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Fiction as Fantasy (and Antidepressant)
“When I’m traveling, and not alone at my desk, after a while I get depressed. I’m happy when I’m alone in a room and inventing. More than a commitment to the art or to the craft, which I am devoted to,...
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A Guide to Mario Vargas Llosa on the Web
Mario Vargas Llosa won the Nobel Prize for Literature earlier this month, the first South American to win since Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Want to know more about Vargas Llosa? Here’s some resources...
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Lost, Trapt: Fiction as Web: Salter
You never know what you’re really doing, do you? Like a spider, you are in the middle of your own web. –James Salter, from the Paris Review
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Why Vonnegut Matters
“So it goes.” — KV Thinking about Kurt Vonnegut now, some thirty-five years since I first read him, what strikes me most is the man’s fundamental decency. This quality is sadly, all too rare in...
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Iris Murdoch on How to Write a Novel
“…make a detailed plan before you write the first sentence… I have a general scheme and lots of notes. Every chapter is planned. Every conversation is planned. This is, of course, a primary stage, and...
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The late, great David Foster Wallace on, um, actual, you know, READERS
If you… succumb to the idea that the audience is too stupid, then there are two pitfalls… the avant-garde pitfall, where you have the idea that you’re writing for other writers… (or) crass, cynical,...
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Of Interest: Poetics of Spanking, New York Squalor, Steinbeck on Fiction
Astrid Lorange on Gertrude Stein and “the poetics of spanking.” Luc Sante waxes nostalgic over life in New York in the Seventies: “New York City was the only imaginable home, the only place that posted...
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Hemingway: Writing at First Light
… I write every morning as soon after first light as possible. There is no one to disturb you and it is cool or cold and you come to your work and warm as you write… You write until you come to a...
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Flannery O’Connor on Writing
Gretchen Rubin at The Happiness Project has worked through Flannery O’Connor‘s letters and found eight wonderful little gems of advice on writing fiction.Click here. My favorite: I know that the...
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Franzen: Risk It All
…you owe it to your readers to set yourself the most difficult challenge that you have some hope of being equal to. With every book, you have to dig as deep as possible and reach as far as possible....
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