Articles, Lectures, Online Reading,
and Websites for Readers and Writers

Probable best introduction to getting published: Jane Friedman's Guide. Also see Tips for Writer. And here are basic instructions on how to Make/Get Your Own Website

 

• See Ben Shepherd's suggestions for marketing online.  He sells services, but also has lots of good free ideas.

• Nancy Wayson Dinan on What MFA Programs Do and Don't Do for Aspiring Novelists (2024)
  

• Commercial selling of fiction from Therese Anne Fowler. (late 2023)

• Dialogue punctuation: Reedsy's six "unbreakable" rules for dialogue punctuation.

• MasterClass on Writing a novel in the Present Tense

• Article on Pros and Cons of Present Tense

• Not an article, but a podcast series on publishing: Publishing Rodeo Podcast (8-7-23)

• About Character Arc by Susan DeFreitas

• From Suzanne McConnell's book: writing ideas from Kurt Vonnegut.

• Excellent piece on why a manuscript gets rejected--emphasis on the query letter and opening pages.

• From Authors Publish: a good basic piece on setting fiction in the past (genre of historical fiction but also more) by Garth Petterson.

• From Lit Hub: Dani Shapiro on Letting Structure Reveal Itself

• From Lit Hub: Rebecca Makkai on Setting

• Amor Towles on how he Outlines

• Nikolas Kozloff sends us another article on writing by AI--a pretty even-handed piece-- an interview of indie para-normal cozy writer Jennifer Lepp who sees the bad and the good.

• "What I Learned from 90 Queries!" by Eva Langston via Jane Friedman's blog

• Deep Point of View"-- a piece about the close third person.

• The Present Moment- is it possible to write about it?

• "The Building Blocks of Scene" by Sharon Oard Warner on Jane Friedman's blog.

• Interesting? Yes? Depressing? Probably. AI generated e-book genre fiction--and nonfiction.   How an e-book paranormal cozy mystery writer started using Sudowrite to help her write lots of novels fast. (Josh Dzieza in The Verge). Thanks to Nikolas Kozloff for pointing us to this piece.

• Yiun Li in Lithub on what writers can learn from War and Peace.

• Check out the NY Times on the growing importance of TikTok to book publishing. Note that the writer they feature is the excellent novelist of ancient history and myth, Madeline Miller, whose Circe I reviewed in an issue of Books for Readers Newsletter.

• Philip Klay on how to write about war.

• Jordan Kisner inThe Atlantic on failing to cross cultural divides in fiction (a review of Geraldine Brooks's Horse).

• Magazines that publish work by children and teens

• Reedsy on lengths of novels and novellas and all genres

• Piece at Literary Hub called "How Do You Keep a Novel Alive When It Keeps Trying to Die?"

• How to Do Online Book Events Successfully (from Jane Friedman's blog)

• Yiyun Li on taking writing lessons from War and Peace.

• Creative Dialogue Tag Syndrome

• A video recording of a an eleven minute lecture on the Scene in Prose Narraitve (from a Workshop on Scene, 1-15-22--This may load slowly.)

• Using Dialect in your prose: Ed Davis'spiece in the Writers Digest's Blog about writing dialect.

• For writing group dialogues: https://industrialscripts.com/dialogue-between-multiple-characters/?fbclid=IwAR2NnsNl37R88P-e7I89waHksj-5XE51LzXBBm6b7CdZe3W5FSCuCViw1bA

• Best Seller: How to write one (from James Scott Bell)

• Piece at Literary Hub called "How Do You Keep a Novel Alive When It Keeps Trying to Die?"

• Interesting article on The Turner Diaries (a white supremicist novel that inspires insurrection) in the New York Times.

• Article with Writing Tips from young, British writers: This one is from Andrew O'Hagan, Esquire editor-at-large and author of books including Mayflies, The Illuminations and Our Fathers.
  
  1. Look past your first idea.
  2. Your first thought is never your best thought. It's just your first.
  3. Most of your ideas are banal. Dig deeper.
  4. Go and find things out. Make a fetish of research. Most of the things worth hearing aren't already sitting in your head.
  5. Stop bothering people with your early drafts. Bother yourself with your early drafts.
  6. Work every day. It's not an amateur's game.
  

• An article in Jane Friedman's blog about use of various types of third person in fiction.

• Emily Temple analyzes a good first paragraph (from True Grit)

• Some editing errors to think about.

• Read this on Story, Plot, and Character: Dennis Lehane appreciates Elmore Leonard

• A blog post from Reedsy about how to make your novel into a series.

• Jane Friedman's blog has a post by a professional editor about strained, too fancy, and badly mixed metaphors.

• Check out an article on choosing titles for books from TheSelfPublisher.com blog.

• Check out Reedsy.com for free lessons and information
  and to hire publishing specialists (and lots more information. Some sample articles:
  

  • What to look for when you're looking for an editor.

  • What can authors expect from their fiction editor?

  • What to expect from your book cover designer,
  

  • How to work with a typesetter or layout designer?

• More formatting: "Nothing says over forty years old like double spaces after a period."

• Here's a summary about the use of fonts in a book. You'll want to read this if you are self-publishing, and even if you are not but want to be knowledgable about how books are produced.

• Twp hilarious/depressing articles about making best sellers: One is by Sarah Nicholas about how the rich game the best seller business (https://bookriot.com/…/buying-books-onto-the-bestseller-li…/), and the other is by Brent Underwood about how a fake book ("Putting My Foot Down") became a best seller on Amazon with the sale of three books (https://observer.com/…/behind-the-scam-what-does-it-takes…/…).

• A blog entry about writing and finally self-publishing a memoir by musician Birgit Matzareth.

• Janet Burroway's article on teaching fiction writing.

• This piece in The Guardian talks about on using adverbs. It has a s link some Jonanthan Franzen's pronouncements. I really dislike pontification.

• Some thoughts on doing research for fiction.

• Here's an old article by MSW from The Writer with ideas for starting yourf novel: "How to Get a Novel Started."

• A critique of the workshopping technique of the silent author by Beth Nguyen

• New piece on Reedsy about getting early readers for your manuscript: don't miss the section on special "sensitivity" readers and the responses in comments!

• Here's a discussion about copyright by Davd Weinberger.

• Octavia Butler talks about her work, where it comes from, etc.

• Interesting article in Wired asserting that the "futurebook" is already here, and it's a plain old potato of a paperback or Kindle--the future has happened in the steps leading up to the book (print-on-demand, indie publishing) and a lot of related technologies (audiobooks on smartphones, email newsletter style communications).

• "41 Ways to Build Suspense" Website (thanks, Ginger Brookover)

• Online article about several kinds of "shadowing" in literature:http://www.slaphappylarry.com/types-of-literary-shadowing/ .

• This isn't an article, just a great source for reading--free--25 Alice Munro stories online! Wow.

• The Montclair Writing Group always has something interesting in its blog. This blog post recommends a character development worksheet. The worksheet is very basic, but also very extensive, and strikes me as extremely useful, perhaps especially for plot driven fiction writers and for problematic characters in any kind of fiction. Here's the blog post (by Hank Quense), and here's a direct link to the form by Iulian Ionescu.

• I had a short piece in the Montclair Writing Group blog as well, on using the omniscient point of view.

• Article on a writer's experience of how hard it is to sell your books--even after they're published.

• Here's a nice piece from Reedsy about the function of a prologue and whether or not you need one.

• Plots that an agent says she never wants to see again.

• Ishiguro on his writing process: some quotes and links.

• Check out this article about what fiction can do--
  and maybe can't anymore.

• An article about ten best books for novelists

• Blog post with commentary on novels in the present tense: pro, con, and practical ("...the story chooses the tense...")

• Jami Attenberg on autobiography & fiction:  "Nonfiction, while more 'true' than fiction, is bound by limitations in part because of its responsibility to that same truth. You can know only so much in nonfiction. But with fiction, you can have it all." I'm not crazy about Attenberg's attitude in this essay, in which she comes across as having an over-developed sense of entitlement, but scroll down and find what Junot Diaz and others say about readers who want to know if fiction really happened.

• A piece in A Journal of Practical Writing on how Virginia Woolf uses the omnisicent point of view.

• Blog with warnings for writers--has been around a long time. ("Writer Beware")

• Short piece on how Anthony Trollope turned out all those pages.

• Prizewinning article about a writer teaching a traumatized child (from Teachers & Writers magazine).

• 20 apps (most free) to help your writing

• Coincidence in fiction

• Ed Davis on When to Stop Editing

• A piece about giving a reading where nobody shows up...

• Word use alert! "Twenty Misused Words That Make You Look Dumb"

• Karin Abarbanel, in her blog Karin Writes Dangerously, features notes from a workshop I gave in April, 2016.

• Selling more e-books

• Good blog post from Ed Davis on the writer's life--the bigger picture than simply sitting down at t he computer.

• Article on Indie Publishing from Author's Guild

• Two good blog posts by science fiction author Veronica Sicoe:
  -- Blog entry about using stereotypes
  -- Why she chose self-publishing

• Interview with Lauren Groff

• Article on overuse of certain words

• How old is a young adult?  Here are a couple of interesting posts about YA novels versus "New Adult" novels:
  Laura Moss BLog and
  New Adult Noves: the Answer

• The Editor's Blog on choices for writing "Inner dialogue."

• Here's a sobering--and fascinating--summary of publishing in 2016. It includes this sentence: "There are these days about as many uncredentialed walk-ons in our literary fiction as there are walk-ons in major league baseball." -- Gerald Howard    The Millions

• Don't wait to submit if a magazine asks you to try again.

• The Key to Building an Audience for Your Work is in Your Back Yard

• Those Handy Little Binoculars-- an article by Sarah B. Robinson about how to maximize your search and replace function in editing.

• Troy E. Hill on Making a Writers' Group Work

• On drafting a novel and then having to draft again: Ed Davis's blog post.

• About publishing with She Writes Press

• Most common errors fiction writers make. Do you agree?

• The case for keeping your novel short.

• The best novelists avoid their deficiencies : Michael Gorra in his Portrait of a Novel: Henry James and the Making of an American Masterpiece (New York: Liverigtht, 2012), p. 160, quotes Graham Greene's essay "The Dark Backward': "A novelist's individual technique is more than anything else a means of evading the personally impossible, of disguising a deficiency....Lesser writers never realize their limitations. Many great ones stumble over something a hack might do with ease."

• From a wonderful old piece on whether writing can be taught by Kurt Vonnegut:

"When the subject of creative writing courses is raised in company as sophisticated as readers of this paper, say, two virtually automatic responses can be expected. First a withering "Can you really teach anyone how to write?" An editor of this very paper asked me that only two days ago.

"And then someone is almost certain to repeat a legend from the old days, when male American writers acted like tough guys, like Humphrey Bogart, to prove that they, although they were sensitive and liked beauty, were far from being homosexual. The Legend: A tough guy, I forget which one, is asked to speak to a creative writing class. He says: "What in hell are you doing here? Go home and glue your butts to a chair, and write and write until your heads fall off!" Or words to that effect.

"My reply: "Listen, there were creative writing teachers long before there were creative writing courses, and they were called and continue to be called editors."

• Some agents comment on good query letters.

• Some interesting tips about using Amazonfrom She Writes.

• Chuck Sambuchino on how to get an agent without a query letter.

• Dan Menaker on old time editing and the publishing that (used to?) make it possible. My response: "Literary Laments and the Future"

• NYTimes BookEnds Pieces on the Novel versus excellent contemporary television dramas (especially Mohsin Hamid's piece)

• Writers Digest on Using Real Life in your fiction.

• Using "nonplussed" by MSW.

• A good piece on how hard it is to workshop novels.

• Thoughts about what a narrator should do from Writer's Digest

• Oh Dear: The Novel is Dead Again.

• A publicity toolkit for writers

• Barry Schwabsky on "Permission to Fail" from The Nation. It's about visual artists and an academic atmosphere where not making mistakes is valued too highly, but the insights hold for for writers.

• A Short TED talk on world building in fantasy and science fiction.

• Food for thought: Pet Peeves of Literary Agents.

• For e-books as the mature way to read: "Ebooks Can't Burn" by Tim Parks.

• More bad news about the big publishers: "From an Ex-Publishing Professional"

• Tips, hints and questions-and-answers for writers

• Politerature on Ann Pancake's essay on Activist Fiction

• Five Tools for Building Conflict in a Novel

• A writer explains why she is choosing self-publishing over a contract with a big 5 publisher, with financials to explain her decision!

• Review of a book positing that our intelligence with computers is greater than without. And here are some excerpts from Plato's Phaedrus in which Socrates says how written words are much less useful in seeking knowledge than words spoken in dialogue.

• Do we remember more when we read print than e-books? Article from Time magazine.

• Science magazine says Literary Fiction is good for empathy and social skills: New York Times 10-4-13.

• Chinua Achebe on Imaginative Literature

• Politerature Piece about Theodore Dreiser's 1900 novel Sister Carrie, and there are several interesting responses with other books to read.

• A Huffington Post summary of a controversy in early 2013 over a Random House publishing plan that writers' groups like Science Fiction Writers of America opposed-- and to which pressure Random House responded! Here's the SFWA summary of how it all went down.

• She Writes talks about Amazon, pros and cons.

• Here's an interesting Writer's Digest piece aimed at commerical fiction, but worth thinking about: Brian Klems' "Confessions of a Story Coach." At one point, he says, "...give us a hero facing a challenge or a goal that changes their near-time life, launching them on a quest to solve the problem or attain the goal, with something opposing that objective (usually the villain, but sometimes a force; in either case, the story works best when that opposition is external rather than an exclusively internal demon), with meaningful stakes hanging the balance." Some of the greatest novels I know ignore most of that advice, but others follow it.s

• An article in Slate about the sameness of screen writing: does every movie have all the same "beats?"

• An article on Using Dialect from Writers Digest.

• Sarah Shulman intervewed about MFA programs (she doesn't like them)

• An excellent site listing many other sites of interest to writers, students, and many other folks.

• MSW's article "Seven Layers to Revising Your Novel" in the November/December 2012 issue of The Writer Magazine.

• Ten Ways Self-publishing Has Changed the book World

• Another Pro-Self-publishing piece

• Future of Book Publishing article from Wired

• Neil Gaiman's video'd commencement address about being an artist: "Make good art."

• Interesting article on the slowing ebook market from the Wall Street Journal 1-5-13.

• PC Magazine Reviews a Novel Writing Program called YWriter 5.
  

• Article in New York Times Business Sections on Amazon cracking down on reviewers

• Margaret Atwood and the "Publishing Equivalent of Youtube"

• A Wall Street Journal article about Marlen Bodden, a former student of mine, who self-published-- and just had her book picked up by commercial presses.

• Salon Says Philip Roth Is Retiring from Writing...
  

• New Digital Resource Page from Teachers & Writers Collaborative!

• Article about (actually, against) Digital Humanities

• Article about publishing as e-book first and self-publishing for literary fiction.

• Rachel Higginson: One self-publisher's success

• Article in Forbes on Publishing, self-publishing, indies and more

• 25 Things You Need to Know about Self-publishing

• Article in Publisher's Weekly on the Reviewers who Never Read the Book

• 25 Things You Need to Know about Self-publishing

• Arnold Bennett on imagining an execution versus observing it

• Essays on the future of the physical book

• On publicizing your own book.. .

• Commas!

• Tough Love for Self-Published Authors

• Your Brain on Fiction: Brain scans of reading

• Jhumpa Lahiri on Sentences

• Lisa Cron's Rejoinder to Jhumpa Lahiri: Story versus Sentence

• Laura Miller & Scott Turow Discuss Amazon and more

• Confessions of a Mid-List Author

• How Artists Get Paid

• A Review of The Business of Books by André Schiffrin

• Billy Collins on Workshopping Poetry: Funny Poem

• Tinkers the Pulitzer Prize winning novel from a small press that the Times failed to review

• Article on Publishing: per centage for paper, overhead, etc.

• Virginia Woolf on "Killing the Angel"

• Elmore Leonard's Ten Rules for writers.

• Keith Maillard and Carole Rosenthal on Memoir and Fiction.

• Two articles on women and men writers:   Where are the women writers?

• The "Rules" of Literary Fiction for Women and Men

• Writing the perfect pitch letter: an agent tells you how

• The Gawking Character

• Editorial and support sites

• More articles and Sites

• The Future of Devices

• Beat Sheet Central--Using the Movies in Prose Writing

• A blog about self-editing

• On politics and poetry in fiction writing by Walter Mosley

• Digital Versus Conventional Publishing

• Piece by Marion Cuba on Self-Publishing

• Lucy Writes a Novel: Classic T.V. from I Love Lucy

• Resurgence of interest in readings and lectures? See article

• Vonda McIntyre the science fiction writer has some wonderful, funny pitfalls of novel writing at Vonda's Pitfalls 

• Article on Print on Demand in the Economist.

• Check out a literary agent's survey on readers anad e-readers.

• Frequently Asked Questions about Writing

• Management for Writers

• Should you hire a book doctor?

• The "Rules" of Literary Fiction for Women and Men

• Resources for writers

• More articles and Sites

 

 

 

Writing Advice About What to Read to Learn Novel Writing

 

The Spring 2023 private writing class suggested:

• George Lies Linda Fairstein's mysteries for New York atmosphere and methodical organization. George Lies also suggests this collection: Points of View (revised 1995) by James Moffett (Editor), Kenneth R. McElheny (Editor) . George says, "Learning of 11 POVs: do a deep dive into fiction, with this book of SS fiction; you know most of 44 authors (including well known women authors)."

• Linda Atlas prefers Dorothy L. Sayres mysteries (British, first half 20th c.).

• Stacey Campbell suggests collections of short stories (by the same author) She sayd, "[They] help me get into a rhythm." John Cheever, Hemingway for how to create an arc of story and resolution.

• Donna Hutchinson is reading a novella "Saving Tyler Hake" and is interested in the material at the beginning that sets up, foreshadows,etc.

• Dreama Frisk mentioned a seminal book for her that got her interested in novels, The Good Earth. She adds,"The person who influenced me to write novels was Barbara Kingsolver when I read The Poisonwood Bible. I met and talked with her at Hindman (Appalachian Writers' Conference). "

• Philip Ai recommends Robert Heinlein for world building with a minimum of description.

• Heather Curran says that Khaled Hosseini's The Kite Runner taught her about subtle foreshadowing and the lucky coincidence. James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man taught her about stream of consciousness writing, and Cormac McCarthy's The Road taught her about how dialogue can supplement action and create characterization, tone, and theme.

• Tracy Costa recommends Shirley Jackson's We Have Always Lived in the Castle.

• MSW recommends George R. R. Martin's Song of Fire and Ice series especially Game of Thrones, Clash of Kings, and A Storm of Swords for multiple points of view and how to pull readers through the story with old fashioned cliff-hangers.

 

 

 

 

The Spring NYU 2020 Novel Writing Class offered some excellent advice for writers from novels that taught them how to write--not necessarily great novels, but great novels for learning.

 

Genevieve Castelino

Regarding best advice - mine comes from Gabriel Garcia Marquez who says, "if I had to give a young writer some advice I would say to write about something that has happened to him; it's always easy to tell whether a writer is writing about something that has happened to him or something he has read or been told. Pablo Neruda has a line in a poem that says "God help me from inventing when I sing." It always amuses me that the biggest praise for my work comes for the imagination, while the truth is that there's not a single line in all my work that does not have a basis in reality. The problem is that Caribbean reality resembles the wildest imagination." (Source)

Brain Pickings is one of my absolute favorite things on the Internet. This is one of my book marked articles on writing advice that I refer to quite often.

 

Books: Is it a novel? I don't know because it doesn't fit the traditional definition of a novel. But the work I find best for learning is Kurt Vonnegut's A Man Without A Country. His language is so precise, it is funny and poignant, and so so so wise. When I feel a writer's block, I pick it up, turn to a random page and read. Tying back to what Marquez says – 'write about something that has happened to you' – that's what Vonnegut does here, and reading it never fails to jumpstart my creative juices.

The other novel I find really helpful is Elizabeth Strout's My name is Lucy Barton. – I am writing a family drama. From the smallest to big sweeping ones, I love how Strout handles of the nuances of family relationships.

 

 

 

Suzan Colón

Best advice I was ever given about writing: read your work aloud. An editor told me to do that, and I was amazed at how reading aloud affected what I'd written, and how it would be read. The editor suggested it when I was writing 1500-word articles, but I've used this practical tip for all of my books--yes, I've read 80,000 words aloud. It takes a few days and it's always worth the time. I've been able to write smoother, more true-to-life dialogue, find inconsistencies, and its value for finding repetition or gaps makes the creaky throat worthwhile.

Most instructive novel: Not the most instructive of all time, maybe, but I recently read a novel that could have been a good book with revisions and steering from an editor with solid story navigation. As is, the protagonist is unlikable, and not in a refreshing, clever way; the story meanders, giving the idea that it's leading up to something, but doesn't; it hops around in time in a confusing way.

The book was very instructive as an example of what revision, and the willingness to put in the time for revisions, can do for a story.

 

Mack Hood

The novel which influenced me is Naked Lunch (and others) by William Burroughs which uses the cut-up technique. It shows that a story does not have to be told in a linear fashion and how, even when you basically explode the text, the reader can still follow the story and see things they might not have seen had it been structured traditionally.

As for the best advice....it was when a writer told me to have someone hold up a photograph and then tell them what I see. I find this has been very useful since I was not detail oriented previously.

 

 

Sebastian Lopez

Advice:
Stephen King - "All you need to write is an empty room and a door you're willing to close."
Anonymous - "Rules are for nerds."

Books:
Mistborn by Brandon Sanderson - I want to reach the level of plotting that he achieved with this book whenever I write. The story moves perfectly at such a fantastic pace with great characters.

Lord of the Flies: Hated it the first time I read it. The second time was for a class and so I was forced to pay attention to themes and motifs and in reading it I gained a newfound appreciation and began to see literature as an art rather than just storytelling.

 

Tina Rosenberg

"Read everything, all the time. Write voraciously. Cut, cut, cut. Dream it, coddle it, write till you bleed, cut some more." My high school English teacher, Jim Carney.
Extras:

"There are three rules for writing a novel. Unfortunately, no one knows what they are." W. Somerset Maugham (Sebastian would like this one).

"To me, the greatest pleasure in writing is not what it's about, but the music the words make." Truman Capote

Novel that taught me a great deal:   Light Years by James Salter- one of the most beautiful books I've ever read.

 

Greg Williams

Best Novels ever in every aspect of learning were Lonesome Dove, East of Eden (also Canary Row for emotive detail), and Shipping News (ending, the strange man finally fitting in, remained with me for years, so lyrical). Presumed Innocent and Silence of the Lambs went much deeper than their genres (also a goal for me).

I have read some books on novel writing over time.

My best advice has come from the old crusty news editors I have worked for. Write you like you talk.   Narrative has to move like lightning, being almost instantly digestible. You have to write like one bad word, sentence, or paragraph is enough to lose the reader. Write with strong verbs (not adjectives and adverbs).

 

 

 

 

 

From an Ex-Publishing Professional

A former student of mine had a conversation with an ex-editor at a major New York publisher.

"He started by reminding me," says the student, "that publishing a hard cover is very expensive. The publishers make money from selling hardcovers. There is a large profit margin there. But now the sales of hardcovers are decreasing while Ebooks are coming on stronger each year. The publishers haven't figured out, he said, how to make money from Ebooks yet. The profit margin is ridiculously small. And because they don't make money from this source, they don't market the books.

"Therefore, it seems, according to him, that they are staying with authors who have big reputations and can be relied upon to sell. The number of new authors they take on is minimal. I asked him if that meant I was engaged in an exercise of futility, and he said probably 'yes.'

"He also pointed out...that self-publishing on the net requires an enormous amount of personal marketing, and most Ebooks don't do well."

 

 

"Imaginative literature … does not enslave; it liberates the mind of man. Its truth is not like the canons of orthodoxy or the irrationality of prejudice and superstition. It begins as an adventure in self-discovery and ends in wisdom and humane conscience."
      -- Chinua Achebe, "The Truth of Fiction" in Hopes and Impediments: Selected Essays (New York: Anchor/Random House, NY, 1988).

 

 

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