Writers’ Inner Voices Many writers report vivid experiences of ‘hearing’ the voices of the characters they create and having characters who talk back to them, rebel, and ‘do their own thing’. It’s an experience described by a wide range of authors from Enid Blyton, Alice Walker, Quentin Tarantino and Charles Dickens through to Samuel Beckett, […]
How Crime Writers Use Unreliable Narrators to Add Suspense Emily Martin uses the categories that William Riggan explores in his book Pícaros, Madmen, Naifs, and Clowns: The Unreliable First-Person Narrator to look at ways crime writers employ them to build suspense. The 2021 Tournament of Books Long List Next March’s Tournament of Books, something that
See What the World’s Reading Habits Look Like in 2020 The editing and proofreading service Global English Editing gathered statistics from various sources, including Pew Research and Amazon’s bestsellers page, that demonstrate how the world’s reading habits changed over the course of 2020: “35 percent of web users worldwide reported reading more during the pandemic,
Mixing Genres Is All About Messing with Structure “Knowing what people are expecting allows you to subvert the trope. Expectation is its own red herring, built right into your reader.” Stuart Turton, author of the brilliant The 7½ Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle and newly released The Devil and The Dark Water, admits, “I’m obsessed by
When Mums Go Bad: How Fiction Became Obsessed With The Dark Side Of Motherhood “Motherhood and ‘mum noir’ is taking over the psychological suspense shelves, but some portrayals have come in for criticism. Author Caroline Corcoran looks into the trend…” I read a lot of psychological thrillers and mysteries, and women-centered stories have for several
Here’s a question that comes up periodically on literary sites: I’m having trouble reading books with unreliable narrators. How exactly do you know a narrator is unreliable? When I saw the question again recently, I realized that, although the question gets asked a lot, I don’t think I’ve ever seen an answer. It’s a hard
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Introduction I came upon Adam O’Fallon Price’s article The Subjective Mood, in which he laments the lack of moral depth in current fiction, back in February. I included it in a literary-links round-up, but I couldn’t stop thinking about it because I find a lot of moral depth in most of the fiction I read.
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Thanks to these two bloggers for sponsoring the 2020 Blog Discussion Challenge: Nicole at Feed Your Fiction Addiction Shannon at It Starts at Midnight You can join the discussion challenge at any time during 2020 by clicking on either link above. Which is more important in fiction: plot or character? Novels that engage in complex
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Earlier post: 5 Irresistible Introductions in Fiction An opening line should invite the reader to begin the story. It should say: Listen. Come in here. You want to know about this. —Stephen King Why Stephen King Spends ‘Months and Even Years’ Writing Opening Sentences The openings of these five novels so obviously invite the reader
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Background: Genre Fiction Genre is a term applied to different kinds of literature that can be defined by their subject matter, form, or technique. According to A Handbook to Literature, 7th ed., by William Harmon & C. Hugh Holman (Prentice Hall, 1996): Genre classification implies that there are groups of formal or technical characteristics among
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