novels
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No need to annotate Dan Brown. While many – and I am not among them – like his storytelling, it must be widely recognized that from a craft standpoint it’s bad writing. Linguist Geoffrey K. Pullum writes, “Brown’s writing is not just bad; it is staggeringly, clumsily, thoughtlessly, almost ingeniously bad.” (if you’re not offended…
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Have mentioned before how much I enjoyed Russo’s Straight Man. It’s one of the best comic novels I’ve read so far. He has a new one out and here he is in conversation with Sam Tanenhaus.
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There’s material all around us for short stories and novels. Here are 5 different takes on Ruth Madoff and other clueless wives. I haven’t been following as closely as when the story first broke, but it’s entirely possible she did not know. It never fails to amaze me how people see what they want to…
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“Sit down and put down everything that comes into your head and then you’re a writer. But an author is one who can judge his own stuff’s worth, without pity, and destroy most of it.” — Sidonie Gabrielle Collette
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Been thinking more about the need to shock in fiction. Watched Sydney Pollack’s doc “Sketches of Frank Gehry” last night. Pollack said, and I’m paraphrasing, that he thought of talent as “liquid trouble.” The trick was to let it seep out in productive and creative ways, to use the talent. Also made the point that…
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Some of the people at school (see below) read Steven Pressfield’s The War of Art. I find it interesting to look at what authors are doing besides writing. Pressfield, who wrote Bagger Vance, Gates of Fire, and so on has taken his research on Alexander the Great’s Afghan campaign and looked at Afghanistan. He doesn’t pretend…
Diane Sherlock 
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