With so many different styles of writing in the world, it’s completely possible that two people can call themselves writers and not even be in the same ballpark. There are poets, essayists, journalists, novelists and bloggers, not to mention reporters, short-story writers, reviewers, and playwrights.
Everyone has strengths and weaknesses; I personally love writing fiction, although it’s sometimes difficult for me to create it. My sister is excellent at writing blurbs. Another friend of mine is great at spoken word poems. I consider myself to be good at a few things, but blurbs and spoken word poetry aren’t part of them.
But it’s the new year, and we’re all about challenges! So, I want to know what your literary kryptonite is.
What writing style makes you curl up with fear and cry?
Your challenge (if you choose to accept it) is to come up with something in that style and post it below. I’m going to come up with something too. Winner gets my love, and the satisfaction of knowing that you are awesome enough to break through everything you ever thought about yourself. Right on!
The new e-chapbook Supercomputer, containing “four stories of goodness” from Jordan Castro, is now out via Deckfight Press. Get it for free in PDF or ePub format (donations are accepted).
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Sara Crow for getting a free copy of Missed Her by Ivan E. Coyote.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Widow: Stories by Michelle Latiolais. The stories of Widow conjure the nuances of inner sensations and conflicting desire as if hitting the notes of a song, deftly played across human memory. Like the memoirs of Joan Didion and Joyce Carol Oates, these meditations were largely written after the tragic death of Latiolais’ husband, and they bravely explore the physiology of grief through a masterful interweaving of tender insight and unflinching detail—reminding us that the inner life is best understood through the medium of storytelling. Whether writing from a widow’s perspective, a girlfriend’s, an aunt’s, a wife’s, or a student’s, Latiolais exquisitely distills the anguish, longing, humor, and strange grace that accompanies life’s most transformative chapters.
The Guardian’s William Skidelsky claims that fiction based on real-life events are “meagre offerings that cannot escape the confines of their reality-bound aspirations.” The two purposes of storytelling, those which have endured since the art was born, are 1) to entertain and 2) to reveal some truth about the human condition. But I fail to see how fact-based fiction doesn’t satisfy both those points.
Obviously, not all fact-based fiction is the same, and I’d tend to agree that a film or book or what-have-you that essentially recreates a real-life experience scene-for-scene, taking very few creative liberties in the process, could hardly be considered art. But a work of fiction that takes a real event and seeks to tease out motifs, metaphors, and hidden meanings? That works to elevate fact? Sounds like proper storytelling to me.
We now have a Tumblr blog acting as a virtual multimedia slush pile. Use it to post stories, videos, comics, text, etc, that you either created yourself or found online. We’ll post 99% of submissions on the Tumblr blog, and the best stuff we’ll republish here, with full credits. You can submit here.
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner dogboi for getting a free copy of Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Missed Her by Ivan E. Coyote. Ivan E. Coyote is a master storyteller and performer; her beautiful, funny stories about growing up queer in the Canadian north and living out loud on Canada’s west coast have attracted big audiences whether gay, straight, or otherwise. Missed Her is Ivan’s fifth story collection, following 2008′s Lambda Literary Award-nominated The Slow Fix, 2004′s Ferro-Grumley Award-nominated Loose End, and 2006′s Bow Grip, her novel that was named a Stonewall Honor Book by the American Library Association (now in development as a feature film). In her passionate and humourous new collection, Ivan takes readers on an intimate journey, both literal and figurative, through the experiences of her life: from her year spent in eastern Canada,to her return to the west coast, to travels inbetween. Whether discussing the politics of being a butch with a pet lapdog, or befriending an effeminate young man at a gay camp, or revisiting a forty-year old heartbreak around her grandmother’s kitchen, Ivan traverses love, gender and identity with a wistful, perceptive eye, and a warmth that’s as embracing and powerful as Ivan herself.
Someone said that art reveals much more of the artist than it ever does of the subject. That is especially true when it comes down to writers. Being that literature is not a visual art, every sentence that we read or write, every place, every character is ultimately filtered through the author’s own unique perspective. We may look at a painting and find it ugly, boring, or see no meaning in it whatsoever. However, in literature, we find whatever the author describes as beautiful, beautiful. No matter how plain the thing may actually be, once it is put into words, we have never known or experienced it any other way. As words are laid out on the page, the writer has exposed a piece of their own heart, by showing us the things that they find are the most valuable.
For that reason, writing is the truest, most direct form of communication. Every single person who has read Lord of the Rings knows Frodo’s exhaustion as he climbs Mount Doom, and every Harry Potter fan knows the slippery, silky feel of an invisibility cloak. Even if you’ve never had Turkish Delight, you know after reading The Chronicles of Narnia that it’s pretty much the most delicious thing ever. Writing is the great equalizer in art; it creates an experience that everyone can share, something that we can all understand the same way. Most importantly, it connects our hearts to everyone who has ever held the same book in their hands. So while writing, as an art, does expose the heart and mind of the writer, it also provides an experience that connects all of its readers. The subject, the truth of the story itself, lies somewhere between the perception of the writer and the interpretation of the reader.
Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner hrbeck for getting a free copy ofGabriella Goliger’s Girl Unwrapped.
This week, we are giving away a copy of Sub Rosa by Amber Dawn. In this stunning debut novel, Amber Dawn subverts and transgresses the classic hero’s quest adventure to create a dark post-feminist vision not for the faint of heart. Sub Rosa‘s reluctant heroine is known as “Little,” a teenaged runaway unable to remember her real name; in her struggle to get by in the world, she stumbles upon an underground society of ghosts and magicians, missing girls and would-be johns: a place called Sub Rosa. Not long after she is initiated into this family of magical prostitutes, Little is called upon to lead Sub Rosa through a maze of feral darkness, both real and imagined―a calling burdened with grotesque enemies, strange allies, and memories from a foggy past. Written with a kind of gasping urgency, Sub Rosa is a beautiful and gutsy allegory of our times, a fairy-tale-like fantasia imbued with a grave, unapologetic realness.
A Shore Thing, literary equivalent of Comic Sans and the debut novel of popular circus show reality show star Nicole “Snooki” Polizzi, heralded in 2011 last week with its release, among other signs of the apocalypse.* If you haven’t read an excerpt, trust that it’s far from a work of literary genius. She appeared the other night on the David Letterman Show to present “top ten reasons to buy the new Snooki book.” I thought of some other reasons.
(The Real) Top 10 Reasons to Buy the New Snooki Book
Creating the perfect character is as intricate as piecing together a puzzle.
Stories take place in all types of regions and eras, with characters of all types of races, ages and social classes. But when you boil each story down, they are really about the same thing: human nature. They all seek to capture an element of the struggle it is to be human and the conflicts (big or small) one faces in the course of a lifetime, year, day, hour or even minute. Therefore, for readers (humans) to sympathize with a piece of fiction and really be moved by it, they must see something of themselves in the characters that inhabit it.
Humans are complex. We become victims of our emotions and become sad or happy at the drop of a dime. We have vices and things we do that we are too afraid to tell others for fear we wouldn’t be loved. We have thoughts we would rather take with us to the grave than share. We have fragile egos prey to the words and actions of others. We have problems showing love and affection; we have problems receiving it. We lie. We cheat. We steal. We betray.
As a writer, it would be impossible to capture all these facets into one character. In fact, trying to do so is where a lot of writers go wrong –– especially young ones. We create characters that are too generalized because we want them stand for a sect of people: a typical NYC teen, a typical housewife, a typical dad. However, creating a “typical” anything only leads to a flat unoriginal 2-D character that will make your narrative stagnant. Original characters fuel great stories –– individuals with unique intricacies, problems, beliefs and behaviors, and those are the characters we must strive to create. Read more »
