Columns

Eat Lightning, Write Thunder: Writing Lessons From Rocky Balboa

June 13th, 2014

image: Welch, Scott D. Rocky movies inspire me to all sorts of new heights. A pair of good headphones and "Hearts On Fire" from the Rocky IV soundtrack? All it takes to push me to the threshold of human endurance...on a low-impact elliptical trainer while Reba reruns play on a gym's mounted television. But hey, we all have our own mountains to climb.

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Live Dangerously with Second-Person Perspective

June 12th, 2014

You have a few seconds at work, in between sending the morning report and the weekly staff meeting. You’re thinking about where to get lunch, and the peculiar brown sweater Cathy wore this morning (is it made of hemp, a burlap sack, dog hair? The possibilities are endless). As you scroll through Facebook, past the political rants and Buzzfeed quiz results, you see a new post by LitReactor on second-person perspective.

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10 Books To Give To Your Crush

June 12th, 2014

A book is the perfect gift to give to your crush. They are not ridiculously expensive, and if upon receiving the book the person says, “I don’t really read,” you’ve just saved yourself a lot of time! Crush over. That person is clearly not dateable.

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Book vs. Film: "The Fault in Our Stars"

June 11th, 2014

WARNING: Spoilers freely discussed.

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Fiction Shmiction: The Science of Stories and Unconscious Beliefs

June 9th, 2014

In my previous article in this series I tried to convince you of one of my core beliefs: That the stories we tell matter because they become the fabric of the world we live in. One of the more interesting reader comments on that article guides us nicely to the core of the next issue I want to talk about. JYH wrote:

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5 Dreadful Memoirs You Never Have to Read

June 6th, 2014

What makes a memoir truly and abysmally bad? Leonard Pinth-Garnell, the host of SNL’s series of sketches dedicated to “Bad Red Chinese Ballet,” “Bad Conceptual Theater,” and other memorably dreadful works of performance art, offered only evaluations, not analyses. “Stunningly bad.” “Exquisitely awful.” Pinth-G was inevitably on target — the art he reviewed was nothing if not bad! bad! bad! Pinning down the reasons is a tougher task. Here are a few tentative explanations:

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Presence on the Page: What It Is, and What It Isn’t

June 6th, 2014

Acquisitions editors will tell you that, beyond a solid command of craft and a good yarn, what they’re looking for is this ineffable something known as presence on the page—a literary critter so elusive, so infrequently and sketchily described, it might as well be Sasquatch. What is this beast so many editors spend their days in search of? And why is it so critical to your chances of publication? 

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Storyville: How to Put Together an Anthology

June 5th, 2014

Have you ever wondered how editors put together anthologies? Maybe you’ve thought about editing one yourself.

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Footnotes: Psycho

June 5th, 2014

Footnotes is a look at how specific works of fiction were shaped by the culture of their time and how those works shaped the culture -- and are still shaping it. In an interview for Douglas Winter's 1985 book Faces of Fear, Robert Bloch admitted that writing a psychopath is an uncomplicated process. Become one yourself, he said, which, as one might expect, is a rather effortless endeavor once you find your footing.

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The Master of Hard Sci-Fi: A Larry Niven Primer

June 4th, 2014

Those who spend significant time reading science fiction inevitably run across the name Larry Niven. That’s because he’s such a longstanding master of the genre, and has earned himself a place in the pantheon of science fiction gods. Or cyborgs. Or alien forebears? Whatever it is we worship in science fiction, Niven is it. He earned plenty of awards, too. He won the Hugo award five times and was nominated nineteen times. He also racked up four Locus wins and a Nebula award, not to mention the dozens of other awards he’s been nominated for.

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