Category: Writing

Don’t Take Writing Advice

1/1/2026

by Adam Buckley

Via Aaron Burden on Unsplash

The irony of this statement is not lost on me. By telling you not to take writing advice, I am, in fact, giving you writing advice—however!—if you follow me where I’m headed, you’ll see where I’m coming from. Age-old axioms like “show, don’t tell,” and “good characters have agency,” have kernels of truth to them; that’s why they’re so often repeated, but what comes after? How do writers really get better? My goal here isn’t to rebuke the institutions of writing criticism or education entirely, more so to make the case against generalized platitudes and advocate for contextual and self-motivated methods of improving one’s work.

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I Built Lit Camp on the Cheap, and You Can Too

7/1/2025

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by Stephen Harrison

Late night Starbucks lights are just enough to let you move around and know that you’re not meant to nap here. The customers typically look harried at 2 a.m., and the menu is limited. But Starbucks is open nonetheless. Fluorescent white lighting and soft talking mixed with honestly pretty shitty coffee served as a launchpad for the rest of my academic career.

Photo by Stefen Tan on Unsplash

During my education as a journalism major, I spent many evenings visiting an open all night location near Rutgers University, but I didn’t spend my time there alone. The three of us—Dan, Carl, and I—all aspiring writers, needed someplace where we could work together. The importance of this was lost on me at the time, but in retrospect, it was critical to my development. Somewhere in the late night coffees and arguments about the merits of this piece or that piece, something was brewing for me.

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If You Want to Write, Watch as Well

5/1/2025

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by Ethan Gross

If you want to write, read a lot. It’s good advice, generally speaking, and very common. If you’ve ever taken a writing course or looked up writing advice online, you’ve almost certainly been given this tidbit. Most of my peers come from writing and literature backgrounds; they’re the kind of people who read all the time. Having come from a background studying film and TV, I had only read every so often, and even then it was usually for high school English class. As time went on, I focused more and more on creative writing, and I found myself being given this same piece of advice over and over again.

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Don't Stop Writing Fanfiction

12/1/2024

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by Bethaney Randazzo

“Stop writing fanfiction, and go get published.”

I often wonder where I would be if a twenty-three-year-old me had listened to that creative writing professor. Would I currently be in a masters in writing program, while teaching first-year college writing, on my way to transforming some of nearly eighty stories I’ve written over the decade since that comment was made into publishable works? Probably not.

via Canva

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Writing is One Big Genre Soup

11/1/2024

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by Ellie Cameron

Photo by Sigmund on Unsplash

It’s a winter night in your childhood, you have a cold. Snow is falling; it’s almost as icy in the house as outside. Someone--your parent, grandparent, sibling, guardian--brings you a steaming bowl. You ask what’s in it, receive a single word response. Soup. You wonder what kind, try to decide if you’re hoping it’s tomato, chicken noodle, alphabet, chowder. Who knows? Broth and some floating ingredients, it could be anything. It’s all soup.

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Don’t Take Writing Advice

I Built Lit Camp on the Cheap, and You Can Too

If You Want to Write, Watch as Well

Don't Stop Writing Fanfiction

Writing is One Big Genre Soup

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