DialogueHemingway built a prose style out of omission and spent thirty years being imitated badly by people who copied the short sentences and missed the method. The technique is learnable. The imitations fail because they reproduce the surface and skip…
Gothic HorrorStevenson wrote a pirate adventure that fixed the shape of every pirate story since, produced a psychological horror novella in days whose title became a figure of speech, and was dismissed as a children's writer for most of a century.…
ConsciousnessBloomsday is the only holiday in the world built around a novel most of its celebrants have not finished. That is worth examining instead of mocking, because the reason people give up is a structural choice Joyce made deliberately, and…
Character DevelopmentConan Doyle built the detective story into its permanent shape, killed his own creation because he resented him, was forced by public pressure to bring him back, and spent his later years defending claims his detective would have dismantled in…
AdaptationDick wrote forty-four novels for cheap paperback money and died at fifty-three, months before the first film adaptation arrived. He asked one question so persistently that the whole culture now asks it with him: how would you know if what…
AmericaMorrison spent nearly twenty years as a Random House editor building a canon of Black American writing, wrote her first novel at thirty-nine around a full-time job and two children, won the Nobel, and made one decision about audience that…
BureaucracyAdams wrote a radio comedy that became five novels selling over fourteen million copies, missed nearly every deadline he was given, and died at forty-nine. His method was to take the machinery of science fiction and point it at ordinary…
Children's BooksWhite spent fifty years writing essays for The New Yorker, wrote a children's book about a spider that has sold over forty-five million copies, and revised his old professor's self-published pamphlet into the most influential style guide in English. He…
DystopiaOrwell spent his life dismantling the class and empire he was raised inside, took a pen name so his family would not be embarrassed by his poverty, and died at forty-six. His most useful legacy to writers is not the…
AprilPratchett left school at seventeen, spent seven years as press officer for four nuclear power stations, and wrote forty-one Discworld novels that made him the best-selling author in Britain. He was dismissed as a comic fantasy writer for most of…
FaithLewis was an Oxford medievalist who became an unlikely broadcaster, wrote seven children's books in seven years, and produced a book about grief so raw he published it under a false name. His thirty-year argument with Tolkien about worldbuilding is…
AmericaLondon was an oyster pirate, a seal hunter, a tramp, a jailed vagrant and a Klondike prospector before he was twenty-two, and he turned all of it into fiction that made him the highest-paid writer in America. He also produced…
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