When you ban books for a second, you ban the pursuit of knowledge for a century. Books are the cornerstone of human connection. When people connect with each other’s stories, they learn to empathize, and when they empathize, it is easier for them to accept new knowledge. This is why, when Americans decide to carry …
Book tropes describe a variety of recurring plot devices, character archetypes, and themes that are written consistently enough to become recognizable by readers and warrant their own names. While they are not necessarily a new phenomenon, their influence has certainly grown with the rise of social media. They’ve become a powerful marketing tool for authors …
As a child, I never had to worry about purposefully surrounding myself with people my own age. The school system did that for me. Granted, I did have to go out of my way to make friends with those peers. But having common interests, common activities, and common class schedules helped with that part. Building …
One of the biggest benefits to being in a writing community is the amount of feedback you can receive on your projects. Revision on your own is all well and good, but you know your story like the back of your hand. It is easy to glaze over the parts that don’t make sense because …
I don’t know about you, but before I studied writing I had a specific, singular vision of what being a writer was. In my mind’s eye I’d conjure up the image of someone locked in an office, curtains half drawn, lazy dust-motes drifting in shafts of sunlight, clacking away furiously at a typewriter or keyboard. …
Any writer out there can probably identify with this: writing without a finish line in sight is difficult—the kind of difficult that has me wanting to curl up into a little ball, quit school, and just bury myself in retail work for the rest of my life. At least then, I’d be making some kind …
When I decide to write, I have one key phrase that I keep in the back of my head: “Just Keep Writing.” It’s a phrase that I mostly felt inspired by through wrestling, specifically a wrestler named Kevin Owens who is a prizefighter who loves to bet on himself while wearing a shirt with the …
Everyone who’s ever picked up a pencil, pecked at a keyboard, or attempted to string together a coherent thought knows the unyielding agony associated with writer’s block—traumatic memories of blank pages staring back at you, a white void demanding to be fed new words so as it can grow to be big and strong. But …
Sometimes the most important pieces are the most difficult to write. I learned this in one of my writing classes when I set out to write a personal essay about my father, who was never very present in my life due to his long-term drug abuse. Before I began writing this essay, I avoided it. …
Hello everyone! This academic year marks the official return of The Broken Plate! Our editorial team of Ball State students is hard at work producing the 2025 issue. After nineteen years of publication, The Broken Plate took a hiatus last year to regroup and plan for our next decade. Now we are back! The release …
Most artists, no matter their medium, fall into imposter syndrome at some point or another. Writers are certainly no exception. For years, I have stumbled over the words, “I am a writer.” The following question to this statement tends to be, “What have you written?” And I stumble over that answer even more. But why? …
I began writing when I was fourteen years old and, since then, I have been told many times that outlines are the way to go for writing everything but poetry. However, in the twenty-five years since then I have learned that I am the weird one that doesn’t function well with an outline. Instead, I …
