Which leads me to the best piece of writing advice I've encountered in awhile. Louise knows she can "catapult the character forward" when she spots a line that authentically, effortlessly grasps who they are.
awp
The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
I ordered The Cosmopolitans after hearing Sarah Schulman at an AWP panel with the gloriously strong and trenchant Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore. I was proud of myself for finally getting around to the work that launched Schulman's career as a novelist and public intellectual in 1990. But about 100 pages into The Cosmopolitans, the sort of insight and anxiety around race, marketing,…Read more The Cosmopolitans by Sarah Schulman
I suspect that any vital creative process somehow involves arranging things so that intuition is given pride of place. The individual writer's "craft" might be understood, then, as the process of conspiring to work oneself into the necessary state of mystification, such that one is deferring to the innate energy of the story, rather than overriding it.
AWP 2018, some hot reads
One of the abiding pleasures of AWP is finding work you wouldn't have touched otherwise.
Debra Monroe
"The intersection of the self with natural, historical, and cultural forces is your subject."
Writers from AWP 2017 you need to read
One of the best things about AWP is the sheer depth of writing available. In the 40 or so panels I was able to attend, I heard from a lot of amazing authors I wouldn't necessarily have passed in Barnes & Noble. The following list includes some of those writers, as well as works from more established authors whose latest novel I'm eagerly awaiting to crack open.