Quotes & Notes: Careful with Those Scissors, Author
by Steven Wingate
Writers are continually told to trim their work down, but is that always the best course of action to follow? Not if you don’t know why.
Writers are continually told to trim their work down, but is that always the best course of action to follow? Not if you don’t know why.
Is your writing lean and trim? Or does it need to shed some flab? Recently, user Leigh posted on FWR’s Facebook wall about an interesting writing-analysis tool, WritersDiet. Intrigued, I clicked on over. WritersDiet is a free online tool that analyzes a sample of your text. Paste in any text you want, hit “Run the test,” and the site provides an overall “fitness” report and a bar graph showing your usage of verbs, nouns, prepositions, adjectives/adverbs, and it/this/that/there. Here’s how it scored a few different samples: 1. The opening paragraphs of a front-page story from the New York Times: The […]
V. Jo Hsu considers Rahul Mehta’s debut story collection, which she says addresses issues connected to sexual, racial, and cultural identities in artful ways, and through evocative language.
In possibly the cutest book promotion campaign ever, Melville House has started an adopt-a-penguin program to—oh, I’ll just let them explain: To celebrate our publication of Andrey Kurkov‘s beloved Russian crime-fiction series starring a penguin named Misha, Melville House is announcing a new Adopt-a-Penguin program. No, really… We will adopt a penguin in the name of any bookstore who successfully sells 25 copies of either book (combined or single title) in the series, which includes Death and the Penguin or Penguin Lost. The contest will run from now until December 31st. As a reader all you need to do is […]
So November is halfway over–you’re half done writing your novel for NaNaoWriMo, right? Right? Whether you’re doing NaNoWriMo or not, there are always those days–or weeks, or months, or, let’s face it, years–when you just feel like you Cannot. Write. Anything. I don’t claim these are foolproof solutions, but here are my own personal tips to get started working again. 1. A journey of a thousand pages begins with opening your document. Maybe it’s just me–but 90% of the time, just opening up the right file seems like a big step. I find a million other places to click: Facebook, […]
HUGE congratulations to friend of FWR Jesmyn Ward, who just won the 2011 National Book Award for fiction for her novel Salvage the Bones! In reviewing Ward’s novel, Ron Charles wrote in the Washington Post, When the finalists for the National Book Award in Fiction were announced last month, I’m embarrassed to admit that I was among those critics grumbling about the obscurity of some of the authors (Andrew Krivak?), even some of the publishers (Lookout Books?). […] I’m happy to eat my words. And my spinach. I’ve just read another one of the so-called obscure finalists, “Salvage the Bones […]
In her sixth novel, State of Wonder, Ann Patchett delivers an adventure story that still rests comfortably on the shelf of Literary Fiction. Researcher Marina Singh leaves her Minnesota lab for the Amazon to investigate a coworker’s death and evaluate the research of a field team deep in the jungle.
First, there was Ernest Hemingway, Yelper: Infusion Tea and Coffee House Category: Coffee & Tea THREE STARS I got up late and the sun was already high and I had been drunk the night before. The barista brought me a cup of coffee and asked if I wanted anything else and when I said no she left. The coffee was good and very hot. I sat at the table for a while. When I was done the barista came and cleared my mug and went back behind the counter. I ordered a muffin to go and walked out into the […]
Novels are like sensible, high-achieving older children. Short stories are the quirky, free-spirited, lovable babies of the family. And the oft-overlooked middle kid? In the writing world, that would be the novella. The novella has been getting a little more attention lately. The Booker Prize went to Julian Barnes’s 150-page A Sense of an Ending, prompting The Guardian to wonder if “is it not time for the novella once again to be out and proud?” But then again, it seems it’s always been almost the novella’s time to shine. Last summer, Taylor Antrim predicted on The Daily Beast that the […]
This week’s feature is N.M. Kelby’s new novel, White Truffles in Winter, published this month by W.W. Norton. Kelby is the author of five previous books of fiction: A Travel Guide for Reckless Hearts: Stories (Borealis Books, 2009), Murder at the Bad Girl’s Bar and Grill (Crown, 2008), Whale Season (Three Rivers Press, 2006), Theater of the Stars (Hyperion, 2003), and In the Company of Angels (Theia, 2001). She’s also the author of The Constant Art of Being a Writer: The Life, Art and Business of Fiction (Writer’s Digest Books, 2009). Her short fiction has appeared in such places as […]
