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From Stephen Elliott
There are those companies that don’t pay their writers to produce content in order to save money, and then there is this. Narrative Science software produces content. It’s being used by twenty companies in order to avoid taking on more writers (and thereby paying more writers) to turn data into a news piece.
...more“…isn’t it strange, I mean, this thing about being a human being breathing and thinking and sensing and dwelling always, always, in a place?”
This essay in the Millions is all about place and home—how all aspects of living occurs in some sort of physical context, all readers are anchored in some sort of “inner geography,” and how being from somewhere is key to a writer’s ability to observe and report honestly on the experience of living in a new place.
...moreWhat kind of caloric encouragement do writers need to get through a day?
Snack choices are among the most important quotidian decisions we make, and often we’re consistent with the ones that work best. Our very own Wendy MacNaughton charts the snack decisions of authors in this beautiful graphic for the New York Times.
...moreLiterary festivals are blowing up (at least in the UK), as evidenced by the new festivals that popped up this year alone, even though it’s increasingly difficult to get sponsors and funders in these times. To get the funds flowing for writers, there may be a new trend in the works:
“A combination of the recession in book advances and the decline of traditional book sales has made the writers who attend these festivals for nothing suddenly conscious of their role as ‘the talent.’ Not only do they want to get paid for their efforts, the literary agents who represent them have begun to explore the commercial possibilities of running speaker agencies as part of their overall service.
...moreWe’ve been seeing a lot from Roxane Gay lately, on The Rumpus as well as in other literary blog realms. Ever wondered about her writing process? See what she has to say about writing in general, as well as about writers who seriously take themselves too seriously.
...more“If your task is to push out the boundaries, and open up the universe, you cannot do that by sitting safely in the middle of the room. If you want to push out the borders, you have to actually go to the borders and push against them.
...more“New online lockboxes allow you to specify beforehand who’ll get your passwords, which private Flickr photos should be purged, and what final status should be posted at Facebook, but these services are no substitute for a will. And writers and other artists should be especially careful about relying on them.”
Maud Newton ponders the potentially troublesome issue of digital remains, especially for writers.
...moreI’ve recently been in awe of the short stories of Paul Bowles, the American ex-pat novelist, composer, and translator who lived in Morocco and wrote The Sheltering Sky and who was basically Beat before the Beats.
Besides maybe Flannery O’Connor and Poe, I can’t think of any other short stories that have so riveted me.
...more“Writing remains a very interesting job, but destiny, or “fat Fate”, as Humbert Humbert calls it, has arranged a very interesting retribution. Writers lead a double life. And they die doubly, too. This is modern literature’s dirty little secret. Writers die twice: once when the body dies, and once when the talent dies.”
— Martin Amis at The Guardian on Nabokov and “the tortuous questions posed by genius in decline”
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Writing by hand does remind you, primally, of what this crazy thing we do is made of. The careful spilling of ink on paper, the joints and girders of letters. Paragraphs as immovable as cornerstones and the proud stab of a punctuation mark.
British writer Simon Van Booy has won “the world’s richest short story prize”, the Frank O’Connor award, for his collection Love Begins in Winter.
Van Booy, who lives in New York and is also the author of The Secret Lives of People in Love, receives €35,000.
...moreThis account of a New York colloquium designed to highlight Jack Kerouac’s Québéqois roots has an odd turn at the end, in which the reporter calls attention to the fact that the confab was part of a series on Latino writers.
...moreTom Shone has been studying writers who have quit drinking. He’s doing it, of course, for a novel he’s writing. How meta. Still, he gives us some interesting anecdotes.
...moreI laughed out loud, like a lot of writers probably did this week, when I read J. Robert Lennon’s confession in the L.A. Times, The Truth About Writers. The truth, it turns out is that “writers don’t spend much time writing.”
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Rumpus Books asked dozens of writers what they’ll be reading on New Year’s Day, 2009. Here’s what they said: