AWP23—Matt Bell

Matt Bell is an author, English professor, and editor. He currently teaches creative writing at Arizona State University. In this episode live from the conference floor at AWP 2023, we’re celebrating the one-year anniversary of his indispensable book on the craft of writing, Refuse to Be Done: How to Write and Rewrite a Novel in Three Drafts. We also discuss his dystopian novel, Appleseed, and and his admiration for climate writing that restores hope for humanity.

Listen to the full episode to find out what Bell means when he advocates for ‘radical revising’ and his mission to conceptualize revision as a process that can transform a draft into a novel, rather than an assignment needed to be completed for school. We also discuss his dreamy ten-plus-year relationship working with Soho Press (shout out to the indie stalwarts!), and some of the advice he gives to his students: 1) allow readers space to figure out things for themselves, 2) experiment with non-traditional writing structures, and 3) work through tangly writing problems together.

Finally, Bell ends this episode with advice for gaining inspiration for your next work and the unfortunate discovery that you can learn what your agent truly thinks of you through their editorial notes (writer beware!). 

Honorable Mentions:

• A Tree or a Person or a Wall, Bell’s short story collection

• His incredibly good Substack (a must-read for any writer), No Failure, Only Practice

• In the House Upon the Dirt between the Lake and the Woods, the “truly weird” novel (Matt’s words) that was allowed to just be itself by the good editors at Soho Press

• Lastly, while we’re still down the rabbit hole, check out his non-fiction book-length essay on the video game, Baldur’s Gate II.