometown (a mere five miles from my hometown) in southeastern Illinois. We were supposed to make the trip tomorrow, but we decided to beat the snow that’s forecast for later…

Bernard Malamud once said, “Teach yourself to work in uncertainty.” I’d wager that at some point in the development of our craft, most of us have believed we had to know exactly where we were going with a piece of writing. In some instances, we were right. I’ve heard plenty of writers say they can’t begin…

As 2017 comes to an end, much of the country finds itself in the midst of a brutal cold snap: temperatures near zero or below, snow, wind. Here in central Ohio we have three and a half inches of snow on the ground. We won’t be above freezing for more than another week. After a…

It’s Christmas Eve, and I’m thinking of something my father always liked to say: “If ‘if’s’ and ‘but’s’ were candies and nuts, we’d all have a merry Christmas. How could he not pay attention to the way possibilities often disappoint us after the farming accident that cost him both of his hands—the accident he could…

Dusk comes early this time of year out in the country. Across the barren fields, pole lights come on in farm yards. Down a stretch of gravel road, headlights crest a hill and sweep across the horizon. Down lanes, lights fill the windows at houses, and sometimes I’m tempted to drive toward them, to knock…

We’re at the end of another semester here at Ohio State University. I’ve gathered revisions from the students in my fiction workshops, and I’m starting to read through them. I’m celebrating the victories and pointing out the battles yet to be won. One student writes to say she’s getting comfortable with the messiness of the…

I’ve had a request to say some more about the process by which writers begin to internalize the artistic choices other writers make. For me, this process begins with the way in which I read other writers’ work. When I read, I’m constantly thinking about how a writer does what he or she does on…

(In honor of Thanksgiving week, I’ve decided to rerun this section from my book, Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life, and with it to issue an invitation for you to let me know if there’s something particular you’d like me to talk about—some issue of craft, or some thoughts on how…