Favorite Authors: Commercial and Literary
Episode 10
I love to read. I can get lost in a book. Like everyone, I have my favorite authors. Here are just a few of my favorites, in no particular order.
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Episode 10
I love to read. I can get lost in a book. Like everyone, I have my favorite authors. Here are just a few of my favorites, in no particular order.
Read more +Episode 9
How to begin? That is the question. Should a novel open slowly by building an interesting protagonist surrounded by memorable characters? Or should it open with a big bang, an exciting hook to entice the reader to keep turning the page?
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You are an author. Or more accurately, you are a writer. You have published nothing. But your goal is to publish a work of fiction. A novel. That’s been your goal for as long as you can remember.
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Sarah Isgur is an attorney, political commentator, and former spokesman for the U.S. Justice Department. She appears regularly as a legal expert for ABC News. As editor of SCOTUS blog, she is considered one of the leading conservative legal voices in America.
Read more +Episode 6
Jodi Picoult ignores linear narrative structures in many of her novels, opting instead to make use of a braided narrative presentation. In that way, she uses her characters, timelines, and forms of narration to present a novel’s central story without simply advancing the plot chronologically. She has successfully created a series of bestsellers with variations of this structure. Among these are Mad Honey (with Jennifer Finney Boylan), My Sister’s Keeper, The Pact, and Nineteen Minutes. Another example is Small Great Things, where she presents her story with alternating first-person narrators that allows her to show the same conflict through very different experiences and attitudes.
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Colson Whitehead showed us the power of metaphors as properly applied to works of fiction when he made masterful use of them in his recent novels: The Underground Railroad and The Intuitionist.
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To understand the process Michael Cunningham uses when working with his characters, one must first have an appreciation of Virginia Woolf’s handling of characterization. To be more
precise, we can look at Woolf’s characterization techniques in her book, Mrs. Dalloway, to see her influence on Cunningham’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel, The Hours.
Episode 3
A writer makes use of the supporting tools AI provides, but she is proud to say that she never uses Artificial Intelligence to compose her stories. Everything she writes is her own. She finishes her latest manuscript then submits it to her agent. She is happy and content.
Episode 2
What is plagiarism?
Not long ago my ninth-grade granddaughter showed me a short story she had written and asked if I would comment on it. I read it and found it to be a sweet story about a squirrel who ate a magic acorn that gave him the power to fly. The story was well written with a beginning, middle, and ending. And it presented the squirrel’s story in a way that kept my attention.
Episode 1
A few days ago while working on a short story, I decided to use the name of an actual town in Oregon, one that would be near the fictional town I was using. My first inclination was to pull up an Oregon road map on my computer and see if I could identify a small rural town that was located roughly forty-five miles from Portland. Then another idea came to mind.