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Review | State of Wonder by Ann Patchett

To start this review off, I think I should mention I was a massive fan of Bel Canto.  I thought it was a phenomenal piece of work, it changed the way I viewed the post-modern novel, and it introduced me to the concept of magical realism.  I really can’t sing enough praise for that book.  Then as soon as I heard Patchett had written a new novel, I knew I had to read it.  For me this meant waiting over a month for my local bookstore to get the book in, but I told myself it would be worth every second.

I was wrong. Read Full Article

The Beauty in Flaws

One of the earliest and most difficult lessons I had to learn as a writer was that the idea of perfection is more fun in theory than it is in writing.  Perfect situations, perfect worlds, and especially perfect people can be the death of a good story, because the things you remember about the world, what makes the people and the things around you interesting, are their flaws, because in the end those are the things that distinguish them from everyone else. Read Full Article

The 25 Funniest Analogies

An old post, but still a good one. I think this is something every lover of fiction should read.

judyrose's avatarWriting English

UPDATE: Tens of thousands of readers have found this post and hundreds of you have commented. A few have said that these analogies were actually taken from other sources and were not written by high school kids at all. Now, we have a link that ends the debate. These analogies are the winning entries in a 1999 Washington Post humor contest, and there are more than 25. Please look at the comments sent August 3, 2008 by “Jiffer” to get to the complete list and the names of the authors.

ORIGINAL POST: I have to share these “funniest analogies” with you. They came in an e-mail from my sister. She got them from a cousin, who got them from a friend, who got them from… so they are circulating around. My apologies if you have already seen them.

The e-mail says they are taken from actual high school essays…

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Fiction | Frozen Opportunities

John sat at the kitchen table, his face resting in his hands.  Brianna, the woman who he had barely known a short year ago, sat on the other side.  It felt like they had been sealed inside of this room for an eternity. Read Full Article

Fiction | Phoenix

Fire.  So much fire.  Fire so hot and expansive that not even being covered in a foot of ice would save you from being burned.  The only way you could survive in this inferno would be if you were made of fire itself.  Fortunately, that wasn’t really a problem for the flame’s current inhabitant.  It was born of these fires, and it would die of these fires, again, and again, and again.  Such was the life of a phoenix.  Both blessed and cursed to live one lifetime after another, always the only one of its kind.  Why it was chosen for this task, it wasn’t sure.  What purpose it was supposed to fulfill, no one had ever told it.  All it knew was the continuous cycle of death and rebirth that had no known beginning nor end.  The phoenix looked around before it started to gather up the beginnings of its next death pyre.  The next burning would come soon, and it wouldn’t do for it to miss it.

Notes: Sometimes I muse on what the life of a phoenix would be like; this was the result.

Fiction | A Grisly End

This is the first scene I ever wrote for the novel I’m currently working on, tentatively titled Children of the End.  I didn’t use it for the beginning, but it’s too soon to say it might not end up somewhere else.  Even so, the ideas in this scene inspired a hundred other ideas.  It’s amazing that so much of what I have written now came from a scene not even 500 words long.  Read Full Article

Fiction | Party at Andre’s

This is an old story. I wrote this near the beginning of college, before I even knew writing was what I really wanted to do with my life. Since then it’s been revised over and over again to the point where I can’t see it objectively anymore. Still, I can’t seem to let it go. If anyone has any thoughts on this, I’d love to hear them. Read Full Article

Fiction | Tip of the Iceberg

This was a writing exercise I did for a workshop. We were basically told to write a story with a specific setting and characters, but we each got to put our own spin on it. It was called an Iceberg exercise, because most of the story was hidden beneath the surface. Anyway, it’s more of a random scene than a full story, but I was pretty proud of how it turned out. Maybe I’ll do more with it someday. Read Full Article