Among the many gifts bequeathed to us by the novelist Kurt Vonnegut, one of my favorites is The Shapes of Stories, where he visualized different kinds of stories by drawing them on a line graph. Continue reading “Story Shapes”
The Hero’s Journey
As you may have already heard, Gotham’s latest writing contest asks people to tell a story about a hero, which got me thinking about Joseph Campbell, a hero of mine. Continue reading “The Hero’s Journey”
Love Letters
Whenever I teach Creative Nonfiction 101, I give my students a special assignment, a kind of show-and-tell for writers, to bring in a work of writing that moved them. Perhaps the most creative response came from the student who taught us a single word, saudade, a Portuguese term that is difficult to translate, meaning sadness tinged with yearning and a deep, penetrating ache. Continue reading “Love Letters”