?
My website seems to have spontaneously created this particular post, throwing up the headline with no particular content to share, and broadcasting it to the usual channels. I originally came in to delete the post and take it down, then figured, what the hell? It’s actually a pretty good metaphor for today: I’ve just finished ten days straight of grading assignments, making comments on first chapters for forty-two different novels, and my brain is feeling rather scraped out and devoid of things worth saying. The thing about marking creative work, as opposed to essays, is that it gets horribly repetitive. You don’t have time to explain everything that’s going wrong across three or four thousand words, which means you focus in on the stuff that will help the manuscript get to the next level. Inevitably, when dealing with new writers, this comes down to the same conversations about scene structure and developing beats and figuring out what your characters want,
