“Poetry is to prose,” wrote Paul Valery, “as dancing is to walking,” and in this post Ben Berman previews his upcoming Muse and the Marketplace session on what kind of dance moves prose writers can learn from poets.

A couple of summers ago, I decided to take a break from writing poetry in order to try my hand at penning a screenplay.

When we think about launching our books, we dream of doing readings (among other things like catching sight of our books in airports, and, of course, getting on bestseller lists), but in this day and age why are readings still so important to us?

By Katrin Schumann

For a new author, are readings really all they're cracked up to be?

In this post, GrubStreet instructor Ben Berman considers the tension between the pleasures of writing and the pressures of being a writer.

The other day we were at some friends’ house when I found myself in a conversation with their six-year-old son.

My dad told me that you’re a writer, he said.

When writing the fiction of violence, Katrin Schumann finds that there are no easy answers about how to get it right. This article first appeared in CrimeReads.

Years ago in a writing workshop in San Francisco, a lanky middle-aged student sitting next to me held his pages in trembling fingers. He began to read aloud a story about a body found in the trunk of a car. As he read, we all listened attentively, drawn in at first by the obvious questions: who was this woman and what had happened to her? We were trying to learn to become better writers

Building a supportive network takes time and courage. Novelist Katrin Schumann argues that it’s worth starting to cultivate community early on, even if your instinct or your preference is to work alone. This post first appeared on JaneFriedman.com.

I’ve always found people who make movies to be awe-inspiring—in order to evoke a world and a story on screen, they need to work together with dozens of other professionals, from front-end people like actors and directors, to back-end people like sound editors