Often a fiction author will launch into a lengthy explanation of X,Y or Z that may only tangentially relate to the actual story being told but shows off the author’s knowledge of whatever subject is under discussion. One of our clients calls these data dumps – and we are of two minds about them. Readers […]
The book that has impressed us most recently is Jennifer Egan’s A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. We have hesitated to blog about it because it is so seamlessly good, it is hard to pick apart for lessons about writing. Happily, Egan has spoken up to teach us a thing or two. GOON SQUAD is […]
Reading Howard Norman’s WHAT IS LEFT THE DAUGHTER, we were wowed by (among other features of the novel) the quirky detail. For instance: • The book is largely set in Middle Economy, Nova Scotia, which sits between Lower Economy and Upper Economy. “Locally the joke was, if you were traveling west to east along the […]
We are not poets so we don’t blog about poetry, but April is poetry month and recently, we had the pleasure of hearing poet Claudia Emerson speak at the annual launch of the Northern Virginia Review literary magazine. Much of what she had to say is applicable to writing prose. Former Virginia poet laureate (2008 […]
We are busy editing, writing and reviewing book proposals. So this week, the blog is getting short shrift. In lieu of any thoughts of our own, we are sending along this U Tube video containing quotes from famous writers, whose advice surely carries more weight than ours anyway. If nothing else, the clip has nice, […]
Whistling, by its very nature, is a cheerful occupation. Nobody whistles when he or she is down but only when good spirits can’t help but overflow into self-expression. So, it seems to us that expectations for THE WHISTLING SEASON might run to the carefree and light-hearted. Yet, the biggest rap against Ivan Doig’s 2006 novel […]
The first day of spring is less than two weeks away. Here in the east, the birds are calling and bulbs are pushing out of the wet ground. Our thoughts turn to the chores of spring cleaning. Time to shake out the cobwebs, clear away the dust and scrub out the dark corners…of your manuscript. […]
Recently, a number of clients have put book characters to sudden, dramatic deaths that move their plots along but cause nary a ripple among other characters in the books. The dead characters are tossed aside like used Kleenex, their use expended, and because they are fictional to begin with, they do not even litter the […]
Honestly, we don’t like flashbacks in books. We find it annoying to be reading along, caught up in some plot strand, then to be tossed back into the past somewhere and asked to be interested in whatever was going on back then. Flashbacks interrupt the story. They put authors, who use them, at a disadvantage. […]
We have been editing a book in which the author has taken great pains to give the hero a sense of humor. Unfortunately, the things he finds funny are so shocking that every time we read one of them, we have to stop and ask ourselves, “This is the hero of this book? Are we […]