Stories Determined by Voice

I recently attended a seminar on writing during which the instructor, a novelist and short story writer, talked about wrestling with a particular character’s voice because voice would ultimately determine the feel of the story she was attempting to write. 

This brought to mind a recent New Yorker author interview in which  George Saunders said that when he sat down to write the story entitled "Mother's Day," he at first envisioned a rather elegant woman as the main character, but when he gave her a voice, she came out grouchy “so the story took a swerve there.”

There's Something Missing In Contemporary Fiction

Back in January, I wrote a post contending that much of the contemporary fiction one reads in The New Yorker -- and probably elsewhere as well -- presents life as a downer.

I mention this now because the April 12, 2016, New York Times "Bookends" column posed the question: "Which Subjects are Underrepresented in Contemporary Fiction?"

An Election Season Read, or Re-Read as the Case May Be

Today's issue of The New York Times has an article noting that Robert Penn Warren's classic political novel, "All the King's Men," is still a great read 70 years after it was first published.

"I reread “All the King’s Men” recently, in the wake of the Ohio and Florida primaries," said Dwight Garner, author of the piece. "It remains a salty, living thing. There’s no need for literary or political pundits to bring in the defibrillators. It is also eerily prescient, in its portrait of the rise of a demagogue, about some of the dark uses to which language has been put in this year’s election."

Rape In Life and in the World of YA Fiction

I've written about Young Adult (YA) fiction previously, in large part because it is reportedly about the only literary genre experiencing significant growth in sales. As such, it has attracted a lot of attention and various established authors who previously ignored this segment of the market have started to write for it.

These are not children's stories. No topics are off limits and perhaps partially as a result of that, lots of adults are said to be readers of these books, too.

An Imaginative Plot Twist or "Cheating?"

Ok, I used that word "cheating" mainly to get your attention. There is no such thing as cheating in fiction, right? Anything goes. But then again ...

Writers often have trouble with plots. They develop a scenario and then, for one reason or another, can't figure out how to resolve it -- how to bring matters to a conclusion, or in the case of many short stories, to a satisfactory finish since conclusions aren't all that common.

"High-Minded Sex:" An Interesting Tournament Outcome

Literary Hub, an online aggregator, today announced the winner of it's single-elimination tournament aimed at selecting the best example of "literary sex writing" from an initial round of 16 samples taken from four different historical eras.

A passage from James Baldwin's novel "Giovanni's Room" took the blue ribbon after all eight judges weighed in on final round, Lit Hub said, adding that the decision to select Baldwin over Jeanette Winterson was "almost unanimous."

"High-Minded Sex:" A Curious Outcome With Sea Anemones

Literary Hub published the results of the semi-final round of its single-elimination "Tournament of Literary Sex Writing" today and the outcome was curious in more ways than one.

First, the contests' finalists, former American author James Baldwin and contemporary English writer Jeannette Winterson, were both describing same-sex encounters in the passages from their writings that were selected for the competition. Oh well, conventional sex between men and women is so very yesterday. Either a gay black male or a lesbian will be the overall winner. The Lit Hub judges can congratulate themselves on being about as politically correct as it gets these days.