Fiction is the trade this site is built on. This tag collects reviews, craft pieces and fiction of my own, from short work to novels, with the working questions attached.
1920sF. Scott Fitzgerald was born on September 24, 1896, in St. Paul, Minnesota. The Great Gatsby sold poorly, his short stories paid the bills, and he died at forty-four believing himself a failure. The novel became a classic only after…
1960sHarper Lee was born on April 28, 1926, in Monroeville, Alabama. A year's wages from friends and two years of revision with her editor turned a draft of loose anecdotes into To Kill a Mockingbird. She never published another novel…
CountercultureJack Kerouac typed On the Road on a 120-foot roll in three weeks and then revised it for six years. He spent his last years in a cinderblock house in St. Petersburg's Disston Heights, and the house where he died…
1930sJohn Steinbeck was born on February 27, 1902, in Salinas, California. He reported on migrant camps before he wrote The Grapes of Wrath, refused to soften its ending, and watched a California county ban it. The habit worth copying is…
CensorshipRoald Dahl was born on September 13, 1916, crashed a fighter plane in the desert, sold his first story for $1,000, and wrote the children's books in a garden hut with six sharpened pencils. In 2023 his publisher's edits to…
DialogueZora Neale Hurston was born January 7, 1891, and grew up in Eatonville, Florida, the town she turned into fiction. She wrote Their Eyes Were Watching God in seven weeks, died broke in Fort Pierce, and waited thirteen years for…
Crime FictionTim Dorsey's first novel, a 1999 black comedy that introduced Serge A. Storms, a history-obsessed Florida killer with a moral code. Dorsey wrote it in secret while working nights at the Tampa Tribune.
FictionMark Sullivan's 2017 novel based on the life of Pino Lella, an Italian teenager who guided Jews over the Alps and then spied on a Nazi general as his driver. Sullivan spent about a decade on it, and it became…
Coming of AgeSylvia Plath's only novel, published in London in 1963 under a pseudonym, about a gifted young woman's slide into depression after a summer internship in New York. It remains the benchmark for depression in fiction.
FictionEvery chapter is addressed to four people who will never read it. That is when I suggest we write it as a novel, change the names, and move the industry.
Artificial IntelligenceA student writes a program designed to stay alive, then abandons it. The program does not stop. Thomas J. Ryan described a computer worm years before anyone had the word.
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…
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