Aaron Colton
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acolton.bsky.social
Aaron Colton
@acolton.bsky.social
110 followers 170 following 20 posts
Associate Teaching Professor, Director of First-Year Writing at Emory English. Wrote a book about writer's block in American fiction: https://uipress.uiowa.edu/books/writing-through-writers-block
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Proofs! Read all about the figure of the blocked writer in American fiction this fall! (With gratitude to the inimitable @samcohen.bsky.social for supporting the project)
A million thanks to @samcohen.bsky.social and @profdgd.bsky.social for their kind work as editors and readers.
We find, then, that literary authors have been acting all along as theorists of composition when they imagine scenes of writing or the failure to write.
The book also tries to break down the divide between literary studies and writing studies. By applying a writing studies lens to fiction, we can better understand the frustrations that authors depict and see how those depictions offer practical lessons to writers of all kinds.
The chapters look to Lucy Ives and DFW on MFA dogma, Nam Le and Philip Roth on ethnic typecasting in the literary market, Sheila Heti and Salvador Plascencia on perfectionism, and Ben Lerner and Bernard Malamud on how writing about other arts (painting, especially) can restore a writer's practice.
It's pub day (birthday 0?) for Writing Through Writer's Block: Lessons from Modern American Fiction! This is a study of how authors have used the archetype of the blocked writer to identify, analyze, and ultimately work through both internal and external constraints on their creative abilities.
Writing Through Writer’s Block
uipress.uiowa.edu
What actually beats writer's block: understanding writing as ordinary labor; analyzing standards set by genre, audience, institution, or market; taking charge of one's relationship with those standards; and seeing half-formed ideas through before evaluating their potential. No AI needed
AI can help authors beat writer’s block, says Bloomsbury chief
Publisher last week reported jump in revenue in academic and professional arm thanks to AI licensing deal
www.theguardian.com
Reposted by Aaron Colton
No grift here. Preorder Aaron's book!
So much grift in this zone depends on an understanding of writer's block as intangible or even indescribable. Shamelessly: I touch on the writer's-block self-help industry in the coda of my book (out tmrw)
Writing Through Writer’s Block
uipress.uiowa.edu
So much grift in this zone depends on an understanding of writer's block as intangible or even indescribable. Shamelessly: I touch on the writer's-block self-help industry in the coda of my book (out tmrw)
Writing Through Writer’s Block
uipress.uiowa.edu
My book (made possible by @samcohen.bsky.social) on why fiction writers are always, always writing about writer's block is out next week (yikes!). It centers critiques of literary institutions/markets and compositional lessons for real writers. Consider pre-ordering! BLOCK40 will discount by 40%
Writing Through Writer’s Block
uipress.uiowa.edu
Reposted by Aaron Colton
Another plug that my lab @nmsu.edu will be admitting up to 2 PhD students this year (application deadline: January 15th). We study (eyewitness) memory, metacognition, and individual differences. More information here:

www.grab-lab.com
Reposted by Aaron Colton
I don’t think a long book is even primarily about plot, or character, or any of the patterned information on its pages. A long book is practicing over time a way of being in the world. Reading even a very good summary is not the same as giving over some portion of your own life to that practice.
Reposted by Aaron Colton
Mail call! New from New American Canon, @acolton.bsky.social's Writing Through Writer's Block uipress.uiowa.edu/books/writin...
Reposted by Aaron Colton
In my mailbox today, a book well worth reading.
The idea that "learning to use AI" is as complex and professionally advantageous as, say, learning Python in 2007 drives me nuts
I'm interviewed in @forbes.com this week about how students can't develop as writers if they don't also develop as readers, how AI tools diminish students' original thinking, and—so long as it remains a genre—how to write a meaningful college admissions essay.
www.forbes.com/sites/lizdoe...
What Teens Lose When AI Writes The College Essay
More students are using ChatGPT to draft college essays, but at what cost? Experts warn it hinders critical thinking and leaves them unprepared for college writing.
www.forbes.com
Reposted by Aaron Colton
Increasingly, what makes sense to me is framing a class as a *dialogic community* and assessing students on their contributions as members of that community. Such contributions can be and should be as spontaneous as they are regulated. +
Reposted by Aaron Colton
teachers!

excited to share a new website at this late date of Aug 15 to try to help us collectively prepare for back to school in the interpretative humanities classroom assaulted by the AI grift, so we don't have to go it alone.

take a look, share, + most importantly: CONTRIBUTE
against-a-i.com
AGAINST AI
against-a-i.com
Reposted by Aaron Colton
Really appreciated this discussion with @tressiemcphd.bsky.social on AI in higher ed and what we and students are losing in terms of opportunities to go from struggling to mastering something, and learning as a relational/social process. www.nytimes.com/audio/app/20...
!!! Disgrace and Elizabeth Costello would be my recs—also Waiting for the Barbarians
The book, it has a cover!