Why I Don’t Like NaNoWriMo
Don’t come after me, it just doesn’t work for everyone. If you’re like me, you probably start hearing buzz from your writing community about National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo) every year starting in September and October. I have countless friends…
Create Characters Your Readers Will Fall in Love With
It only takes one thing to make your characters more relatable: motivation. We all can undoubtedly think of characters from our favorite works of fiction that stick with us. Some stories are propelled forward by amazingly realistic characters that kind…
Why You Should Read Stories You Hate
There is valuable writing information to be gleaned from even those stories that you can’t wait to put down. We’ve all been there — settling in for a relaxing evening with a cup of tea ready to read the latest…
The Art of Doing Nothing
What quarantine taught me about creativity. If there’s something we can all relate to right now, it’s the isolation we are experiencing at the hand of the coronavirus pandemic. Right now we are all collectively hunkering down and trying to…
Over, Under, Through, Around: Narrative in Creative Nonfiction
“Narrative is one of the best intoxicants or tranquilizers.” ― A.S. Byatt Sitting on a hard plastic chair in a windowless classroom below the Osborne Center on my college campus, I watched as my creative writing professor went around the…
An Editor’s Tips on Submitting to Literary Journals
So you want to submit to a literary journal. You have a short story, or some poems, or a flashy nonfiction piece that you’re convinced is a sure-fire piece that editors all over the interwebs will be fighting with each…
Are You a Pantser or a Planner?
When I was new to writing, I often didn’t know what I was doing. I spent the valuable (and few) minutes I had every day to devote to writing just floating around in a sea of words. There was often…
What Makes a Good Poem?
When you think of poetry, your mind might go to the classics. Perhaps to Homer’s The Odyssey or to Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales — both epic stories told in meter and reflected in the tropes of modern storytelling still used today. Or maybe when you…
Falling Behind in Writing and…Life
A stream of consciousness post… Some days it feels like it takes all I can do to not fall behind on everything. It’s hard enough to go through the day to day–work, food, pets, bills, exercise, grocery shopping, errand running,…
Finding the Time to Write (or Not Write)
Something interesting that I have found about writing is how much I learn about it when I’m not writing. It may sound counter-intuitive, but I almost always find this to be the case. Over the summer I was writing nonstop. …
Addey Vaters
Web page of writer, editor, and all around grand human being.
