Craft Essays
Our Craft Essay Archive extends back to 2005, a rich trove of essays exploring the craft of characterization, voice, image, syntax, and structure, author interviews, reflections on the flash form, and many other aspects of the writing life. You can access these essays by using main search box in the righthand margin, or peruse the...
Brevity’s Craft Essay Archive
Our Craft Essay Archive extends back to 2005, a rich trove of essays exploring the challenges of writing, the craft of characterization, voice, image, syntax, and structure, author interviews, and many other aspects of the writing life. You can access these essays here, or by using the search box. We have also tagged many of...
Brevity Craft Merges with the Brevity Blog
As of March 2024, Brevity has folded our Craft Essay section into The Brevity Blog, side-by-side with an active daily discussion of craft and the writing life. The Brevity Blog reaches thousands of readers each month, with the aim of publishing quality essays that include the arc and movement found in all good essays. Appropriate topics for the...
Craft and Creative Process: Loosen Science Writing from Technical Grooves
A key element of the scientific process is play. This is often overlooked. When I say play, I mean the kind of game that might end with everyone crying. The suspense, risks, hope, joy, and dead ends of making hypotheses, forging wilderness, and running experiments are messy. Wonder fuels inquiry and, often, human connection sustains...
Searching Brevity Essays by Craft Element
A searchable index allowing readers, writers, teachers, and students to locate essays highlighting particular craft elements and choices such as characterization, dialogue, extended metaphor, segmentation, speculation, and others. CRAFT TAGS Beginnings/EndingsCharacterizationDialogueDictionExtended MetaphorFrameImageryPersonaResearchRevisionSegmentationSensory DetailSettingSpeculationToneVoice
Everything Has Changed, but Craft Still Matters: Lessons from a Top Travel Editor
When editor Lavinia Spalding started reading submissions for Volume 12 of The Best Women’s Travel Writing (BWTW), forthcoming in October 2020, she couldn’t know that a pandemic was on its way, one that would claim hundreds of thousands of lives and make travel problematic, if not impossible. She also couldn’t anticipate the cultural upheaval and...
Impatience and Craft
A few weeks ago, my partner, Jake, wanted to watch the movie Nocturnal Animals with me. The film is about a writer who uses his newfound talent to torment the psyche of his ex-wife who left him years before. Since I’m a writer and also spiteful, Jake thought the movie would be right up my...
Write Like a Cow: On Taking Craft Cues from Your Subject
In her chapbook The Cows, Lydia Davis begins with the promise of drama: Each new day, when they come out from the far side of the barn, it is like the next act, or the start of an entirely new play. They amble out from the far side of the barn with their rhythmic, graceful...
The Craft of Writing Queer
When I discovered creative nonfiction I’d just turned thirty, was self-schooled in queer and activist literatures, newly in love with the woman who is still my spouse, newly sober, even newly tattooed, and recently returned to university. I’d dropped out of pre-journalism school in the late 1970s, in part because no line of study fit...
From Confession to Craft: Memoir as Its Own Reward
Back when I was a third grade geek, wanting badly to be accepted and popular (loved!), I walked home from school one day with Howard U. and Doug Y., past my own house at the bottom of Fellsmere Road and up the hill to Howard’s. We went down to the basement – one of those...
I Hear You Man
I don’t remember a time when men, young, elderly, or middle-aged, stranger, or familiar, didn’t randomly confide in me the most traumatic horrors of their reality. Is there something about my bespectacled face? My half-broken nose? Is it my beard? Is it too philosophic, should it be more fundamentalist? Or maybe it’s something subcutaneous, a...
Teaching with Brevity
Our TEACHING RESOURCES (found in our top menu) offer a diverse set of resources for writers and teachers of the flash form, including teaching tools, syllabi, prompts, craft essays, subject and craft element indexes, and much more.
Astonish
Astonish (v.) In 1300, there was a word, astonien, which meant “to stun” or “strike senseless,” which came from the Old French estoner—to stun, daze, deafen, or astound. This came from Latin’s ex- meaning “out” + tonare: to thunder. (See thunder). See thunder, hear lightning, ride air, the wind is your breath, you lift the...
Welcome to Our Trans Experience Special Issue
Introducing Brevity’s latest special issue, which also happens to be its 75th, featuring brilliant new writing by Lee Anderson, Nic Anstett, Kay Ulanday Barrett, KB Brookins, Rivka Clifton, Mac Crane, Atlas Desmond, Melissa Faliveno, Eric LeMay, Katherine Scott Nelson, Mattilda Bernstein Sycamore and Ocean Wei. Each piece is accompanied by gorgeous visual work by artist...
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