People do not tend to look at a surgeon performing open heart surgery and say, “I could do that!” They do not see an NBA player swish a contested three-pointer and say, “Pssh. The problem with today’s society is that there aren’t any good NBA players.” But they will pick up a bestseller in a […]
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Social media is a dumpster fire (This week in books)
This week! Books! You know it, I know it. Social media just isn’t what it used to be. Approximately 15 years into the social media era, and 8 years after GameGate marked the beginning of the end, we’re at a messy nadir, where the giants (Facebook/Instagram, Twitter, Snap) are earnestly committing suicide, the insurgent (TikTok) […]
Another mass shooting and another and another (This week in books)
I’m not quite ready to return to full blogging in the wake of the recent mass shooting in California (calling it that doesn’t even narrow it down), which hit very close to home literally and figuratively. I and my loved ones are okay, but I’m going through that heavy time where I’m feeling a lot […]
The worst sentence structure on the planet (This week in books)
This week! Books! David Owen of The New Yorker and I should absolutely go bowling together because he has written an exhaustive screed against front-loaded, somersaulting sentences, which has a surprising history with roots in journalism and misguided “elegant variation.” David my man, tell it like it is: The awkwardness is obvious if you imagine […]
Do you want the reader to understand your story? (page critique)
If you’d like to nominate your own page or query for a public critique, kindly post them here in our discussion forums: Also, if you’d like to test your editing chops, keep your eye on this area or this area! I’ll post the pages and queries a few days before a critique so you can see how your redline […]
Infuse a character’s desires into their observations
One of the most fundamental principles for writing a novel is that characters need to want something and they need to actively go after that thing. In genre fiction, this is often either self-evident (the character needs to defeat the dragon or solve the crime) or translated into something very concrete. It’s fine to simply […]
