Category: Writing

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

7/1/2025

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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Who Can Write What?

8/1/2024

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by Eric Noon

Image by nugroho dwi hartawan from Pixabay

One of the most common sayings for writers is to “write what you know.” Pulling from your own experiences and the things that you’re already familiar with are great ways to get the juices flowing and to fill in the gaps of otherwise tiresome or troubling writing in which we writers can often get bogged down. After all, it’s much easier to put a twist on a story you already know, or embellish something that’s happened to you--the bulk of the work is already done! The real question, and maybe where the advice needs to shift, is “what can we learn from the things we don’t already know?”

If all we’re to write about is our own experiences, then what room does that leave for us to learn, to empathize with, and to appreciate the stories of others? Writing about what we don’t know, the experiences we personally will never have to go through, could potentially help us to connect and build bridges with one another in ways we couldn’t see before. But as with any work of art, the court of public opinion holds a lot of sway in what is acceptable and what is not. I’m often left with the burning question of “Who can write what?

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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

Who Can Write What?

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