August 26, 2026 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
This past summer, I took an advanced novel workshop class. It was billed as one for writers who have already made significant progress towards a novel draft and was set to begin in June. When I signed up, I might have had a few thousand words of a chapter—and not a particularly good one. I knew I needed to sit my ass down and get some writing done. And for weeks before the class started, I did just that, even if it was only to save myself from future embarrassment. By the time class started, I had close to 20,000 words of a draft and was just starting to feel good about it. Motifs were being established. Themes were emerging. A plot was taking shape. The prose, at times, finally started to sound pretty. Things were going well. Then I met my classmates and my instructor, and before we knew it, we were workshopping. But for me, the real learning didn’t happen in the classroom or even when my classmates discussed the excerpts from my novel. It was the act of giving written feedback to my peers that promoted so much learning. And maybe that’s not quite the right word for it. Often, when we talk about learning, we talk about it in the context of being introduced to some novel concept or information you hadn’t previously considered. And as I’ve gotten older—and continue to get older—I find that there’s often very few new things to learn, especially when it comes to writing fiction after getting my MFA and teaching composition and literature for over a decade. Instead, it was responding to my classmates, thinking deeply about their work, where I learned new things about concepts and techniques I already thought I knew.
When reading my classmates’s work, there would invariably be a moment when my mind would mentally check out, when the excerpt stopped being interesting to me. This presented a real problem as someone who is supposed to offer advice to another writer. It’s not particularly helpful to tell someone “this is the place I was bored.” I don’t think that does much to make things clearer. It doesn’t tell them why. And it very well could be a reflection of my own biases. I may just not be into the painting process or medical drama. It might be a sign that I’m not the reader for this particular book. So I had to decide, if this was going to actually be useful feedback, is this a me issue or is this a textual issue? (Or maybe even a skill issue.) As I read and reread my classmates’s work, I spent a lot of time in those moments of discomfort, where I knew there would be some friction, where I knew I was going to say something that someone didn’t want to hear. After all, nobody wants to hear their work “needs improvement.” It’s a polite euphemism for “it’s not good,” which we always hear as “it’s bad.” And as I disentangled my preferences from the work itself, I realized how much everything comes back to fundamentals.
Most of the time, those moments where I was feeling disconnected from the story weren’t because the author had no talent or that this genre wasn’t for me, but instead, it was a result of forgetting some core convention of storytelling. It’s easy to criticize a writer for some failing in their work, but we have to keep in mind that writing is not one skill but a vast ocean of skills. There’s mechanics of sentence craft and grammar. There’s rhetoric and metaphor and similes. There’s paragraphing. There’s character. There’s conflict. There’s setting. There’s plot and structure. The sheer enormity of it should make us even wonder why the fuck we think we can do this in the first place. And of course, those are all choices we have to make. Talk about decision fatigue. It should make us all want to go to our closets and replace every item of clothing with a black turtleneck like we’re Steve Jobs. Undoubtedly, we’re going to leave something behind. We’re going to struggle with at least one of those infinite number of skills.
So, when I read through my classmates’s work, I could admire a particular turn of phrase, an evocative use of anaphora, a brilliant character beat, but what stood out was often a bigger picture problem, one that was too easy to forget. I would read a scene, and there would be moments of description, of action, of dialogue, of interiority, of exposition. It felt like a novel. But as I observed two or three characters just shooting the shit, I realized something. The vast majority of the time when I read a writer’s work and felt that something wasn’t working, it often boiled down to one simple question: “Why is this protagonist here and what do they want?” It was a surprising revelation, not because it’s a particularly profound question, but because it’s advice we so often get. Any time an agent or an editor offers generalized advice to new writers, this is the kind of thing you hear.
So what makes this a moment of learning for me?
I think it was in trying to articulate this problem that not only made me a better critic of other people’s work but my own too. I started looking at my own scenes through that lens.
I’ve been teaching composition for a long time, and it’s something similar to what I see with my students. They frequently spend so much time on the words and the structure of their essays that they forget their purpose. Their thesis is unclear or absent from the essay. The argument is never tied to the evidence. And reading the work from my classmates showed me how we can get so caught up in the weeds of sentences that we forget our main idea.
So my advice for you and myself is that when we sit down to write, we have to keep that purpose in mind—especially at the scene level. Why is the character here? What is their scene objective? What obstacles will they face in opposition to their desire? How does that conflict escalate and evolve in the scene? Does the character ultimately fail or succeed? And where does that lead the character next? Everything else is just icing on the cake. It’s vibes. It’s texture. They’re the last things that will fall into place. That sophisticated use of hendiadys can wait.
And I don’t think I would have learned this if I hadn’t had to communicate it to other people. Writing is thinking, no doubt. And I thought a lot about this over the last ten weeks, writing over 25,000 words of very specific feedback that I hope made a difference. But the benefit to me, through doing the work, is so enormous that my greatest regret here is that, what I’ve learned, what I feel in my bones about story now, is impossible to convey.
May 12, 2026 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
Note: Thanks to Atthis Arts for sending the ARC.
At the midpoint of Emma Burnett’s Ex Partum, the exhausted mother protagonist, Panya, makes the startling realization that you can feed your baby a biscuit instead of an undefined goo called nutribulbs. In a scene that’s supposed to be serious, Panya is shocked to learn that food is a perfectly good substitute for the novella’s central nutrient-dense solution, whereupon her epiphany is interrupted by the intrusion of her neighbor-best friend. And even though we’ve only witnessed the arrival of Panya’s BFF, somehow, because the scene is so poorly choreographed and described, Panya’s mother-in-law seemingly magically arrives in the middle to dress down her daughter-in-law for basically being a terrorist by committing the unforgivable act of feeding her baby the most dangerous substance known to man, cooked dough.
Ex Partum is like Mike Judge’s Idiocracy, except the novella isn’t ever funny. Its satire, if it’s even supposed to be satire, is never winking or ironic, played totally straight. I get the distinct impression the novella is supposed to be a dystopian drama, but given the context of how outlandish the whole premise is, you easily can imagine ads for nutribulbs, the voiceover proclaiming it’s the hunger multilator and has what babies crave.
The novella, available on June 2nd from Atthis Arts Press, is the story of Panya, an overwhelmed and tired mother whose shitty husband goes away for weeks at a time to perform indeterminate duties for an indeterminate company to afford indeterminate food. She’s just trying to make it through motherhood, raising her first child in the Blocks, a suburban dystopia that requires its residents to undergo the kind of daily blood tests that would grant Elizabeth Holmes a release from prison and another 200 billion in investor funding. The blood is then used to assess a resident’s nutrient deficiencies, and a completely unclear corporation has drones deliver nutribulbs, a vitamin juicebox that has everything a growing baby needs and which you annoyingly won’t stop hearing about, that are designed specifically for them. It’s like JG Ballard’s High Rise meets Tillie Olson’s “I Stand Here Ironing” without Ballard’s droll wit or Olson’s beautiful minimalism.
And it commits maybe the most unforgivable sin a story can make, which is that it’s consistently boring.
For a book of only 116 pages, it takes nearly one-third of its page count to get to any whiff of a plot. The novella’s big inciting incident comes when Gabbi, Panya’s inconsistently characterized BFF, invites Panya to a Smorgasburg for excoms, the ostracized but freedom-loving outcasts of this future society, who feel like a very resigned version of the subterranean Scraps led by Denis Leary in Demolition Man. (But again, unlike Demolition Man, Ex Partum is not funny.) Panya, who has been shown to be reluctant to go outside for fear of getting sick, almost instantly agrees. And because Panya is so baby-brained, she doesn’t really know much of anything about these excoms, the narration even admitting, “Panya didn’t know much about excoms.” Any sense of tension or danger or mystery is completely lost on the reader because we know just as little as our protagonist. And while I appreciate that Burnett doesn’t bog her story down with needless exposition and pages upon pages of world building, some would have been nice. Imagine if, in The Terminator, when Kyle Reese is leading Sarah Connor away from the titular villain via stolen police car, he said, “Look, I don’t even know who that guy is.”
The prose on the sentence-level is generally fine though there’s little magic in the diction choices or the images that Burnett presents, never seeking opportunities to take risks or surprise us. It’s serviceable. The narrative voice, however, seems to go out of its way to constantly explain Panya’s emotional state, even when it’s made clear through dialogue and action. Not to mention, the novella is consistently on the nose like Panya’s baby girl being named Liber.
The story’s climax is as inspired as the rest of it, which is to say not very much. Overall, if you were looking forward to a novella that grapples with motherhood, late-stage capitalism, post-pandemic germophobia, or our general nutrition obsession, you won’t find much exploration of any of those themes here. The story’s treatment of them is always surface-level and at arm’s length, lacking any real philosophical depth. Ex Partum is the kind of book that makes you wish you were reading anything else.
January 13, 2017 / Vito Gulla / 0 Comments
An introduction is the first paragraph (sometimes, in longer essays, first paragraphs) and serves, rather obviously, to introduce your topic. It here that you provide some kind of background or general information about your subject. For example, if you’re arguing for greater regulations on the financial industry, your introduction should give a brief history of previous regulations or the lack thereof. If you are writing criticism about Shakespeare’s The Tempest, you may want to begin by providing an overview of the more important or more recognized critical interpretations of the text which came before yours. However, that history does not always have to be so broad. While you may sometimes write about the larger ongoing discourse, you may also want to discuss your own personal history with the topic, using an anecdote to introduce it. If you’re arguing that eating meat is immoral for a philosophy essay, you may want to consider starting with a brief story about how you went from an omnivore to an herbivore. Of course, regardless of the approach you take, your introduction should always lead logically to your thesis.
The thesis statement is the heart of your essay and should, the majority of the time, come at the very end of your introduction. Typically, your thesis is a one sentence answer to an explicitly or implicitly asked question. For example, if your instructor asks you to write an essay about the influences on Arthur Penn’s Bonnie and Clyde, they are essentially asking, “What cause or causes produced Bonnie and Clyde?” Your thesis statement should directly answer that question. For example, you may answer it by writing, “Bonnie and Clyde was a result of the New Hollywood era, incorporating the vernacular of the French New Wave and promoting the sexual mores and anti-establishment nature of the hippie movement.” Notice this answer is not definitive. In order for a thesis to be valid, it must be debatable. It is not a fact: It is the author’s opinion backed up by evidence. In other words, your thesis should serve as the roapmap to your paper. It should not only provide your argument but your support as well. In the previous example, the reader has made the following promise: He or she will show how Bonnie and Clyde was influenced by the New Hollywood era, the French New Wave, and the hippie movement. Also, the author has implicitly signaled to the reader that the body paragraphs will follow that order.
- How to Construct a Thesis: A Formula
Whenever you write a thesis, you have three possible answers, “Yes, no, and maybe.” The first one is “yes, I agree with this idea.” The second one is “no, I disagree with this idea.” The third one is “this idea is both true and not true.” This should be the base of your thesis statement.
The second part of your thesis should list the evidence or support you plan to explore in the body of your essay. Therefore, you can use the following approach:
Thesis Statement = Your Argument + Point 1/Body Paragraph 1/Section 1, Point 2/Body Paragraph 2/Section 2, Point 3/Body Paragraph 3/Section 3, ad infinitum
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The body paragraphs serve to prove the initial claim you have presented in your thesis. If, for example, you encounter the following a thesis, stating, “Though it is to difficult to decide the success or failure of a series of wars which took place in a nearly two-hundred year period, an investigation of the Crusades’s moral consequences yields a reasonably assertive answer: the Crusades failed because they were presented as just wars but, instead, led to institutionalized xenophobia and genocide, which continue to plague the west to this day,” you expect the first body paragraph/section to deal with how the wars were presented by church leadership, the second paragraph/section should deal with what the wars did, and the final paragraph/section should deal with the Crusades lingering effects. Here, you can again follow a simple formula to construct your paragraph.
Your first sentence, or topic sentence, should disclose to your reader how this idea proves your argument. Let’s take an example from the second paragraph: “In many respects, the First Crusade sprang out of the racial and religious fears of Christian Europeans rather than a war of revenge righting unforgivable wrongs.” This is a claim. Notice it is be an idea which is debatable (and not a fact).
The sentences which follow should provide “proof” for your claim. This is your evidence. It should be specific a fact or facts that you interpret to support your argument. You could use quotes, paraphrase, or summary from a text. In the previous case, we find, “As stated previously, Urban suggests that Muslim rule in Jerusalem has led to the most disturbing abuses against Christians; however, his description owes more to bigotry than it does to fact. As Marcus Bull observes: ‘Urban had almost certainly never been to the Holy Land himself, and what he said owed more to rhetoric than reality…. their treatment seldom, if ever, amounted to the sort of horror stories which Urban recounted. (11)’” Here the writer gives specific information to support his claim.
Following the evidence you present, you must explain its significance and how it connects to your overall point (your thesis). This is a warrant. In the Crusades paper, we expect to see a follow-up sentence, which states, “Therefore, Urban’s speech may not have been inspired by first-hand knowledge—or even second-hand knowledge—and it is fair to assume he was purposely preying on the ignorance of his audience.”
This is the typical process of laying out an argument. Depending on the length of the essay, this paragraph may end here or, if the writer feels as though he or she needs further evidence to support his or her case, the writer may continue to follow this process of evidence and warrants until the claim of his or her paragraph has been sufficiently “proved.”
The conclusion is often the most neglected part of academic form. Most writers tend to treat it as a simple restatement of the ideas presented in the introduction. If your reader wants to know what you’ve written in your introduction, they can reread your introduction. Think of it as a bigger version of what you do in your body paragraphs. The claim is your introduction, the evidence is your body, and the conclusion is your warrant. A conclusion should aim to answer the question, “So what?” Now that your reader has examined your claim and evidence, what can they do with that information?