Those of you participating in NaNoWriMo will know what that question means: Do you plot out your novel beforehand, or do you compose by the seat of your pants? As a nonfiction writer, I’m way over on the plotter side of this spectrum. However, I have had the experience of writing in flow, during which […]
Quotation: Are You a Plotter or a Pantser? Read More »
Because it’s NaNoWriMo, all this month’s quotations will swirl around the general topic of writing fiction. Here’s a suggestion on how to get started. “Once you create the character — if the character is really well done, complex enough and interesting enough — the character is going to create the story for you. . .
Quotation: On Characters Read More »
I don’t write fiction. However, I know that a lot of you who read and review novels also write them. So it’s only right that we all greet NaNoWriMo. Do you participate in NaNoWriMo? If you do, I’ll be reading while you’re writing. For both the readers and the writers, here’s some information on the
Hello, National Novel Writing Month! Read More »
An Innocent Abroad: Joan Didion’s Midlife Crisis Novelist, short story writer, critic and retired English professor Scott Bradfield grew up in California but had difficulty “[l]earning how to write fictions set in California”: California is filled with so many vivid pleasures, smells, textures, and absurdities of human character that it feels difficult, or even impossible,
“When I embark on a writing project, my characters come to tell me their backstory. Very little of it—perhaps none—might be referred to in the final draft, but it’s there nonetheless, hiding in the decisions that each character makes, driving their reaction to every event. They tell me, these characters, of past incidents, big and
Quotation: “characters come to tell me their backstory” Read More »
Pat Barker on Briseis, the main character of the novel The Silence of the Girls, based on the women from Homer’s Iliad: “You can sometimes struggle for months to get the voice of a new character, but Briseis’s voice was there from the beginning, as if she was impatient to make herself heard. If I
Quotation: Pat Barker on “The Silence of the Girls” Read More »
Censorship on the Rise Worldwide A report from Publishers Weekly: “Since the start of the Covid pandemic, there’s been a rise in instances of government censorship of books around the world.” 3 Things to Know About the Ending of a Story I see a lot of discussion in literature-related posts about fictional introductions, but not
A Reading List for Women in Translation Month 2021 Women in Translation Month is celebrated every August. Here are quite a few reading suggestions from independent literary presses and magazines. Women are leading the new Latin American literature boom Appropriate for Women in Translation Month, here’s a short article about how women are leading the
Oral History Through the Ages Oral history is older than written history. Homer’s early epics the Iliad and the Odyssey were transmitted orally long before they were written down. Here Sarah Rahman describes how oral history has progressed into the present. For centuries the important stories of marginalized peoples have been transmitted orally in the
What Our Biggest Best-Sellers Tell Us About a Nation’s Soul “Reading America through more than two centuries of its favorite books.” In The New Yorker, Louis Menand takes on Jess McHugh’s book Americanon, which discusses “thirteen American books, from ‘The Old Farmer’s Almanac,’ first published in 1792, to Stephen R. Covey’s ‘The 7 Habits of
