FictionThe English ghost story is one of the few literary forms with a documented inventor, a rulebook, and a measurable decline once writers stopped following it. M.R. James wrote the rules down, read the stories aloud at Christmas, and produced…
FictionThe gothic novel was invented in 1764 by a man who claimed he had found the manuscript in an old chest, was mocked as trash for a century, and has outlived nearly every respectable form that looked down on it.…
ChristmasTelling ghost stories at Christmas was normal Victorian practice and considerably older than that. Dickens did not invent it, he wrote inside it and made it commercial. The custom then died almost completely in America while surviving in Britain, and…
Fiction WritingThere are four books that get given to writers, and anyone who has been writing for more than a year owns all four. This is a guide to what to give instead, organized by what the person is struggling with…
FictionThe death-and-return is the most reused structure in fiction and the most frequently botched. It works when the death costs something permanent and fails when it is reversed for free. This is what separates a resurrection that lands from one…
Fiction WritingCalling a book a beach read is usually a way of praising it while making clear you are not taking it seriously. The assumption underneath is that easy reading means easy writing, and that assumption is exactly backwards.
Fiction WritingIt's a Wonderful Life lost money, disappointed its studio, ended the production company its director had staked everything on, and was flagged by the FBI as possible communist propaganda. It became a Christmas institution decades later because a clerk failed…
AttentionSpring is the best season for difficult books and almost nobody uses it that way. The light is long, the energy is back, nothing is competing, and the hard book you keep postponing has a better chance in April than…
Fiction WritingSummer is the only season most people get a genuinely uninterrupted stretch of days, and that makes it the season for the long book. A nine-hundred-page novel needs consecutive days more than it needs concentration, and nothing else in the…
Fiction WritingTwenty horror films for people who believe they do not like horror. Almost none are gore, most contain no monster worth the name, and several are among the best films ever made in any genre. Ranked gentlest to hardest so…
ChristmasTwenty Christmas films ranked, including several that are genuinely bleak, one about an attempted suicide, one about a family destroying each other over the English crown, and one nobody thinks of as a Christmas film despite every scene being lit…
Fiction WritingEvery October people who never read horror pick the book with the most alarming cover, discover it does nothing for them, and conclude they dislike the genre. What they have discovered is that they dislike one register out of six.…
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