Life is Too Short to Read a Bad Book: A Conversation with My Editor

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After I sold my novel to Little, Brown, my editor Allie Sommer and I talked on the phone (for the second time ever). I said, "My parents are so proud of me!" and she said something like, "Mine are so proud of me!"
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Plotted in Technicolor: On Mark Haskell Smith’s Raw

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One particular image from Baked by Mark Haskell Smith persists in my memory. There is bondage involved. And testicle shaving. It was with this in mind that I began Smith’s new novel, Raw: A Love Story. I hoped to find that same ribald humor, not to mention a few delightful plot twists. I wasn’t disappointed.
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Style Sheet: A Conversation with My Copyeditor

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I think I’ve always read like a copyeditor, even way back before I knew what a copyeditor was. One of my favorite authors is Proust, and when I was young I would read some of his sentences over and over trying to make sure I understood how every word related to the other words and just to make sure I understood what he was saying.
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A Year in Reading: Edan Lepucki

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If I see you at a holiday party this December, I will corner you at the punch bowl and talk your ear off about Far From the Tree: Parents, Children and the Search for Identity by Andrew Solomon. This book is a masterpiece! And, hey, here, let me ladle you some punch, that’s a nice sweater, etc.
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Ask the Writing Teacher: Fifty Shades of Rejection

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To get an informed answer, I decided to query some highly respected magazine editors and readers to see what they had to say on the topic.
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The Past is What Matters: On Margaret Atwood’s Vision of the Future

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For Atwood, the speculative effort is to imagine not just what the future might bring, but also what it might take away.
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Love, Reblogged: Thoughts on 40 Days of Dating

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The project is a lesson for fiction writers in the variance of point of view, and it proves that interpersonal communication can be as trying as putting together Ikea furniture.
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Ask the Writing Teacher: Story Arc(s)

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The thought of a student asking me this question in a classroom, where I would have to improvise a coherent answer, is enough to make me retire. Story arc?!
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Don’t Let the Story End: Five Spinoff Novels I’d Love to Read

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I'd love to read a novel narrated by Eloise's mother. She's a rich fuck-up, to be sure, maybe a functioning alcoholic with a penchant for Bloody Marys at breakfast and champagne every afternoon.
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The Chemistry between Fiction and Reality: The Millions Interviews Ramona Ausubel

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There are lots of conversations in the world about writing which focus on the benefit of the reader and what works for him or her, and of course all writers should care about that, but at the same time, the magic act of making something out of nothing is happening in the writer’s head, and it’s that brain that needs to be tended to first.
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Sing It, Sister! On Meg Wolitzer’s The Interestings

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As I read its final lines, declarative and profound and true, I felt mournful. The book -- this book! -- was over. I closed the novel and wondered if I could write a book this big, this ballsy. I imagined Ms. Wolitzer behind an imposing mahogany desk, quill in hand. "Why not?" she said to me, and smiled. Yes, why not?
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The Space Between: The Millions Interviews Marisa Silver

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A photograph captures a moment of time, but then time itself moves past that moment into the future. When we look at a photograph, we are looking at time stilled, at a moment that has died.
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Ask the Writing Teacher: A Spork in the Road

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Honey, you aren't a contestant on The Bachelor, you're a writer!
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Ask the Writing Teacher: Novelists on First Drafts

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I decided to ask some writers I admire what they try to figure out with their first drafts. What, I asked them, do you need to know before you begin? And what do you try to solve as you're working on that first draft?
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A Year in Reading: Edan Lepucki

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It's not my fault that the most popular girl at the dance is also the coolest and the smartest and the funniest and the sexiest; plus she's got blood under her fingernails and one helluva snarl: ferocious, seductive, ironic and dark.
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Literary Fiction is a Genre: A List

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Let's consider literary fiction as a straightforward genre, like romance or science fiction, with certain expected tropes and motifs.
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Unsettled and Unsolved: Tana French’s Broken Harbor

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The detectives in a Tana French novel can solve crimes, but they can't solve themselves.
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Ask the Writing Teacher: Transitions

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How does a writer attach one scene to the next without saying "And then..."?
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