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Category: Writing

Ghost Writer

Cartoon by Graham Annabelle.

And just a reminder, Graham AKA Grickle has a new graphic novel for kids called Eerie Tales from the School of Screams coming out this summer.

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A Writer’s Hierarchy of Needs

Grant Snider for the New York Times Book Review.

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The Nine Rs

Grant Snider for the New York Times. (Oh, and Grant has a book out too)

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Women and Critics: Roxane Gay and Michelle Dean

Michelle Dean talks about her new book, Sharp:The Women Who Made an Art of Having an Opinion, and the nature of criticism with Roxane Gay for The Cut

I tend to judge a piece of criticism by how smart I find the argument… I don’t mean, how much I agree with it, exactly, but more: how much does this open up the subject at hand? Does it show me things about it I didn’t already know? I like debate and argument, so I’m usually all right with disagreement, and I’m even all right if the critic doesn’t come to a clear thumbs up or thumbs down. But I need the disagreement to have some kind of line I can follow on the map. I like following an interesting mind along it.

Bad criticism recites rote arguments. The shame of rote arguments isn’t just that they’re clichés, though they are, but that they tend to hide from us why a critic is actually thinking what they’re thinking. In which case there’s no point in reading the review at all. I don’t care about the bare fact that anyone liked or didn’t like a book or movie; they can only interest me in that bare fact by writing an intelligent review.

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Punctuation

quotes

Grant Snider has drawn a lovely series of cartoons on punctuation for The New Yorker.

 

 

exclamation

 

ampersand

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How To Be a Bad Writer

How to be a Bad Writer Tom Gauld

Tom Gauld for The Guardian, inspired by this piece on what makes bad writing bad by Toby Litt.

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Find Your Stories in the Dirt

cover design by Steven Seighman
cover design by Steven Seighman

I mentioned Andrew F. Sullivan’s piece on High-Rise last week, and I recently spoke to the author about his own novel WASTE, and about influence of David Lynch on his writing in a Q & A for Publishers Group Canada:

Initially, I think I was very resistant to Lynch. I think I thought a lot of it was just nonsense for the sake of nonsense. It was Blue Velvet that won me over, that showed me you could implicate and confront your audience, you could tell a sad, vicious truth and people would want to hear it/see it. Lynch opened up so many opportunities to leave the explanation out, to make the work immersive and unsettling while still dancing around the established conventions for storytelling. What he was doing seemed very singular, but also invested in the everyday, in waking up, going to work, putting in the hours. He created a world, especially in Twin Peaks, that began as just slightly askew, plausible even. He lured you into the nightmare and then told you it was real. And everyone questions the theories their friends have, there is no code to break. His work exposes the peculiarities of each audience member in their own response—their passions, fears and obsessions. How can they make this story make sense? What demons does it awaken?

Lynch is still doing that. He is always doing that.

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Title Fight

At The Paris Review blog, author Tony Tulathimutte (PRIVATE CITIZENS) considers how the titles of books get chosen:

Every literary generation has its naming conventions, and it’s as hard to imagine the sixty-five-word original title for Robinson Crusoe passing muster today as it is to imagine a nineteenth-century novel called Never Let Me Go. It’s easy to spot the fashions of our publishing moment: short-story collections are named after the collection’s centerpiece practically by default. Titles for longer literary works are often staked to a central relationship—The Time Traveler’s Wife, The Abortionist’s Daughter, The Orphan Master’s Son—or a group in a setting: The Swans of Fifth Avenue, The Mystics of Mile End, The Dogs of Littlefield. Publishing favors the memorable, the concrete, and the vivid; it also has grammatical preferences, like solitary adjectives (Mislaid, Thrown, Wild, Lit), rousing imperatives (See Me, Find Me, Find Her, Lean In), and quirky pleonasms like Everything Here Is the Best Thing Ever or What’s Important Is Feeling… And for whatever reason—maybe a surge of interest in young women’s lives, maybe Lena Dunham—we may soon hit Peak Girl, with The Girl on the Train, A Girl is a Half-formed Thing, Girl Through Glass, Girls on Fire, Girl at War, Gone Girl, The Girls 

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