"Dear Sugars" podcast host, New York Times columnist, bestselling author, and longtime grubbie Steve Almond fished himself from a pool of dread after the 2016 election by asking, What are the bad, fraudulent stories that got us here? The result was his latest work of nonfiction, Bad Stories: What the Hell Just Happened to Our Country? a book-length inquiry into the bad stories we tell ourselves as Americans and how we can use literature as a lens through which to understand what the hell happened in 2016. Earlier this year, Steve was on retreat at Wellspring House ...

This month, the DeadDarlings team shared what's worked for us when we've taken a red pen to our writing. Each of the featured bloggers are graduates of Grub's Novel Incubator program.

Character Count

Sharissa Jones exceeds 144 characters to examines sentences that work in Jumping the Cut: Writing Transitional Scenes in the Netflix and Twitter Age .

Debut Deadline

Belle Brett shares her preflight checklist for marketing her novel Six Months until Publication: Tentative Tips from a Debut Novelist. 

Existential Editing

Looking for Ten Tips for Losing a Hundred Pages? Emily Ross has ...

GrubStreet dreams of a literary future for Boston, one in which all Bostonians have access to the narrative arts. In partnership with Harvard Book Store and Mass Poetry, we have a great chance of securing a bid to create a dynamic, inclusive, and fully accessible Narrative Arts Center in Boston's Seaport, one that showcases, celebrates, and supports writers at all stages and from all backgrounds. In two minutes, you can help us realize that dream. GrubStreet's Founder and Executive Director, Eve Bridburg, explains how.

GrubStreet has been dreaming of building a Narrative Arts Center with partners in ...

 It’s been an exciting ride for former journalist and long-time Grubbie Kim Savage, who just released her third YA novel, In Her Skin, following the success of After The Woods in 2016 and Beautiful Broken Girls (one of Kirkus’s 10 Best YA) in 2017

Make your characters want something right away, wrote Vonnegut, even if it’s only a glass of water.

And as soon as we pick my four-year-old up from pre-school and strap her into her car seat, she tells us that she wants some water.

But a narrative, at its most basic level, is driven by the relationship between what a character wants and the obstacles in their way, and it just so happens that my daughter’s water bottle is empty.