Veterans of writing workshops will know that a good story has a heavy dose of conflict. One can add it to a story in many ways, but one of the best and most reliable is to add a predator, either in the form of a threatening organisation or an animal or person with malicious intent. At the Ploughshares blog, Year in Reading alum Megan Mayhew Bergman reflects on predatory literature.
The Hunted
‘The Last Library’
A conference on the implications of Google’s proposed settlement with publishers will highlight the massive role Google’s scanning project will play in the future of books. “‘This is the last library.’ It’s going to be extremely difficult for anyone else to create a similar digital library in the future, at least under the current laws.”
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Feels so good being bad
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.
Roald Dahl Deals
Do you live in the UK? Well, if you can’t afford Roald Dahl‘s writing shed, perhaps these two £0.99 e-books of his will suffice: “Royal Jelly” and “Man from the South.”
False Positive
At The New Yorker, Sarah Miller humorously learns why only positive book reviews might be a bad thing. “If St. Petersburg is the Little Engine That Could of city names, then the main character, Raskolnikov, is the Little Engine That Could of elderly pawnbroker murderers,” she writes in her review of Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment.
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