Monthly Archives: July 2012
Cunningham’s Response to No Pulitzer for Fiction
Posted on July 12, 2012 Leave a Comment
This week in the New Yorker, Michael Cunningham has a two-part essay on the process of selecting three candidates (above) for the Pulitzer Prize and the pain of learning that no award for fiction would be given at all. The last time this happened was in 1974 when Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It […]
16 Fictional Characters and Their Personality Types
Posted on July 11, 2012 8 Comments
Back in college I took the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator test, which is a personality quiz based on Carl Jung’s typological theories. Basically, it divides people into 16 types based on the following variables:
Series of Writing Lessons from the New York Times
Posted on July 10, 2012 2 Comments
I wanted to point you to a wonderful series of writing lessons that recently appeared in the New York Times. I stumbled upon the last of eight entries written by Constance Hale, a journalist based in San Francisco. This column was devoted to the voice of the storyteller. What I liked about it is that […]
Literary Fiction is a Mental Workout
Posted on July 9, 2012 7 Comments
Just when I was getting worried about the waning interest in fiction comes this little piece of research from a professor at Stanford University. Joshua Landy, an associate professor of French and Italian, found that literary works of fiction offer “a new set of methods for becoming a better maker of arguments, a better redeemer […]
The Meaning of ‘Write What You Know’
Posted on July 3, 2012 1 Comment
Here’s a nice, quick video from Nathan Englander, author of the short story collections What We Talk About When We Talk About Anne Frank and For the Relief of Unbearable Urges, among other things. Englander, who grew up in suburbia without thrilling adventures was worried that he’d have nothing of substance to write about. Sometimes, […]
Tracy Staedter 