Nolancapps.com

Nolan Here! I have two pieces of very good news. The smaller good news is that a nonfiction piece of mine, “Strange Fire” has been picked up for publication by Arts & Letters, the literary magazine of Georgia College. I’m so excited that this piece is coming out—for the publication, and because they are going…

In 2020, I applied for a fellowship at NYU. The job was to lead NYU’s Veteran Writers’ Workshop, and the compensation was a year’s free tuition plus a monthly stipend. But I wanted the position because I was a veteran myself, I liked the group, and I thought I could do a good job. Just…

Hi all! As a part of a nonfiction workshop I am attending, I filmed the following video. In it, I discuss the value of a writing routine and a mindset that puts process over product. Please check it out if you have nine minutes to spare, and if you’d like some ideas for a routine…

In the first creative writing class I ever took, I read a useful craft book whose name escapes me now. Let’s just call it Telling the Story. Telling the Story gave me the following formative advice on dialogue: attribute your dialogue either with a dialogue tag or with an action, never both. This advice is…

Trudge? Trudge? I hate the word. Am I the only one? And am I wrong? After all, some of the first writing advice we hear is to avoid adverbs and prefer verbs that are active and vivid in themselves. Trudge, therefore, should be a fine word. It should at least be preferable to “walked laboriously,”…

If you’ve attended a creative writing class or a workshop, you may have heard the term “liminal space.” As in: “In this piece, the laundromat is really functioning as a liminal space.” You may see the other students nodding, murmuring in agreement, and meanwhile, you’re thinking “what on earth are liminal spaces, and why does…

When writers say “craft books,” we’re talking about books on the craft of writing. I’ve never read a craft book that I agreed with from the first line to the last, and I think that’s okay. Sometimes, in fact, encountering advice that you absolutely disagree with is valuable. It’s an opportunity to ask, “why do…

Happy New Year and welcome 2023! Now, I promised a literary agent a revised copy of my manuscript by the end of my winter break (January 16th), and so I really should be revising. But I’ve had some time off because of the holidays and because, in the last week of the semester, I fell…

Crazy news, everyone. An agent has read my novel, Gay Marine Blues, and offered me notes and encouragement. I haven’t gotten the offer of representation yet, so I don’t want to celebrate too much or tell you anything too concrete about this… but… I’m excited. If I can get the thing into good shape, we…

These days, poetry as a written artform is consumed in two places: academia and Instagram. Academic poets, and many others besides, like to make fun of Instagram poetry because it is full of derivative ideas and cliché images (comparing an imminent breakup to a storm on the horizon, for example). Some poets lament the rise…