There’s nothing more gratifying than scrolling through the wasteland of divorce, welfare, addiction, and failure in your Facebook newsfeed only to realize you are suddenly the hot girl (or boy) from high school. Twenty years late, perhaps, but none the less, “Hell yeah!” And if it hasn’t happened yet, don’t worry. It will. But easy there Harry Potter. This is Draco Malfoy telling you not to go making friends with the “wrong sort.” After all, do you really have that much in co

Dear Writers, you need to eat, and that Pulitzer Prize book you’re drafting isn’t going to feed anything more than your ego for a long time. As a student, I watched my fellow English majors spend their savings on reckless road trips hoping it would induce the next great American novel, and as a teacher I’ve had my senior English majors roll their eyes and say, “I didn’t go to school for four years to write instruction manuals!” If you have that attitude, you’ll starve, both l

At any given moment, the inside of my mind has two to three conversations shouting over a TV that changes channels every three seconds in the middle of a Sharknado. The ideas collide like bumper cars and then vanish like those awesome memories from the fourth of July that the Jell-O Shots blacked-out. Which explains why my vacuum sits in the center of the living room, where it was dropped when I remembered an overdue blog post that I started to write before I remembered an ol

It’s 1AM, and you’ve been writing for over five straight hours, immersed in your characters: their voices distinct, their conversations riveting, the plot gradually unfolding, the words not only flowing but bursting from the seams of your imagination, and you can’t type fast enough. When you do dare to step away from the computer, it is like waking from a comma or climbing out of a rabbit hole—so much time has passed between your last trip to reality to get a drink or go to t