Murder Deferred
Considering how prolific James Patterson and his team of writers are, it’s no surprise that he turned to “fan fiction” with a novel called The Murder of Stephen King. Unfortunately for…
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Electric Literature
278 posts
Writing = Work = Job
Settling the debate about whether “writer” is job that arose with Merritt Tierce’s Marie Claire essay about going broke post-debut novel, and a response piece by Ester Bloom at The Billfold calling…
“Debate/Discuss/Rend Garments”
Over at Electric Literature, Ryan Chapman interviews Teddy Wayne, whose third novel, Loner, seems to effortlessly blow by the clichés of the campus novel: as Ryan calls it, “the writer’s…
Describing Characters Better
Having trouble getting your character just right? Not sure how to illustrate their inner lives, their conflicted feelings, and complicated psychologies? Read John Thornton Williams’s extremely helpful essay on writing…
The 43 Percent
The National Endowment for the Arts recently published its Annual Arts Basic Survey, and the news isn’t so great for literature. As reported by Dani Spencer at Electric Literature, only 43…
Happy Endings
So I didn’t understand how radical The Price of Salt was, how strange and fabulist it is in parts, how hallucinatory and real. I didn’t know how revelatory a book…
The Power of Unreality
While fiction embraces the flights of fancy that come with imagination, nonfiction is fairly hostile to writers who stray too far away from the objective facts of the story. How closely…
The Ghost Is You
At Electric Literature, Samantha Tanner reaches out to the dead via a spiritual medium, confronting the ghosts and echoes that haunt anyone who writes about family. Along the way she contemplates…
Mexico City’s Budding Writing Scene
Writing in Mexico City is like holding a conversation when you’re under the takeoff and landing path of the city’s airplanes: you have to shut up sometimes, to let the…
Kindness/Aggression
In a poignant essay for Electric Literature, memoirist Lori Jakiela (Belief is it’s Own Kind of Truth, Maybe) looks back on the time she spent working the church kitchen on…
Reading Emotions
There’s nothing that the book world likes to debate more than the differences between literary fiction and commercial or genre fiction. According to a new study published in Psychology of…
Scenes Illustrated
As a writer, I always want to know where the light is in the room and how it’s striking the characters. Even if that description doesn’t make it to the…