Praising unlikable characters: click here.

This will get you thinking: click here.

The guy says smart, smart stuff about writing. Click here.

Interesting. Click here.

Write less badly: click here.

Nine years ago.

An interview with Dinty Moore: click here.

TV Tropes: click here.

"Confessions of a Semi-Successful Author"

A thoughtful post on grades and grading: click here.

"When women are honest about their experiences, it’s destabilizing. It’s not socially acceptable for us to think our thoughts are interesting or valuable. Or if you write about personal experiences, it’s like people think you want advice about how to live, like you’re holding a public referendum. Recently I read reactions to Sandra Tsing Loh’s Atlantic essay, “On Being a Bad Mother,” and some of the comments were cowardly, bullying, and also weirdly normative and conservative. What on Earth gives people commenting on a blog under aliases the right to judge Sandra Tsing Loh’s parenting skills? I do think that people who write honestly about their lives are doing people who won’t or can’t a favor, to put it bluntly."
--Emily Gould

from "The Art of Confession." For more, click here.

Naming nail polish: click here.

Interesting post at The Rejectionist: click here.

The terms of creative nonfiction: click here.

Day jobs: click here.

Yes.

No writer ever truly succeeds. The disparity between the work conceived and the work completed is always too great, and the writer merely achieves an acceptable level of failure.
--Philip Caputo

Funny words: click here.

Here's why: click here.

Blake Butler on Literary Citizenship:

"Everyone can do more.

Here are some ways you can do more, outside of spending $$$.

(1) When you read something you like, in any form, write the author and tell them. You don't have to gush or take forever. Just tell them you saw it, you read it, you liked it. It's a supportive feeling. It's better than not saying anything.

(2) Write reviews of books you like. Short review/long review, whatever. It's not that hard. It takes a little work to think about it clearly, but what goes around comes around. You can't expect to be recognized for your work if you aren't recognizing others for their work. Open the doors.

(3) Interview writers. New writers or well known writers. You like somebody's work a lot? Ask to do an interview with them. It doesn't take a ton of effort. Write up some questions. Let them talk. Spread the word. Talk. Say. Get. Eat.

I have done this for years and have made friends by doing it, have 'opened doors' so to speak: in other words, by helping others, you are also helping yourself. If spreading others' work isn't enough in your mind, think of it as 'connections.' (I hope you don't have to think about it in this way to justify it because that is sad, but, well, some people...) Things often can/might happen as a result of these things, on both ends, even if they are just small things, small things add up, small things can be good things, haven't you read Carver, momentum.

Energy. Power cock.

(4) If you have free time, start an online journal. Start a blog, a review, an anything. If you don't know how I'll help you. Say stuff. Mean what you say.

(5) If you have a journal already, respond faster. Pay attention to your inbox. When someone asks a question that feels dumb or unnecessary maybe, answer it anyway. Don't be a fuck. Yeah, we're all busy. Yeah, things take time. Work to take less time. It's okay to move forward at a wicked pace. (And yes, as an editor, I too struggle to adhere to this advice, but I struggle at least, everyone struggles, but you can always struggle more. I am so tired of seeing journals with 200+ days response time, why do you even exist? Does it really take that long to like something? People should stop sending to these places. Seriously. Just stop sending.

Yeah I know the flood comes strong. Stand in the flood. (Me too.))

Seriously, Conjunctions/Ninth Letter/Subtropics: these 3 journals get just as much work coming in as anybody, and they all respond often in less than a month.

To everyone: Push the fucking envelope even harder than you do. Be an open node.

BE AN OPEN NODE.

I am amazed sometimes by people who want to be writers and yet seem to know little to nothing about even the more popular journals, who don't read that actively, who don't buy literary magazines hardly ever but send out their own work constantly, who don't buy even their friends work, who etc etc. Then they want to turn around and call anyone with any stripe of 'success' a 'secret handshake motherfucker' or 'in crowd' or anything like that.

There are people who don't even answer their emails when they get those 'I like your work' mails, which really blows my mind some. You're just typing into a keyboard like the rest of us. Don't be Richard Ford spitting on Colson Whitehead. Don't be a turd person.

Getting involved is being involved, and if you aren't actively promoting others, I don't know why in hell you'd think anyone would ever want to read or support you."


For the full text: click here.

"I read my peers’ stories in a haze of defensiveness and jealousy and anxiety; I read suspiciously instead of sincerely; I read with a closed mind instead of an open one. This was true not just of workshop stories but of many of the books put in front of me by professors as models of the form. In class, we tore the stories in Best American Short Stories to tatters. Best? I would think, sneering. Really? Many of us had pet writers, writers who could do in our eyes no wrong, writers who were antidotes to everything we thought was wrong with contemporary American fiction. But even these favorite writers were chosen to highlight our aesthetic philosophy, to exclude as much as to include. As we workshopped, we took pains to make sure that our stories weren’t too “workshoppy.” I must tell you, it’s strange business to take a workshop and not be workshoppy, to believe in the process but not in its product."

--Holly Goddard Jones

To read more, click here.

A Reader's Advice to Writers

by Laura Miller of Salon.com.

For full text, click here.

1. Make your main character want something. Writers tend to be introverted observers who equate reflection with insight and depth, yet a fictional character who does nothing but witness and contemplate is at best annoying and at worst, dull. There's a reason why Nick Carraway is the narrator of "The Great Gatsby" while Gatsby himself is the protagonist. Desire is the engine that drives both life and narrative.


2. Make your main character do something.
For the reasons stated above, many writers gravitate toward characters to whom things happen, as opposed to characters who cause things to happen. It's not impossible to write a compelling novel or story in which the main character is entirely the victim of circumstances and events, but it's really, really hard, and chances are that readers will still find the character irritatingly passive. When you hear someone complain that "nothing happens" in a work of fiction, it's often because the central character doesn't drive the action.

3. The components of a novel that readers care about most are, in order: story, characters, theme, atmosphere/setting.

Of course all these elements are interlinked, and in the best fiction they all contribute to and enhance each other. But if you were to eliminate these elements, starting at the end of the list and moving toward the beginning, you could still end up with a novel that lots of people wanted to read; the average mass-market thriller is nothing but story. If you sacrifice these elements starting from the beginning of the list, you will instead wind up with a sliver of arty experimentation that, if you're very, very good, a handful of other people might someday read and admire. There's honor in that, but it's daft to write something with the deliberate intention of denying readers what they love and want and then to be heartbroken when they aren't interested. If you want to engage with more than a tiny coterie, take storytelling seriously; if you think that's incompatible with art, you are in the wrong line of work.

4. Remember that nobody agrees on what a beautiful prose style is and most readers either can't recognize "good writing" or don't value it that much.
Believe me, I wish this were otherwise, and I do urge all readers to polish their prose and avoid clichés. However, I've seen as many books ruined by too much emphasis on style as by too little. As Leonard himself notes at the end of his list, most of his advice can be summed up as, "if it sounds like writing, I rewrite it." Or, as playwright David Hare put it in his list, "Style is the art of getting yourself out of the way, not putting yourself in it." But whether you write lush or (please!) transparent prose, keep in mind that in most cases, style is largely a technical matter appreciated by specialists. You probably don't go to movies to see the lighting and photography, and most readers don't come to books in search of breathtaking sentences.

5. A sense of humor couldn't hurt.
American writers in particular are often anxious to be perceived as "serious," which they tend to equate with a mournful solemnity. Like most attempts to appear grown-up, it just makes you look childish. Comedy is as essential a lens on the human experience as tragedy, and furthermore it is an excellent ward against pretension. While readers may respect you for breaking our hearts, we will love you for making us laugh.

I could go on, but I'll stop there unless the populace clamors for more. Naturally, writers of genius have broken these "rules" as well as every other rule ever conceived. But, let's face it, geniuses don't need lists like this and couldn't follow them even if they tried. Most writers are not geniuses, and most readers would be exhausted by a literary diet that consisted only of the works of geniuses. The novel can be a down-to-earth and companionable thing as well as an exalted one, and while management gurus like to go on about the good being the enemy of the great, they are in fact misquoting Voltaire. He said, "The perfect is the enemy of the good," which means exactly the opposite. And he, as you are no doubt aware, was a bona fide genius.

Interview with Scott Korb, author of Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine

I have read Scott Korb's Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First Century Palestine and you will want to read this book if:

You proudly identify as a history nerd who loves Sarah Vowell and/or can spend hours watching the History Channel;

You appreciate a writer who can reference both Tacitus (the Roman historian) and Madonna (not just the one who was a virgin but also the one who was like a virgin);

You have a bumper sticker that says I'd rather be reading Flannery O'Connor;

You cannot resist the smart use of a footnote;

You have a sense of humor;

You value good writing;

You enjoy learning surprising things about leprosy.

Here's the publisher description:

For anyone who's ever pondered what everyday life was like during the time of Jesus comes a lively and illuminating portrait of the nearly unknown world of daily life in first-century Palestine.

What was it like to live during the time of Jesus?

Where did people live?

Who did they marry?

And what was family life like?

How did people survive?

These are just some of the questions that Scott Korb answers in this engaging new book, which explores what everyday life entailed two thousand years ago in first-century Palestine, that tumultuous era when the Roman Empire was at its zenith and a new religion-Christianity-was born.

Culling information from primary sources, scholarly research, and his own travels and observations, Korb explores the nitty-gritty of real life back then-from how people fed, housed, and groomed themselves to how they kept themselves healthy. He guides the contemporary reader through the maze of customs and traditions that dictated life under the numerous groups, tribes, and peoples in the eastern Mediterranean that Rome governed two thousand years ago, and he illuminates the intriguing details of marriage, family life, health, and a host of other aspects of first-century life. The result is a book for everyone, from the armchair traveler to the amateur historian. With surprising revelations about politics and medicine, crime and personal hygiene, this book is smart and accessible popular history at its very best.

Interview with Scott Korb

Diana Joseph: What's your background?

Scott Korb: I grew up Catholic in rural Wisconsin. Those seem like important details. I studied briefly at Emerson College in Boston – in their writing and publishing program – before returning home to the University of Wisconsin – Madison. I studied English and creative writing there and moved to New York to do graduate work at Union Theological Seminary and then Columbia University. For years I thought of myself as a fiction writer and yet over the past few years I’ve begun to think of myself as an historian of sorts, or a writing student-of-history. For my last project – before the book we’ll be talking about below – I was an associate editor on The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers, put out beautifully by the University of North Carolina Press. The first book, The Faith Between Us, was co-authored by Jewish writer Peter Bebergal. And here we are now: Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine – that comes out March 18.

Joseph: In the book's introduction "This Is Not A Book About Jesus," you make it clear that your focus is more on his neighbors. How did you decide theirs was the story you wanted to tell?

Korb: Telling Jesus’ story has been done – time and again. Indeed, another point I make in the book’s introduction is that every time someone tries to tell Jesus’ story – going back to the Gospels, even – that person makes Jesus his own. Or her own. Now, while I have a pretty good sense of who I like to think Jesus was, my point in Life in Year One was to avoid the kind of speculation that pops up wherever you see the name. There are other great books that have that as their mission, many of which I used in writing this book – starting, as I said, with the Gospels.

I was interested here in telling what daily life might have been like for a first-century peasant, doing my best to approach what James Agee describes as his effort in Let Us Now Praise Famous Men (which provides the book’s epigraph): “an independent inquiry into certain normal predicaments of human divinity.” Regardless on your position on Jesus’ divinity, hardly anyone suggests he was a particularly normal guy. By talking about normal life, I’m maybe painting the backdrop for Jesus.

Finally, though, in order to write in a complete way about life in the first century, I couldn’t help but talk about the powers-that-were. I tried to highlight the interactions between rich and poor, north and south, insider and outsider, Roman and Jew, terrorist and terrorized.

Joseph: You emphasize that there's a lot that can't be definitively known about Palestine in Year One. Describe the kinds of research it took to write your book.

Korb: I quote in the opening pages from the writings of the Prophet Ezekiel, who hears God telling him to “eat this scroll.” That was the first big step in researching the book: eating lots of scrolls, reading lots of books. Smarter people than I have spent their lives digging through the dirt of Palestine looking for material evidence from the past. That is the most reliable evidence we have, and so I rely mainly on that. Thanks to all the archaeologists. I read ancient religious and historical texts – the Gospels, the Talmud, Philo, and Josephus. I traveled to Israel and the Palestinian Territories, met people on the ground, visited the holy sites and took notes. I interviewed archaeologists and rabbis and corresponded with professors. And I read. And I read. J.D. Crossan and Jonathan Reed were especially important. As was Garry Wills and Lee Levine. An important lesson I borrowed from the Gospels, though – pieces of which were translated anew by a Greek scholar I worked with, Patrick Stayer – tells me this: “What goes into the mouth does not corrupt a man, but what comes from the mouth, this corrupts a man.” In other words, none of the scrolls I “ate” in making this book are in any way responsible for any of the mistakes I make within it. In the tradition of scholars everywhere I say: Errors are my own.

Joseph: When sorting through all that research, how did you decide what to keep and what to leave out?

Korb: I had in mind to tell a story in ten chapters – beginning and ending with the two certainties in life: taxes and death. And so, those ideas shaped the first and last chapters. Who paid taxes to whom and how did people die? I settled on the other topics as I learned what we could know for sure (no pork, no icons, ritual baths, stoneware) and how much various details said about people (all markers of Jewish identity). I tried to offer surprises: 97% illiteracy rates, private latrines, imperial monocropping and tenant farming. King Herod probably died of The Itch. Almost everyone who was crucified back then was left hanging and became food for dogs and carrion birds. I also tried to offer readers a way to relate to the people they were reading about, and so quoted contemporary opinion makers and journalists. I included in the epilogue some personal narrative of a trip I took to Bethlehem and Jerusalem.

I certainly tried to leave out ideas I thought were dumb – or where I didn’t leave those out I tried to comment on how dumb I thought they were. And in the end, I organized the book ahead of time, altered my outline once (reducing the chapters from fifteen to ten), and wrote to a deadline. That deadline was hard and fast. That alone helped me decide what went belonged and what didn’t belong.

Joseph: What's an interesting bit of information that didn't make it into the book?

Korb: I made a comparison between the babble of the first-century agora and the setting for the HBO series Deadwood, which I was watching as I wrote the book. Here’s how it went, in a footnote: “It strikes me as interesting that this very same issue often comes up in HBO’s Wild West series, Deadwood, a welcome reminder that God’s work at Babel may still be playing itself out. In one episode of Deadwood titled ‘Mr. Wu,’ saloon operator Al Swearengen negotiates a deal with the boss of the camp’s ‘Chinatown’ using two words comprising virtually their entire shared vocabulary: ‘white cocksucker.’”

During the editing process we decided to cut all the cursing from the book: “shit” became “defecate,” etc. And I moved most of the history into the main text and most of the commentary into the footnotes (see below, re footnotes). I think some other bits of information, and a few more curses – e.g., imagining Jesus saying, “Fuck you, Herod!” – hit the cutting room floor.

Joseph: Can you talk about how you constructed the voice in this book? I thought you were witty and funny but not distractingly so, and even more, not in a way that detracted from your credibility.

Korb: First, thanks. That was the hope. My editor and I decided at the outset that this would be a highly readable, sometimes funny, often breezy, and sometimes dark history. To a certain extent, I imagined myself as a tour guide. And the best tour guides – hell, the best teachers – I’ve ever had have sprinkled humor and off-beat information into their discussions of the people and places they were trying to teach me about. So, imagining myself that way helped. And my jokes – if you can call them that – work as basically as possible: I make fun of myself in the book as much as I make fun of anyone else. As for credibility, I tried to address that directly in the introduction by first being very clear that I am not an archaeologist or even a biblical scholar or ancient historian. I’m primarily a good reader. And I do my very best as a writer. (The two go hand in hand.) And I also try to suggest – by quoting a much funnier, much darker, and flatly brilliant Flannery O’Connor – that our integrity is perhaps rooted in trying, but perhaps not always succeeding, in what it is we set out to do.

Joseph: Describe your ideal reader. Did you have this person in mind when you were writing Life in Year One?

Korb: My ideal reader is curious, kind, and patient. She has a good sense of humor. She likes long walks on the beach at sunset.

Joseph: You like footnotes.

Korb: Yes.

Joseph: What's the question about Life in Year One that nobody thinks to ask but you're wanting to talking about?

Korb: No one’s asking about the footnotes. (I’m kidding.) Among many other things, what the footnotes allow me to do is to tell two stories at once – that is, the main historical narrative and then my own contemporary commentary. This book is as much about telling history – and a kind of self-awareness that reveals where we’re coming from, who we are, what we read, what we watch, and so on – as it is about history itself. And footnotes allow me to suss that out as I’m going, to be honest with the reader, both directly and indirectly, about just how difficult telling this history ought to be.

I don’t think writing books and telling stories should be easy. Pleasurable, hard work is how I describe writing to my undergraduate students. I like that the pleasure and hard work is made visible in the writing itself. Along with the imagining that I’m doing. In part that’s why my ideal reader is somewhat patient and curious and kind. Patient and curious enough to hear me out, to see what I’m trying to do. And kind enough to imagine along with me the lives of first-century peasants not named Jesus.

Joseph: What are you working on next?

Korb: There’s a stack of essays I have to grade, for one thing. But I think there’s a novel in me yet. But that’s not next. I’m not really talking about what’s next.

Scott Korb is co-author, with Peter Bebergal, of The Faith Between Us: A Jew and a Catholic Search for the Meaning of God (Bloomsbury, 2007) and associate editor of The Harriet Jacobs Family Papers (UNC Press, 2008), winner of the American Historical Association's 2009 J. Franklin Jameson Prize. His latest book, due out March 18, is Life in Year One: What the World Was Like in First-Century Palestine (Riverhead, 2010). He currently teaches religion and food writing at the New School and New York University. Read his tumblr.

"Deep Thoughts in Nonfiction": click here.

RIP, Barry Hannah.

"The Maddening Protagonist": click here.

Some awesome writing prompts: click here.

Can I get a hallelujah?

The problem with creative writing programs, she says, is their obsession with craft. “What did craft ever try to say about the world, the human condition, or the search for meaning?” Ms. Batuman asks. “All it had were its negative dictates: ‘Show, don’t tell’; ‘Murder your darlings’; ‘Omit needless words.’ As if writing were a matter of overcoming bad habits — of omitting needless words.”

Click here.

And here.

And also here.

"100 Things About A Novel" by Alexander Chee, Part One: click here.

Part Two: click here.

Part Three: click here.

Amen, Sister

"Fall's Big (and Little) Books" by Marie Mutsuki Mockett: click here.

Gay Talese's outline for "Frank Sinatra Has A Cold": click here. My students would tell you how much I like seeing different colors of magic marker.

Just click here.

An interview with Brenda Miller: click here.

I love this: click here.

"The dynamism in a novel is dependent upon plot; the plot makes the thing go. The dynamism in a collection of linked short stories can, of course, hinge on plot. But it can also lie elsewhere—within the movement of the stories themselves; in subtle alterations in tone; in a change in perspective; in the ending of one story and the beginning of the next, so much more of a bump than a mere chapter ending can provide."
--from Clare Dederer's review of Amy Bloom's story collection Where the God of Love Hangs Out. For more, click here.

My new favorite blog by the editors of Willow Springs: click here then bookmark it.

Privacy and your Facebook settings: click here.

Junot Diaz on politics and the power of story: click here.

"...I noticed that in the stories I was getting in my workshop, and actually, in some of the fiction written by contemporaries of mine, the stories are not particularly dramatic. As if drama were some kind of embarrassment. We can all talk about character; we can talk about setting; we can talk about dialogue; but if you begin to say, “Well this isn’t very dramatic,” it’s as if you farted, and you’ve said absolutely the wrong thing. But I think that we have to get back to the idea that, if people are going to read these books and stories, we have to consider the dramatic elements that underpin the great books."

Charles Baxter, in his interview with Willow Springs. For more, click here.

"The Death of Fiction?": click here.

A response: click here.

How Not to Be a Horrible Writer in 2010: click here.

"Art is not a product; it's a relationship the artist is offering you.": click here.

Have you ever read A Separate Peace?: click here.