So maybe Tuesday’s post on the 10-year novel got you down. Here’s some encouragement: lit site The Rumpus is introducing a new occasional column, “The Long Haul,” featuring writers reflecting on the (long-term) writing life. Or, as the editors put it:
Whether you’re a literary wunderkind whose first book was a bestseller, or one [...]

n Slate.com, Susanna Daniels reflects on the process of writing her first novel—which she describes as “the quiet hell of 10 years of novel writing”:
During my should-be-writing years, I thought about my novel all the time. Increasingly, these were not happy or satisfying thoughts. My “novel” (which had started to wear its own air quotes [...]

I have always thought that freudenschade should be a word. Definition: feeling bad when good things happen to other people.
Apparently The Rejectionist agrees. A recent essay gives some advice on what to do when good things happen to bad people:
No, today we wish to discuss the cretin of all cretins, the [...]

aybe it’s summer—too sunny out to work inside!—or maybe it’s just the 80º+ weather in Boston, but I’ve been feeling a little… tired. Just in time, Paperback Writer has a post on how to combat fatigue—physical, mental, and, most importantly for writers, creative:
Creating on demand, always being on, always being told we’re not good [...]

Author Hannah Moskovitz has a sweet little post on coping with the ins and outs of a daily writing life:
Here’s what I’ve found keeps you from getting gnawed down to nothing with the jealousy, fear, and guilt that seems to go hand in hand with writing.
Tell someone who isn’t a writer.
When I was querying in [...]

Would you rather have one smash hit, or a long series of good—if not mind-blowing—little hits? Robert McCrum asks that very question in The Observer:
Original work is, by definition, exceptional. Often, it seems to come out of nowhere in a explosive flurry of excitement. Anglo-American and European literature is notable for its sprinters as [...]

hould you get an MFA? On Big Think, novelist Lionel Shriver discusses the downsides of attending an MFA program:
[It] does have a kind of indulgent, middle-class gestalt. The grim truth is that most people who get MFAs will not go on to be professional writers and therefore when I’ve been on the other [...]

“One is not born a genius, one becomes a genius.”

– Simone de Beauvoir

Today’s technological delights are well on their way to becoming tomorrow’s demands, entrenching themselves in ways that will do more than force bookbinding as a business model to adapt, but allow writing, as an art form, to expand and thrive. These are good things. Welcome to the age of Binary Bookmaking.

We love our debut novels here at Fiction Writers Review. As a site devoted to emerging writers, we love calling attention to the start of a literary career and the promise of a new voice. But here is some news of a very different sort: recently, veteran author Jim Crace made news by [...]