Kurt Vonnegut draws some graphs to explain how fiction works, via.

Six simple tips for writing a literary manifesto.

Talk about finding a silver lining: Bad Review Cliche Bingo.

Edit other people’s sentences for fun with oddly addicting Bite-Sized Edits, via.

Author photo failures.

Buzzfeed co-founder Jonah Peretti has a choose-your-own-adventure Twitter, and Mediabistro is lauding him for “[breaking] new ground in Twitter Lit.” Which isn’t really true, as the ground has already been broken, but Peretti’s project is cool anyway.

Fiction advice from ad guys.

A French experiment modeled after the Milgram experiments found that people would kill, literally, to be on TV.

Aaaaand because I love you, and also zombies, I would like to share with you this: will you survive a zombie apocalypse, the flowchart. Read more »

Maybe it’s just me, but there seemed to be quite a few literary videos cropping up over the weekend. From hitchhiking Kafka cockroaches to songs about children’s literacy to an astute response to the ongoing debate over publishing’s future, I thought these videos might serve as a nice introduction to the week. Read more »

Laura Miller’s piece in Salon last week touched upon our continued interest in reinventing Jane Austen into what most pleases ourselves. Given the ridiculous success of Pride and Prejudice and Zombies and multiple vampire books*, there’s been much talk about whether Jane Austen herself would be rolling in her grave, or perhaps amused to see her stories with “ultra violent zombie mayhem.”

I can’t help but wonder though, if we’ve unconsciously brought Jane Austen full-circle. Though Austen never wrote about zombies, her juvenilia is full of scandal — carriage chases, divorce, murder and other mayhem, without always punishing the offending character. (Though this may not sound very scandalous to us, but in Victorian England this was extremely shocking, and to protect her reputation, Austen’s juvenilia was not published by the family until over 100 years later.)

But much like the spirit behind Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, Austen’s humor is tongue-in-cheek, and at 14 she’s already noticed the inordinate number of women who faint in the novels of her time. In Love and Freindship[sic], written when Austen was still a teenager, she writes, Read more »

This is your brain on books.

Jane Austen’s Emma comes to the big screen…in Bollywood. I am very excited to see Emma and Mr. Knightley dance and sing. For reals.

O helo thar: a good old fashioned book burnin’ at a Baptist Church in North Carolina. Books to be burned include such “heretical works” as Rick Warren, Mother Theresa, and, uh, the Bible. Book burning: ur doin it rong.

Maurice Sendak says he does “not tolerate” the opinion that Where the Wild Things Are is too scary for children, and concerned parents should “go to hell.”

The question is asked, again: is Twitter ruining literacy? We say, again: nope.

Boys like zombies because they’re both “dumb, brutal, ugly, and mindlessly violent.” Girls like vampires because they’re a proxy for the gay men they secretly want to date. Okay.

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This week: writers say the darndest things, Americans buy the darndest books, and also some zombies. Read more »

Oh, horror movies. How I adore/hate you. With your sharp-fanged monsters, and your copious amounts of fake blood, and your unnecessary nudity, and your sequels and your sequels to sequels being released so quick that I just can’t keep track which version of Final Destination or Scream we’re up to anymore.

I spent the other evening re-watching a horror film I had first watched in high school, and hated. But I was on one of those Wikipedia sprees where I was reading one entry that linked to another entry that linked to another, and I ended up on the Wiki page for the film. And because I’m a little bit of a masochist, I rented it and watched it. And I still hated it. The acting was terrible, the writing just sucked, and as the credits rolled I was left wondering why I had just wasted two hours of my life that I would never get back. But, being the optimist I am and needing to find the good in everything, I realized: your standard horror movie fare can provide a really good lesson in constructing a compelling story. Even if you don’t write horror.

The whole point of writing a story (besides your own personal satisfaction) is to in some way affect the reader. To get a reaction out of him. So what better genre to learn from than horror, which is decidedly the most baldfaced in its attempts to get a reaction out of the reader. I mean, really, most taglines for horror films are usually some variant of “So scary you’ll wish you were DEAD!” or “You’ll wet your pants!” And for the most part, the films deliver. People get scared. Reaction = caused. Mission = accomplished. So what can the average schmoe learn about fiction from crappy horror movies? Read more »