“Rather than outlining your plot in chronological order, try outlining your plot as if it were a candle burning at both ends. Begin the process by writing your first and last chapter simultaneously.” Amazon Author Insights gathers, well, insights on writing from Dan Brown and other famous crime and thriller novelists. (Full disclosure: Amazon helps us pay the bills around here!) We will also never not recommend this evergreen piece from our own archives, of writers on the best advice they ever received.
The Thriller Code
She Totally Did
“‘I can hold my own in the bedroom and the boardroom,’ she said to no one, and to everyone. ‘You should never underestimate me.’ She took off her blonde ponytail and shook her hair loose; there was another blonde ponytail underneath it.” There’s no better time than now to revisit Mallory Ortberg’s classic, unbelievably funny piece “A Day in the Life of an Empowered Female Heroine” from The Toast.
tl;dr
It's the last day to vote on panels at SXSW interactive 2013. So if you wanna hear how our editor in chief, C. Max Magee, and our friends Andrew Womack, from The Morning News, and Kevin Nguyen, from The Bygone Bureau, have changed the game with independent long form digital publishing, you better cast your vote today.
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An Interactive Diary
The London Review of Books has created an interactive map of their diary entries. Check out where 100 of their authors were writing.
My hangovers are scheduled a year in advance.
John Waters on parents, aging, routine, gangsta rap, and WikiLeaks.
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The Kindle Will Disappear Your Old Magazines
Gizmodo discovers that when you cancel a Kindle magazine subscription all the back issues that you've accumulated disappear.
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He’s at a Loss
Guess which famous novelist and new Twitter user got 19,000 retweets for the following: “On Twitter at last, and can't think of a thing to say. Some writer I turned out to be.” (Hint: his last name rhymes with “sing.”)
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“Perhaps James Franco should just stick to acting.”
“Oh, thank goodness,” said Guy Fieri, as he read the New York Times’s review of James Franco’s photography exhibit. “Their review of my restaurant is no longer the most gleefully negative thing they’ve published.”
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