Erin Morgenstern’s latest, The Starless Sea, is breathtaking. The novel unfolds through a mythical, labyrinthian-like plot/world in which Zachary Ezra Rawlins begins as a lost millennial graduate student and ends as a modern-day Theseus. His journey takes him into an…
The question I get the most about my novel-in-progress is, “Why is it set in an alternative world?” My story takes place in the country of Silmara, not to be found on any map except ones I’ve drawn (alas, cartography…
Six years ago, I was finishing a first draft of my still-in-progress novel and got stuck at the final scene. My heroine needed to thwart an elaborate ATM scam run by her charismatic captors. How exactly had they pulled off…
So you have a strategy or two for locating the reader in time. You know whether and why you’re setting your surreal, speculative or dystopian novel in the past, present or future. And you’ve pinpointed the era, the decade, maybe…
From Hogwarts to Whoville every fiction writer constructs a world. It’s an artful business even when the settings are based on real places. The best ones are indelible.
My primary association with Friday the 13th — as is the case for many of us, I suspect — is Jason Voorhees. But there are also those who are superstitious about making travel plans on this unluckiest of Fridays. Many…