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Cosimo Galluzzi
he wasn't even looking at me and he found me
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Mike Driver
#extradirty
art blog(derogatory)
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Peter Solarz
Stranger Things
cherry valley forever
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oozey mess
shark vs the universe
macklin celebrini has autism
Not today Justin
trying on a metaphor
PUT YOUR BEARD IN MY MOUTH
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@engl272
Novelist says it is 'delicious' to be first contributor to the Future Library, which will compile 100 texts for publication in 2114
Atwood said about the project: "I think it goes right back to that phase of our childhood when we used to bury little things in the backyard, hoping that someone would dig them up, long in the future, and say, 'How interesting, this rusty old piece of tin, this little sack of marbles is. I wonder who put it there?'"
The kind that isn’t fantastic. It’s just creating a new reality. Really, a good fantasy is just a mirror of our own world, but one whose reflection is subtly distorted.
Terry Pratchett, answering, "What makes for the best fantasy writing?"
I bristle whenever fantasy is characterized as escapism. It's not a very accurate way to describe it; in fact, I think fantasy is a powerful tool for coming to an understanding of oneself. The magic trick here, the sleight of hand, is that when you pass through the portal, you re-encounter in the fantasy world the problems you thought you left behind in the real world. Edmund doesn't solve any of his grievances or personality disorders by going through the wardrobe. If anything, they're exacerbated and brought to a crisis by his experiences in Narnia. When you go to Narnia, your worries come with you. Narnia just becomes the place where you work them out and try to resolve them.
Author Lev Grossman on fantasy and Narnia in "Confronting Reality by Reading Fantasy"
The lies are in different places.
David Adams Richards on the difference between fiction and non-fiction, in an interview in Hazlitt.
"[W]hat I love about opening sentences is the complete lack of rules."
Jonathan Russell Clark on the art of the opening sentence
A fantastic example of creative parody news.
In the New York Times:
In a deposition in Ohio, a lawyer became embroiled in an absurd argument about the definition of a photocopier. D: When you say “photocopying machine,” what do you mean? PL: Let me be clear. The term “photocopying machine” is so ambiguous that you can’t picture in your mind what a photocopying machine is in an office setting? The dialogue was so sharp, inane and fully realized that I assumed it was fiction. I traced the deposition back to the Ohio Supreme Court and downloaded hundreds of pages of legal documents from the case. To my pleasant surprise, it was as strange as it was true.
Literary Aces Playing Cards from Electric Literature
Chipotle Cups Will Now Feature Stories by Jonathan Safran Foer, Toni Morrison, George Saunders, and Other Authors. Jonathan Safran Foer says, "[W]hat interested me is 800,000 Americans of extremely diverse backgrounds having access to good writing. A lot of those people don’t have access to libraries, or bookstores. Something felt very democratic and good about this."
I think fiction writers write what they do because no one else has written it and they want to read it.
NPR's Alan Cheuse on writing without a net and what to read this summer
When good students turn in an essay, they dream of their instructor returning it to them in exactly the same condition, save for a single word added in the margin of the final page: “Flawless.” This dream came true for me one afternoon in the ninth grade. Of course, I’d heard that genius could show itself at an early age, so I was only slightly taken aback that I had achieved perfection at the tender age of 14. Obviously, I did what any professional writer would do; I hurried off to spread the good news. I didn’t get very far. The first person I told was my mother.
John Kaag, "The Perfect Essay", New York Times, May 5, 2014
I can't think of a story that doesn't have something terrible in it. Otherwise, it's dull.
Lemony Snicket, NPR interview transcript
In November, all the women in Northwest Ohio have bats in their purses. They hang upside down within the purses, no matter the size, silent, peaceful, their tiny claws clinging to the cell phone pocket, or the built-in coinpurses or checkbook covers, or the zipped interior compartment filled with tissue, lipstick, antacids, breath fresheners, analgesics. The bats are furry, large-eared, pug-nosed, their leathery wings folded about them like comforters, their neat and sharp fangs hidden, their near-useless eyes closed and calm. They sway inside the bags as women walk, rustle subtly.
Lawrence Coates, "Bats", Winner of the 2013 Barthelme Prize for Short Prose, selected by Robert Coover
I think I'm an okay writer, but a very good storyteller.
James Patterson, on how he writes so many bestselling books
How did you come up with the Wall? The Wall predates anything else. I can trace back the inspiration for that to 1981. I was in England visiting a friend, and as we approached the border of England and Scotland, we stopped to see Hadrian's Wall. I stood up there and I tried to imagine what it was like to be a Roman legionary, standing on this wall, looking at these distant hills. It was a very profound feeling. For the Romans at that time, this was the end of civilization; it was the end of the world. We know that there were Scots beyond the hills, but they didn't know that. It could have been any kind of monster. It was the sense of this barrier against dark forces – it planted something in me. But when you write fantasy, everything is bigger and more colorful, so I took the Wall and made it three times as long and 700 feet high, and made it out of ice.
George R. R. Martin, in The Rolling Stone interview
It had been years since I wrote a novel. I had an idea for a science-fiction novel called Avalon. I started work on it and it was going pretty good, when suddenly it just came to me, this scene, from what would ultimately be the first chapter of A Game of Thrones. It's from Bran's viewpoint; they see a man beheaded and they find some direwolf pups in the snow. It just came to me so strongly and vividly that I knew I had to write it. I sat down to write, and in, like, three days it just came right out of me, almost in the form you've read.
George R. R. Martin, in The Rolling Stone interview.
The more I write about a character, the more affection I feel . . . even for the worst of them. Which doesn't mean I won't kill them. Whoever it was who said "Kill your darlings" was referring to his favorite lines in a story, but it's just as true for characters. The moment the reader begins to believe that a character is protected by the magical cloak of authorial immunity, tension goes out the window. The Red Wedding was tremendously hard to write. I skipped over it until I finished the entirety of A Storm of Swords, then I went back and forced myself to write that chapter. I loved those characters too much. But I knew it had to be done.
George R. R. Martin in The Rolling Stone interview