Suspend Your Disbelief

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Celeste Ng

Editor at Large

Celeste Ng is the author of the novels Everything I Never Told You  (2014) and Little Fires Everywhere (2017). She earned an MFA from the University of Michigan (now the Helen Zell Writers’ Program at the University of Michigan), where she won the Hopwood Award. Her fiction and essays have appeared in One Story, TriQuarterly, Bellevue Literary Review, the Kenyon Review Online, and elsewhere. She is the recipient of the Pushcart Prize, the Massachusetts Book Award, the American Library Association’s Alex Award, and a fellowship from the National Endowment for the Arts. She lives in Cambridge, Massachusetts.


Articles

Shop Talk |

An idea is worth… Three MILLION dollars

by Celeste Ng

I am selling my story that I have been creating for 10+ years. (not constantly writing, but of piecing everything together in a cohesive manner) It can be compared to stories like Star Wars, Harry Potter, Lord of the Rings, Matrix, Indiana Jones and other titles in those categories. This is a really great story I have. This story needs to be completed by a professional writer or Ghost Writer. I am by no means a writer. Thus begins a recent listing on eBay. The item up for auction? Not the story, but the story idea. The listing continues: I […]


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Thursday Morning Candy: DailyLit

by Celeste Ng

Welcome to Thursday Morning Candy, where we highlight some of our favorite online journals and writer resources. This week’s treat from our blogroll: DailyLit, which sends you literature in bite-sized installments via RSS or email—for free! Says the site’s FAQ: Why read books by email? Because if you are like us, you spend hours each day reading email but don’t find the time to read books. DailyLit brings books right into your inbox in convenient small messages that take less than 5 minutes to read. You can choose from nearly a thousand titles, and DailyLit breaks the book or story […]


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The child as writing aid

by Celeste Ng

I used to say that in order to get any writing done, I should hire someone to stand behind me with a stick and hit me on the head anytime I wasn’t working. I imagined someone along the lines of The Rock, or at least Queen Latifah, who embodied just such a character (more or less) in Stranger Than Fiction—a sweet movie despite its amazingly unrealistic portrayal of the writing life. “Motivator” might have been a good job title. Well, now I have a Motivator, but he doesn’t look anything like I expected. Trying to write while taking care of […]


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"How do you know a tsunami is coming?" "When the ocean starts to disappear."

by Celeste Ng

If you’re looking for reasons to help the relief efforts in Japan, look no further than this moving essay in the New York Times by novelist Marie Mutsuki Mockett, author of Picking Bones from Ash. Mockett’s family lives near Sendai, the city hardest hit by the earthquake and the tsunami that followed. For 36 hours after the earthquake and tsunami that eviscerated the east coast of Japan on Friday, I was unable to get any word from my relatives who oversee and live in our family’s Buddhist temple in Iwaki City, south of Sendai, the biggest city near the epicenter. […]


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99 problems… but a snitch ain't one

by Celeste Ng

Once again, fiction becomes reality—sort of. The wizard sport Quidditch, from J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter series1, has made its way into the real world. The International Quidditch Association “serves to promote Quidditch as a new sport and lead outreach programs to increase athletic participation among children and young adults and bring magic to communities.” According to the organization’s website, “Muggle Quidditch,” or “Ground Quidditch,” began in 2005 as an intramural league at Middlebury College in Vermont. The rules were adapted from JK Rowling’s Harry Potter novels by Alexander Manshel, the first Quidditch Commissioner. […] Since then the IQA has helped […]


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Spider-Man, and killing your darlings

by Celeste Ng

Last week, Spider-Man: Turn Off the Dark fired its director, Julie Taymor. Already the most expensive musical in Broadway history, Spider-Man has been universally panned by critics—and it hasn’t even officially opened yet. The show’s decision to let Taymor go was apparently in part due to her refusal to alter the script, even when everyone around her agreed it wasn’t working. Reports the New York Times: According to four of her colleagues, Ms. Taymor boxed herself into a corner with the producers in the last few weeks by rebuffing their requests to allow outsiders to make changes to the show. […]


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26 years old. 100,000+ ebooks sold per month. The future of electronic publishing?

by Celeste Ng

Is self-publishing really a viable option for writers? It is for Amanda Hocking. USA Today reports on the 26-year-old self-published success story: Fed up with attempts to find a traditional publisher for her young-adult paranormal novels, Hocking self-published last March and began selling her novels on online bookstores like Amazon and Barnesandnoble.com. By May she was selling hundreds; by June, thousands. She sold 164,000 books in 2010. Most were low-priced (99 cents to $2.99) digital downloads. More astounding: This January she sold more than 450,000 copies of her nine titles. More than 99% were e-books. Internet-fiction site Novelr analyzes how […]


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Help victims of the Japan earthquake!

by Celeste Ng

Authors for Japan has just launched an auction site to help those affected by the recent earthquake and tsunami. (Via.) Items up for bids include 200 UK pounds of teen fiction from Hachette, several opportunities to have a character named after you in an upcoming book, cover letter and first chapter critiques, query letter critiques, a book-themed blog or site of your own, freelance journalism mentoring sessions, and much, much more—far too much to list here. Click on over to the Authors for Japan site and place your bids (in UK pounds) in the comment section of the items you’d […]


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Flipbook: "Teaching"

by Celeste Ng

Every few weeks, we launch a new Fiction Writers Review “Flipbook.” During the past two and a half years, we’ve featured more than 50 interviews with authors established and emerging. They’ve had such valuable insights into the writing life—from thoughts on process and craft to ideas about community and influence—that we wanted to find a way to further these conversations within our community. Each Flipbook highlights some of the very best of the conversations on our site, centered around a particular topic. Our latest Flipbook is now up on the FWR Facebook page, with an exclusive slide right here on […]


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Beyond "Books by the Foot"… but to what?

by Celeste Ng

I adore this video of books arranging themselves by color. So why do I cringe when I read this? For the spa in Philippe Starck’s Icon Brickell, the icy glass condo tower in Miami, [designer Thatcher Wine] was asked to wrap 1,500 books in blank white paper, without titles, to provide a “textural accent” to the space. He chose mass-market hardcovers that flood the used book outlets — titles by John Grisham and Danielle Steel, or biographies of Michael Jackson, he said — because they are cheap, clean and a nice, generous size. For another Starck project, in Dallas, Mr. […]




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