September 16, 2019
What Makes a Character Human?
It’s been almost twenty years ago now since James Wood penned (metaphorically speaking, of course, since I’m sure he used a computer) his famous critique of a genre of literary […]
July 26, 2019
On the Importance of the Authorial Voice
In his book The Art of Perspective, part of Graywolf Press’s series of craft books on writing (which I’ve written about a few times before on this blog), Christopher Castellani […]
May 22, 2019
Close-Reading the Rhythm of a Thomas Pynchon Sentence
If you’ve read enough of my blog posts, you’ll likely realize that I have an abiding interest in the rhythm of sentences. In a blog post on first lines, I […]
January 23, 2019
On Borges’s “The Secret Miracle”
For many writers, nothing is more exciting than seeing in some work of fiction, be it a short story or a novel or a play or even a movie, a […]
January 16, 2019
On the Creative Value of Unproductive Time
There’s a scene in the fifth episode of the third season of Mad Men in which Lane Pryce, one of the new managers in charge of the company’s finances, complains […]
December 28, 2018
On Rereading Books
Each year, as I look over my list of all the books I’ve read (and listened to) in the past year, I always take note of the books I chose […]
December 12, 2018
In Defense of Long Sentences
When it comes to prose style in contemporary literature, no two works have had a greater influence than George Orwell’s 1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” and Strunk and […]
October 26, 2018
On Character Names
Picking a character name is often as hard as writing the first line of a new novel or story—the kind of specific and essential task that often halts any momentum […]
August 27, 2018
In Defense of Flat Characters
Every fiction writer who’s taken even an intro to creative writing class is likely aware of E.M. Forster’s famous distinction between flat and round characters, from his book of lectures […]
July 18, 2018
In Defense of Long Descriptions
When I was young (middle school) my favorite novels were The Lord of the Rings, though my friends always complained that they were too long and boring, with too much […]
July 10, 2018
On a Novel’s First Line
Perhaps it’s the economic realities of trying to publish literary fiction in an age of late capitalism, or perhaps it’s simply our culture’s diminishing attention span, but the first line […]
June 11, 2018
Against the Nineteenth-Century Novel
In a negative review last fall of Nathan Hill’s The Nix, Brianna Rennix of the leftist magazine Current Affairs critiqued what she described as the novel’s “postmodern” elements and argued […]