The Post-Apocalyptic Present
For a smart writer, a ravaged future world also offers something like a perfect literary playground, a cleared field where everything from language to human psychology to social convention can…
Posts by tag
The Millions
291 posts
Writing in the Age of Social Networks
[W]anting to make a career in letters and not being on Twitter and Facebook — that is, not wanting to share your work constantly with the strangers you met on…
The End Has a Start
I wasn’t sure that it was elegant, or even grammatically sound, but I did know it was just how my narrator—who spends the novel negotiating issues of privacy and voyeurism—would…
Stop Worrying About What Comes Next
At The Millions, Jonathan Russell Clark analyzes several last sentences from well-known novels by Hemingway, Tolstoy, Morrison, and Roth. He pays particular attention to the craftsmanship necessary to write these sentences, and…
For the Love of Chapters
What I’m talking about instead are the ways in which chapters are not merely components of a narrative’s foundational architecture but also part of its aesthetic, i.e., more like those…
Mapping the Imaginary
For The Millions, Hannah Gersen shares the visual aid she used to construct her novel and asks other writers about their own: I got curious about the other visual aids…
Writing Erotica for Money
Once the story was actually finished, and there was no money to be made, all ambition tied to it evaporated, and now I’m left pretty much where I began. Ruthlessly…
The Stories at the Edges
There are novels like Wide Sargasso Sea and Wicked and Mary Reilly that retell stories we know from new angles, and there are whole worlds of fanfiction letting new voices…
The Literary Meet Market
At The Millions, Matt Seidel has some thoughts on the “author x meets author y” formula, and he “set[s] out to conceive of and review the most convivial work imaginable,…
Literary Duets
At The Millions, Nick Ripatrazone reviews BOMB Magazine’s “The Author Interviews,” “a collection of 35 interviews spanning 30 years.” He meditates on the competing definitions and modes, concluding he is “drawn”…
Word of the Day: Frigiferous
(adj.); bearing or bringing cold; from the Latin frigus (“cold”) There’s no denying it, as much as we might wish to: the Northern Hemisphere is in the midst of the…