Episode 165: Ramona Ausubel Will Get You Unstuck

About this episode

In this episode, Christie Aschwanden interviews Ramona Ausubel about overcoming creative blocks and effective writing strategies.

Everyone gets stuck. And in this interview with writer and teacher Ramona Ausubel, we talk about why this is normal and practical, usable ways to meet a page when we don’t think we can go on. Drawing from her newest book, Unstuck:101 Doorways leading from the Blank Page to the Last Page , Ramona shares with us why certain strategies work only at certain stages of creative projects. We talk about finding patterns, ways to develop characters and create scenes, different ways to approach different drafts, the half-draft approach, finding opposition and so much more. Ramona Ausubel is the national bestselling author of Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading From the Blank Page to the Last Page, The Last Animal, Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born and No One is Here Except All of Us . She is the recipient of the National Book Foundation Science + Literature Prize, the PEN/USA Fiction Award, the Cabell First Novelist Award and has been a finalist for both the California and Colorado Book Awards and the New York Public Library Young Lions Award. Her work has been published in The New Yorker, The New York Times, The Paris Review daily, One Story, Tin…

People in this episode

Host: Christie Aschwanden

Guest: Ramona Ausubel

Topics covered

• creativity
• writing strategies
• overcoming writer's block
• character development
• drafting techniques

Keywords

• writer's block
• creative projects
• writing techniques
• character creation
• drafting

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Colorado State University

Books & works: Unstuck: 101 Doorways Leading From the Blank Page to the Last Page, The Last Animal, Awayland: stories, Sons and Daughters of Ease and Plenty, A Guide to Being Born, No One is Here Except All of Us

Places: Boulder, Colorado

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