Welcome to Litsy!

I‘m a sucker for books about writing—I enjoy them both as a reader & as someone who occasionally does some editing. This short volume was first published in 2006 (and may be hard to find) & it‘s a fantastic resource for young aspiring writers. Levine breaks everything down into short chapters—on character, getting stuck, setting, revising & loads more—that always end with a writing exercise to reinforce the lesson. Encouraging & informative.

There‘s one lesson you will definitely learn from this book: save everything you write.

Otherwise it‘s pretty basic, definitely written for a younger crowd with good advice for new young writers.

4.5/5⭐ Contains many short entries on granular writing topics divided into comprehensive categories. I can see the exercises and topics for consideration being incredibly helpful for my own creative writing. A small number of authors seem elitist in their advice, but the vast majority are down to earth. The list of prompts at the end is lackluster, but the exercises within the entries are complex and thought provoking. #roll100

Hilarious and helpful, Chuck Wendig does what he does best: tells a hell of a story. The book is full of tips, tricks, and examples of how to improve your own narratives.

There are a lot of how-to poetry books out there. A lot. I‘m sure that some are excellent, some are average, and some are terrible, and individual experiences with these books will vary. My experience of The Art of the Poetic Line by James Longenbach? Excellent. Highly recommended to poets of every skill and experience level, as well as fans of Writing Metrical Poetry by Baer and Writing Poetry in the Dark edited by Wytovich. #howto #poetrymatters

Just released our latest Elmore Leonard episode. We review 52 Pickup and talk a little bit about Leonard's 10 Rules of Writing. This episode was fun and breezy to record and I hope you all like it as well!

https://open.spotify.com/episode/5TMI9lscdphDfYQWaNNCUZ

I was 100% on board for this book about alternative dramatic structures to the Aristotelian arc, and was along for the ride for the first half. I still agree with the premise that other structures are possible & can be successful, particularly for narratives outside the context of Western heteronormative patriarchy. She lost me after spirals though & the remainder felt like a dogged attempt generate a long enough manuscript for a full length book.

There was a lot of good info about battling writers block and how to plot your book. Some of the info was pretty dated (published in 2002 so that‘s to be expected). I learned a lot about Rambo which was not expected (Morrell wrote the book the movie was based on). What kind of annoyed me was he kept harkening back to books written 100+ years ago instead of using a mix of classic and modern examples.

Down with narrative arc! Death to climax! Alison makes a case for non-standard narrative structures, praising patterns in nature: meander, spiral, explosion, radial, fractal, cell, tsunami. Some good examples (Sebald, García Márquez, Lispector), but tons of omissions (Calvino, Borges, Pavić, Vonnegut, Bolaño), few “stun gun” insights. Section on pacing, “narrative hydraulics,” Wolff‘s “Bullet in the Brain” strong. Narrative by accumulation. 2019

Hello, Littens! It‘s been a while! Thought I‘d share a photo of my #usedbooks #bookhaul from the SSO Book Sale. I haven‘t bought books in a long, long time so it felt so good to go book hunting! All of these are #tbr but with #Nanowrimo approaching, I‘m looking forward to reading the tagged book ASAP.