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Fiction has always been a place to explore socially critical, taboo, even transgressive ideas. Sensory extravagance and eroticism go all the way back through literary history, but in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, writers like the Marquis de Sade, Fyodor Dostoevsky, and Franz Kafka brought the themes of sexual deviancy, social isolation, and proto-nihilism into the canon. From there, …
[Read more...] about Writing Transgressive Fiction? Here’s What You Need To Know
Few names in American letters command as much respect as Toni Morrison. The first black woman to win a Nobel Prize, Morrison, rather remarkably for a writer of such prestige, didn’t publish her first novel until she was thirty-nine. She wrote this novel – The Bluest Eye – by waking up at four AM every day to write before her two children got up. Then it was off to work. Goodness me. Morrison is …
[Read more...] about 5 Ways Toni Morrison Can Improve Your Writing
In realist writing, villains need to be at least a little relatable (a little sympathetic) in order to be believable. Not all villains have to be sympathetic, of course. Uni-faceted villains can still fill a strong role in the more imaginative or allegorical genres. For instance, we wouldn’t enjoy Edmond Dantès’ epic revenge if Mondego and company were decent chaps who made a few bad choices. But …
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Kate Bernheimer is like fiction’s knight errant, on a mission to rescue fairy tales from the tall, dark tower where they’ve been locked away with other vestiges of childhood – like optimism and the color pink. Bernheimer’s writing style is magical and her modern fairy tales are understandably popular, but the average writer may think they don’t have much to learn from her unless they’re trying …
[Read more...] about 3 Ways Kate Bernheimer Can Help You Improve Your Writing
Though many know her for her dramatic suicide, Virginia Woolf was a champion of literary modernism who adapted the close psychological approach favored by Russian novelists of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, pioneering stream-of-consciousness narration that she married with a superb sense of style, restraint, and inimitable observational chops. As you might expect, there’s a …
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Naming characters is a mercurial task. Sometimes, characters arrive in your mind wearing a name badge. Sometimes, their name is so hidden that you get the impression they’re only joining your story to lay low. Generally, experimentation is the answer, but I’m not here today to give you tips on where to find names. That’s something we covered in The Definitive Guide To Naming Your Characters, …
[Read more...] about 6 Things Authors Forget When Naming Their Characters
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