Good Writing Podcast

Blake Butler's Molly is a memoir about the suicide of his late wife, poet and memoirist Molly Brodak. It's one of the most controversial alt lit book of the past year – rightfully! – and, with photog…

Haha this was recorded like months ago. Please excuse the mess. More Good Writing coming on a reliably unreliable schedule.

Good Writing is a podcast where two MFA friends read like writers and lay…

What are more tools we can use to further develop theme and the point-of-view character's worldview? In her novel The Book of X, Sarah Rose Etter regularly breaks the action with lists of facts.

• Find…

Point-of-view characters. You love them. You understand them. They still do mean things. How can you keep your reader empathizing with your point-of-view character even if they do something villainou…

Do you have to write about a topic in the chronological order that it happened in to understand it better? No, definitely not. In fact - maybe you shouldn't?

This episode, we discuss Enjoy Me Among M…

In this episode we consider what it takes to write young people in a way that feels both honest and honoring with a difficult piece of fiction by B.R. Yeager from his newest collection, Burn You the …

Carmen from Julia Armfield's debut novel Our Wives Under the Sea isn't necessary for the plot, but Emily got obsessed anyway (of course). In this episode, we discuss bringing side characters to life …

Today we discuss "A Very Old Man with Enormous Wings" with poet David van den Berg.

David's magazine - Prometheus Dreaming

His new book - Love Letters from an Arsonist

Good Writing is a podcast w…

Emily has Ben read sections from Eula Biss's Having and Being Had this week because she knows he loves to think about capitalism. 

How can you come up with rules to how you write about a topic? Eula …

Happy (belated) Halloween, Good Writing subscribers! In today's episode, we discuss Shirley Jackson's 1959 gothic horror novel The Haunting of Hill House.

What makes this "psychological ghost story" …

Dune is a weird book. Some might even say, a bad book. Emily does on this episode, and so does Ben (sort of). Herbert’s prose style is definitely stilted, but what Ben and Emily get into on this epis…

We love insights and character motivation on this podcast! 😤 But we also like scenes that move the story forward.

This week, we discuss the hilarious Milk Fed by Melissa Broder (2021) and how she int…

In this episode of the Good Writing Podcast, Ben and Emily discuss what it means to write an image that by no right can actually be seen.

Good Writing is a podcast where two MFA friends read like wri…

It's been 6 months of podcasting! Ben and Emily review some of their favorite prompts and exercises from the past 25 episodes of the Good Writing Podcast.

Listen to the full episodes clipped here:

• Br…

This episode of the Good Writing Podcast deals with the ethics that the writer must grapple with when writing, especially when that writing deals with people from the so-called real world with the he…

Borges often looked to his work as an essayist and literary critic when looking for inspiration for his fiction, be it in the form of using that fiction to better understand writing or taking on the …

Emily picked up The Fellowship of the Ring and bought in hard. What makes the whimsical and meandering opening work so well?

Ben and Emily also discuss listener mail and workshop peer pet peeves.

Goo…

Author and editor John Trefry joins us to discuss (among many other things) the ways in which language itself has aesthetic value, the unknowable contours of spacetime, why writing without emotion ca…

Today on the Good Writing Podcast we are joined by flash fiction author Brett Bieble. Topics discussed include the ways in which flash fiction approaches "perfection," the advantages of brevity, the …

Texas poet Esteban Rodriguez joins us to discuss an excerpt from Thomas Pynchon’s The Crying of Lot 49 (1965). We talk about writing about stuff you hate and combining long and short sentence lengths…