Category: Writing Advice

Fiction-Writing: My Dead Darling

By guest contributor, Sharon Bially. Years ago I began fiddling around with a work-in-progress known, for lack of a better title, as My Life. It was all very preliminary: some vague thoughts about where the story might lead; some images…

Too Many Metaphors?

“Our mother performed in starlight.” Thus reads the succinct and succulent first sentence of Swamplandia!, Karen Russell’s 2011 literary blockbuster (Oops! Dead metaphor.) And while it doesn’t, at first blush, contain a metaphor—their mother, Hilola Bigtree, really does perform under…

THIS DRAFT SUCKS

It’s the first afternoon of the Novel Incubator Alumni Writing Retreat in Jackson, NH. From my room up in the eaves, I read over the last chapter of the latest draft of my novel, attach the whole thing to an…