Dialogue
You know that point in your story when you have to get across a BIG chunk of information? And I’m not talking about backstory where you can ramble on for a while in a character’s POV, recreating a scene at…
Tag: craft
Looking the Sphinx in the Eyes
The first page of Jenny Erpenbeck’s amazing 2014 novel The End of Days (Aller Tage Abend in German, available in English from New Directions) has to rank among the most agonizingly beautiful—and thematically apt—novel openings ever written: “The Lord gave,…
Discovering the Big Easy: Writing What You Might Never Know
“Write what you know”—and its many opposing suppositions—is perhaps the most commonly touted fiction-writing maxim; it has been defined, re-defined, debated, refuted, defended, and all the while handed down to fledgling writers as the ultimate golden rule. A few years…
Here’s the Beef on Stakes
“What’s at stake here?” Sooner or later every fiction writer fields this question. Often the challenge appears as a single word – STAKES? – scrawled on a novel chapter or short story draft, plus or minus a coffee cup ring,…