I was scrolling through social earlier today and discovered something amazing: Joyce Carol Oates is teaching a MasterClass! And on short stories, nonetheless, which happens to be my forte. I’m so excited to have the opportunity to take this MasterClass, learn from an unparalleled literary giant, and write a Joyce Carol Oates MasterClass review.
Le Guin was a “genre” writer who constantly pushed the boundaries of what we think of as genre. Besides sci-fi and fantasy, she wrote poetry, creative nonfiction, and literary fiction.
I honestly believe she will go down in history as one of the greatest writers, literary or otherwise, of the 20th century.
You never get a second chance to make a good first impression. That’s why these famous first lines of books are a terrific opportunity to learn from the masters of fiction. Take a look and see if one of your own favorites is here.
Are you frustrated with your writing? Tired of writing words you know aren’t as good as you want them to be? Frustrated writer, I know why.
A weird thing happens when we finally sit down to write The Book: we expect it to come out as magnificently as we think it should. We see or feel what it should be, and hey—we’ve read and written stuff all our lives, right? It should just come out!
But it doesn’t.
This is normal.
This week, we lost an incredible writer. Toni Morrison was a novelist, essayist, editor, professor, and winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. Her perhaps most well-known book, Beloved, won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction and was made into a movie starring Oprah Winfrey.
In honor of Black History Month, I want to share five quotes from black authors that are sure to give you the push you need to write something fantastic.
Recently my publisher recommended I read the novel “If Beale Street Could Talk” by James Baldwin.
Baldwin is known by many for being a political writer during the Civil Rights movement, but what struck me about Beale Street was how he conveyed this emotion. He does such a great job making me feel Tish’s love, desperation, etc. throughout the book such that I found myself thinking, “how did he do that?”
How did Baldwin so successfully evoke emotion in Beale Street? Here are some of the answers I came up with.
