Awesome: visualizations of famous movie quotes, via kottke.

What is the worst sentence you ever wrote?

The David Foster Wallace audio project.

Speaking of whom, you’ve probably already heard that UT-Austin recently acquired Wallace’s archive. But it’s worth a mention here regardless, if only because of these doodles David Foster Wallace drew on Cormac McCarthy’s face: Read more »

"Come over here, Sugar - and type me something sexy."

In my sophomore year at NYU, I was writing a feature screenplay that required two types of scenes that I had never written before – the fight sequence and the sex scene.  Since I had less experience in the former, I decided to tackle it first (ha) and get it over with.  The fight sequence turned out to be incredibly detailed.  It was different, interesting and moved the story forward.  I proudly brought it into class that week and we did a read-through of the scene.  My predominantly red-blooded, action-movie-loving, male classmates really got into it.  They physically reenacted the scenes and asked me if personal experience inspired any of it.  I shared the story of the one fight I had ever been in: at thirteen, a girl slapped me across the face with a spoonful of ice cream to impress the boy she liked.  Long story short, I won the fight and we were banned from our local Häagen-Dazs.

Armed with the confidence that my classmates had given me, I returned home to write what I thought was the easier half of the ordeal – the sex scene.  After typing hours worth of blush-worthy, shuddery scenarios and being overly conscious that my classmates may associate what I wrote with my personal experience (or try to reenact it), I ultimately rejected it all and opted to have my characters simply enter a bedroom and shut the door.  I know… I totally wussed out.  I rationalized that implication and cliché was the way to go.  A screenwriter or even a playwright writes with the knowledge that their work will be seen.  If your actors are hot enough, who cares that the sex is clichéd?

So what does sex look like as a novelist? Read more »

Since starting Lit Drift, I’ve gotten used to reading a lot of doom-and-gloom opinion pieces about the death of the publishing industry. I’ve read predictions that the paperbound book will be totally replaced by digital books within the decade, or that we’ll all stop buying books and forget how to read, and so on. Most of it I’ve taken with a grain brick of salt, because I think at this point in our current techno-literary revolution it is far too early to tell where we’ll be in five–let alone ten–years.

Still, I can’t shake my anxiety after reading this recent article from The Guardian, in which Philip Roth–one of my favorite writers–says that the novel will be a “cult minority” in 25 years. He attributes the decline of the novel to the popularity of film, TV, and computers. It’s not the first time I’ve heard claims like this. But it’s unnerving to hear it from Roth.

He continues:

“The book can’t compete with the screen. It couldn’t compete [in the] beginning with the movie screen. It couldn’t compete with the television screen, and it can’t compete with the computer screen,” Roth said. “Now we have all those screens, so against all those screens a book couldn’t measure up.”

Maybe I’ve been living in a happy non-reality for the last two decades, but I don’t think that’s entirely true. So as much as I love Philip Roth, I have to respectfully disagree. Read more »