Benjamin Roesch

Category: Writing Advice

  • Post #95: Well, no Shit

    This report brought to you from our correspondents in The Land Where Things Are Fairly Obvious. Last week I got to play writer in my life as a teacher, which is rare and to be treasured. One of my colleagues in the high school English department where I teach invited…

  • Post #92: This Will Only Hurt a Lot

    I got a very polite rejection yesterday from The Florida Review. They apologized for the delay in responding, contextualized the long wait around some editorial and personal changes, yadda yadda yadda, told me they’d found my story “Unsayable Things” engaging, but that it didn’t meet their editorial needs at this…

  • Post #66: Speaking Truth to Tired

    Though I’m a writer in my heart, and supporting myself through my craft (whatever that looks like) is my ultimate goal, I’m a high school English teacher by day and have been for seven years.  I love my work.  I do.  But as I sit here on an average Tuesday…

  • Post #59: False Finish Lines

    Dear Charles, My writing goal for the summer was to finish the rough draft of my new novel Returning, and I’m happy to say that a few days ago, I did just that.  Hit the “final” key stroke on a book that, at this point, is 715 pages (222,500 words)…

  • Post #54: The Path to Publication, Part 2

    THE GREAT FREELANCE EDITOR ROUND-UP (guest post by author Ron Dionne) So I had accepted the offer from Delabarre Publishing to publish my novel SAD JINGO as an ebook, and had withdrawn it from consideration at Akashic Books. I had chosen the Wild West that book publishing had suddenly become,…

  • Post #36: Bausch(ian) Wisdom

    For me, one of Facebook’s on-going pleasures, and this is coming from a former Facebook doubter and critic turned addict, is getting status updates by the great writer Richard Bausch, who I met at Bread Loaf.  I’m sure he doesn’t remember me, or the rather hilarious hour we spent sipping…

  • Post# 34: Utilitarian Description

    I read a short passage in Joe Hill’s Heart Shaped Box the other night and I liked it so much, I wrote it down and am here to burden you with it.  It’s a short passage.  Here it is: “She glared at Jude, saw he was dressed, black Doc Martens,…

  • Post #29: Revising Blue Dot

    Been spending my writing time the past two weeks beginning revisions on my new novel, Blue Dot, which I’ve been dubbing a horror/sci-fi mash-up.  For the uninitiated, I wrote the first draft of Blue Dot in a month during National Novel Writing Month, in which participants take on the challenge…

  • Post #25: Circumstance

    Ask 10 random people what “Setting” is and they’ll tell you something resembling the following: The Time and Place a story occurs. Not so fast. A third element of setting worth celebrating, though oft neglected, is that of Circumstance, which I humbly submit is actually its most interesting and durable attribute.…

  • Post #19: Best of Lists and Middle Class White Guys

    Here’s a couple of articles I found thought provoking.  The first, by Roxane Gay, examines the “Best of…” lists that have become such a part of what establishes literary “excellence.”  Gay makes a compelling case regarding their legitimacy and usefulness. http://therumpus.net/2011/12/toward-a-more-complete-measure-of-excellence/ The second is by Benjamin Hale, a writer who…