plot
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How We Create Ourselves: Second Place by Rachel Cusk
The voice reaches and reaches at answers to broad questions. Sometimes it pulls back pieces of insight and beauty.
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The Story Is the Concepts: Philosophizing with Ryan Ruby
Ryan Ruby talks about his debut novel The Zero and the One, the challenges of pacing and plot, and the fun of inventing a book of philosophy for the novel.
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The Rumpus Mini-Interview Project #71: Kris D’Agostino
In Kris D’Agostino’s second novel, The Antiques, he returns to familiar forms: A dysfunctional family whose members are in various stages of arrested development; a generational home in upstate New York; and the absurdity of life in its most darkly…
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The Saturday Rumpus Interview: Leslie Pietrzyk
Think about the stories you have inside that scare you. That’s what you should be writing.
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The Unfolding of a Hidden Design
Plot has lost its prestige. Fighting against what he perceives as a changing of values in the modern novel, John Mullan writes an ode to plot, from the masterworks of Dickens and le Carré to the serialized TV dramas we…
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The Rumpus Book Club Chat with Sari Wilson
The Rumpus Book Club chats with Sari Wilson about her new book Girl Through Glass, the demands of the dance world, and New York City as a character.
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Tell Don’t Show, Like Wikipedia
Do not make me decipher your intent. Do not assume allegorical common ground. Do not make me pay attention to your god damn motif. Tell don’t show, like Wikipedia. A blunt argument for the straight story in fiction, over at…
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The Rumpus Interview with Lidia Yuknavitch
Lidia Yuknavitch discusses her latest book, The Small Backs of Children, war, art, the chaos of experience, and that photograph of the vulture stalking the dying child in the Sudan that won the Pulitzer Prize.
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Every Word Counts
Great writers, along with everything else they are doing, stage a readerly experience and lead their readers through it from first word on first page to last. Mapping out what those paths might look like is as worthy a critical…
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Plotting Plot
With the help of math and computers, a University of Nebraska English professor has been plotting the basic shapes of novels (spoiler: there are six), but this time in a new way. Instead of focusing on plot as action, Matthew…
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The Rumpus Interview with Luke B. Goebel
Luke B. Goebel talks about his experimental novel, Fourteen Stories, None of Them Are Yours, his dark days in San Francisco, hands as blood-bags, and literary Ouija boards.
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World History Plot Holes?
A meteor killing off the dinosaurs was obviously a cop out because the author didn’t know where to take the story. This was just one of several responses on Reddit’s thread “Assume all of world history is a movie. What…