Columns

5 Ways Your Brain Sabotages Your Writing... And What To Do About It

July 19th, 2012

When we sit at the keyboard, we rely on our brains to help us fill that vast white space with intriguing words, well-rounded characters, and watertight plot twists. Sometimes our brains oblige. But more often, our grey matter tells us that we should check Twitter (because what if our blog post got a retweet from someone important?), that we totally have time to catch up on TV while we eat lunch (because that’s just smart multitasking right there!), or that we should quit this writing nonsense and get a real job (because we suck anyway). Everything happens for a reason.

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YA Superstar: Meg Cabot

July 19th, 2012

Over at Forever Young Adult, we have a term we like to use to describe the feeling or action of being totally obsessed with something. It sums up the tingles of giddy excitement that sweep through your body when you think about your favorite author or TV show, as well as the complete irrationality of your subsequent behavior. The term is "swimfan," which we borrowed from a movie starring Erika Christensen as a bonkers psychopath who becomes fixated on a high school swimmer.

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As A Writer, Does It Matter Where You Live?

July 18th, 2012

A few weeks ago The Economist wrote an article so ridiculous I'm still wondering if it's real: The news that Martin Amis had just spent $2.5 million on a brownstone in Brooklyn's Cobble Hill neighborhood turned into a cream session over how Brooklyn was the new literary frontier.

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Two More Comma Rules You Oughta Know!

July 18th, 2012

So you’ve had a few months to think over, practice, and master the three comma rules I presented to you in April, and now it’s time to learn two more that will help you spruce up your writing while still satisfying those pesky grammarians.

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Acting on the Fictional Stage: The Dramatic Method in Fiction

July 17th, 2012

One of Stanislavski’s major contributions to acting theory was the concept not of “appearing” to be a character, but of “being” that character. In that regard, writing a short story or a novel may be even harder than acting, because in order to pull it off, you don't have to play just one role, you have to play all of them.

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Library Love: A Matter of Degree - Is Library and Information Science Really The Worst Master’s Degree?

July 17th, 2012

Forbes.com gave a tip o’ the nib to my field and advanced degree recently in its annual “Best and Worst Master's Degrees for Jobs” list.

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Stories: Should They Be Unique, Good, or Can They Be Both?

July 16th, 2012

At the time of this writing, it has been less than 24 hours since I watched the pilot episode of The Newsroom. Thanks to the miracle/atrocity that is the Internet, I was, of course, made painfully aware of the general reaction to the show well before I actually sat down and saw a frame of it.

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The Blagger’s Guide to Shirley Jackson

July 13th, 2012

To blag (v): to sound like you know what you’re talking about when you don’t The Blagger’s Guide to Literature (n): an invaluable resource for those who wish to blag about books without actually reading them.

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A 'Bot Bestiary: The Robotic Tradition In Science Fiction

July 13th, 2012

From honorable cyborgs to dastardly androids, Science Fiction is filled with synthetic beings of every sort. Robots give authors and readers a chance to contemplate deeper issues of self and consciousness - while still keeping rad options like laser cannons, super strength, and jet boots on the table.

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On Comics and Continuity

July 12th, 2012

Continuity is quite simply the greatest storytelling device since the narrative poem. Even if you’ve never written a story or taken a lit class, you probably know about continuity. Cause precedes effect, action comes before reaction, and characters that die in chapter four do not suddenly appear alive and well in chapter six without a very good explanation. It allows our stories to mimic the flow of events in reality, thus making them more real for the reader. Continuity is part of the magic that allows us to believe stories that we know to be categorically false.

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