For the last couple days #badwritingtips, a collection of hilarious writing tips to take your novel from typical to terrible, have been trending on twitter. The Guardian rounded up a few of their favorites. Perhaps this advice will help out the unlucky souls retweeted on working on my novel.
Feels so good being bad
Not Really a Good Person
“I wasn’t exactly feeling this. Still, I did try to rationalize what I was doing: maybe being altruistic and selfish at the same time was actually a good way to live, making sure sacrifice doesn’t go too far?” A psalm for a selfish hospice volunteer from Andy Mozina over at Electric Literature.
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Poetry from the Road
Recommended Reading: Amy Woolard’s poem “Things Go South” at TriQuarterly. “Here, the apple don’t fall/From the tree. Here, whatever you/Find lying on the ground is yours./A scratch-off waiting to strike.”
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Tuesday New Release Day: Russell, Koch, Crace, Mohr, Binchy, Conklin, Lasdun
New this week: Karen Russell’s new collection Vampires in the Lemon Grove; buzzed-about thriller The Dinner by Herman Koch; Harvest by Jim Crace; Fight Song by Joshua Mohr; the final novel of the late Maeve Binchy, A Week in Winter; Tara Conklin’s debut The House Girl; and James Lasdun’s non-fiction Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked.
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Vacationing with the Strayeds
At this point, we’re all familiar with Cheryl Strayed’s transformative solo hike of the Pacific Crest Trail that she wrote about in Wild. Yet at Condé Nast Traveler, she discusses how a recent family vacation to Laos reawakened her passion for travel. “Here we were on a sacred hill so far off from the place from which we had come, and so abundantly thankful for it. Perhaps the power of that very gratitude is the reason I travel.”
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Camus’ Web
Have you ever wondered what Charlotte’s Web would be like if Albert Camus joined the farm creatures? Well, someone wrote it for you at McSweeney’s. Pair with our review of Camus’ American Journals.
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Two Moons, Two Reviews
In the Los Angeles Review of Books, Charles Yu describes reading Haruki Murakami’s 1Q84 as not so much reading it, but rather “liv[ing] with it for a while.” I bet our own Kevin Hartnett would agree.
Street Preachers and Tacos
“Even if I bought cars in department store parking lots, and even if I followed small children down wooded paths, I still knew better than to accept tuna fish from strangers in national parks.” At The Hairpin, Jami Attenberg writes about meeting a street preacher in Moab. For more Attenberg, read her not-quite-a-restaurant review of Café de La Esquina at The Morning News.
The Charleston Bulletin
Sometimes, Virginia Woolf took a break from her busy schedule of constant brilliance in order to write children’s stories for her nephews’ newspaper, The Charleston Bulletin. A taste: “When in a good and merry mood Trisy would seize a dozen eggs, and a bucket of flour, coerce a cow to milk itself, and then mixing the ingredients toss them 20 times high up over the skyline, and catch them as they fell in dozens and dozens and dozens of pancakes.”
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