“Write a short story from the point-of-view of a babysitter who one summer night witnesses something she never expected to see in her life, and then do a ‘find and replace’ in your Word doc until each instance of ‘babysitter’ becomes ‘Navy SEAL.'” Leigh Stein shares some “Writing Prompts for Girls and Women” with The Rumpus. Pair with our own Emily St. John Mandel‘s review of Leigh Stein’s The Fallback Plan.

On bad days, when his writer’s block was at its worst, Hart Crane wrote bizarre, feverish prose poetry as a way of juicing his creative synapses. Understandably, he never published this poetry, but now, thanks to the Harry Ransom Center, we can read it in its original form. Sample quote: “I held the crupper by a lasso conscripted from white mice tails spliced to the fore-top gallant.”

Recommended Reading: Sally Gall’s 2013 interview with the late James Salter.

Amidst all the controversy surrounding Go Set a Watchman, one question that gets left out is how realistic, exactly, the book is in its depiction of its setting. At Salon, Scott Timberg sits down with Professor Angela Thorburg, who makes a case that regardless of its literary qualities, Watchman is “a very accurate perspective of what’s going on here in the South.”

E.L. Doctorow, the renowned novelist and fiction writer best known for books including Ragtime, Billy Bathgate and the National Book Award-winning World’s Fair, passed away in Manhattan last night at the age of 84. You could read one of our numerous pieces about his work if you’d like to look back on his life and career.

As part of their Literary Ladies Cage Fight series, The Butter pitted two of Shakespeare’s most well-known characters against each other, staging contests between Hamlet’s Ophelia and Romeo and Juliet’s Juliet. Who won, you ask? Only one way to find out. You could also read Stefanie Peters on women and Shakespeare’s plays.

Frank Stanford isn’t the most well-known American poet, but he is one of the most revered, at least according to his contemporaries. At The Rumpus, David Biespeil writes about a new collection of the poet’s work, remarking that “no American poet I have ever met regardless of disposition or poetics has disliked Frank Stanford’s poems.”

“Writing on a computer can be terribly distracting, so sometimes I like to use a pencil and paper to jot down ideas. I always end up drawing a cartoon duck. Inevitably, the duck is holding a notepad, and I can read the ideas that he wrote down.” At Clickhole, six writers explain how they overcome writer’s block.

In a digital age, what’s the point of handwriting? It may seem like there isn’t much point to honing one’s penmanship these days. In Hazlitt, Navneet Alang suggests that handwriting, far from being a lost art, is in fact a “useful alchemy” that retains particular uses. You could also read our own Kevin Hartnett on writing by hand.

New this week: A Cure for Suicide by Jesse Ball; Lovers on All Saints’ Day by Juan Gabriel Vásquez; The Kindness by Polly Samson; a new book of correspondence between Allen Ginsberg and Lawrence Ferlinghetti; and Apollo in the Grass by the Russian poet Aleksandr Kushner. For more on these and other new titles, check out our Great Second-Half 2015 Book Preview. Support The Millions: Bookmark this link and start there when you shop at Amazon.

Recently there’s been a lot of talk about the famously reclusive Harper Lee, and with good reason – her long-awaited second book, Go Set A Watchman, was released last week, and isn’t quite what readers expected. Over at The Atlantic, Ari N. Schulman takes a slightly different approach to Lee and her work by focusing instead on Maurice Cain, Lee’s longtime agent, friend, and “co-conspirator.”

“When I want to be ambushed, captured, thrust into a strange and vivid world, and tossed aloft until I cannot stand it, until everything is at stake and life feels almost unbearably vivid, I do something simple. I read short stories.” Electric Literature has posted Ben Marcus‘s “paean to the contemporary American short story,” which doubles as the introduction to New American Stories and does a pretty good job of capturing just what it is we love about reading fiction.