We get all kinds of submissions at the Metro Times offices from aspiring scribes. Some of the writing samples, as you might imagine, are laughably, horribly bad. We couldn’t post them here in good ...

National Novel Writing Month—usually shortened to NaNoWriMo—is an annual creative writing event in which participants set out to write a 50,000-word draft of a novel in the month of November. More ...

All advice is suspect. I'm not suggesting you break all the so-called rules of creativity you've collected. Only that every tip can be counteracted with its opposite. And some advice is just plain bad ...

A modest but effective example of the sort of thing Eliot had in mind is the annual Bad Writing Contest sponsored by the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature. Previous winners have included the ...

If you’ve got a story to tell, tell the story. No need to dress it up in a tutu. Many moons ago, my late friend John Van Doorn strolled ‘round the newsroom flashing a $5 bill, promising it to whoever ...