Jennifer Egan has tweeted the first ever short story for Twitter. It appeared in ten installments @NYerFiction, the New Yorker Magazine Fiction Department’s Twitter handle. Egan is the author of several highly regarded books, including most recently the Pulitzer Prize-winning A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD. Below are the first three chapters (or stanzas?) of […]
The country’s major newspapers have been writing about commas recently. Have the dog days of summer arrived early? University of Delaware Professor Ben Yagoda started the comma-tion in his New York Times Opinionator. If you count the most recently posted comma questions installment, in which the professor answers a lot of questions from readers about […]
Lately, we have encountered a memoir or two that are long, explanations of someone’s life. How interesting are explanations? Think of your mother explaining to you why you should get a life. Think of the person you are meeting for lunch explaining in detail why he or she is late. And think about somebody telling […]
A report in the Washington Post this morning details the soul searching National Public Radio is doing over contributor David Sedaris. Sedaris is a well-known memoirist and comic whose quirky stories about his upbringing and later life have also been best-selling books. The issue NPR is having is that it is a news organization and […]
It will not come as news to any of you that writing is a really hard endeavor. Just about everybody agrees with that. In THE CAMBRIDGE HANDBOOK OF EXPERTISE AND EXPERT PERFORMANCE (a book that examines the scientific understanding of expertise in fifteen areas of endeavor), author Ronald Kellogg writes that serious writing requires the […]
A team of scientists at Cornell University has reviewed hundreds of famous movie quotes to find out what makes them memorable. The researchers took 1,000 well-known quotes as identified by IMDb and matched them with other quotes that have not proved as durable. The pairs of quotes came from the same movie, were spoken by […]
In his new book, POCKET KINGS, Ted Heller has coined the phrase nov-oir. A combination of novel and memoir, it defines a memoiristic novel, which is to say a fictional book written in the first person as if it were a memoir. POCKET KINGS is just such a nov-oir (or mem-vel). The protagonist, Franklin W. […]
As hard as many of us work at our writing, we may never get sent on a book tour. Author Anne Lamott might well say that is a blessing. When her latest book SOME ASSEMBLY REQUIRED came out recently, she tweeted about the whole experience: publication, reviews and book tour. Written with her son Sam […]
When you make an effort to use strongly evocative words in your narrative you are not just creating a richly textured piece of writing, you are also stimulating the brains of your readers. We were interested to read in the March 17th New York Times that neuroscientists are finding that reading not only activates the […]
Here in Washington D.C. the cherry blossoms are expected to hit peak bloom this week, about two weeks earlier than the average. This is to say spring has arrived here. We have had a stretch of unusually warm weather; the trees are greening up fast; and the bulbs have popped. All of this makes it […]