As you may know, Dead Darlings, “the site for everything novel,” is a production of GrubStreet’s year-long program, the Novel Incubator. Founded by novelist and GrubStreet’s artistic director, Christopher Castellani, and developed with novelists and Grub instructors, Lisa Borders and Michelle Hoover, the Incubator takes…
We at Dead Darlings are aware that it is 13 days past New Years, but some of us are just recovered from our annual Bacchanalia, and others are so sad with S.A.D. (Seasonal Affective Disorder) that it’s taken us this…
We write about the other with varying degrees of rigor and success. Homer’s default was narrow (white, male, hetero, warrior), but even that long ago he tasked himself with imagining his way into immortals. Chaucer wrote in the voice of…
This spring I nearly declared a moratorium on violent fiction after reading three savage novels: The Orphan Master’s Son, The Sympathizer and A Little Life. Afterward life felt dirty. Basta! After all, the news is horrific: a toddler refugee washes…
Fail Faster, Succeed Quicker The first time I saw “Fail faster, succeed quicker,” I was at an MIT robotics convention. Don’t ask. The idea being each failure teaches one to design a better experiment–or novel. More failures means more learning…
The Da Vinci Code is fast paced, a “page-turner.” Proust’s In Search of Lost Time is not. We don’t need Writer’s Digest to define narrative pace as how quickly or slowly the writer takes a reader through the story. And…