Writing good dialogue is not art. It’s craft, which means that you can get better at it. Here are some tips. Listen to how people talk in real life. Hang out in a coffee shop or a bar and listen to how people talk. (As a writer, you get to call this research.) Often, we think …read more…
Blog Archive
About the Lit Project
As anyone knows, the cost of college textbooks is sky-high. One of the advantages of being an English major, however, is that you are studying novels and plays that are available relatively inexpensively in paperback. Quite often you can get them used in the college bookstore for slightly under the price of new, or you can …read more…
Currently Reading (2016.06.08) — We Should All Be Feminists
So much of what she says about gender is also true of race. A very accessible introduction to modern feminism.
Currently Reading (2016.06.04)
Kindred by Octavia Butler.
This book is beautiful and powerful almost beyond my ability to describe it. Definitely one of those “where has this been all my life?” books.
Harper Lee’s Sense of Place
With all the excitement about the release of Go Set a Watchman I started thinking about To Kill a Mockingbird and what a magical experience it is. I first read the book when I was 11 or 12 years old; it’s one of those books I tend to pick up and reread every now and …read more…
The Tripods Trilogy by John Christopher
In the not too distant future, Earth has been taken over by aliens (later identified as “Masters”) who travel about in large metal tripods. To control the populace, all humans are “capped” on their fourteenth birthday: their head is shaved and a metallic cap is applied to their head. The cap suppresses curiosity and creativity, …read more…
The Sword of Shannara by Terry Brooks
Throughout middle and high school my friends and I paid a lot of attention to what the others were reading. We didn’t spend much time talking about books, but we noticed what the others were reading and asked for recommendations, something that we, as boys, never asked a teacher. This was before the internet and …read more…
My Summer 2013 Reading List
It’s looking to be a busy summer for me, but I still have a long list of books I want to read. Here’s what’s at the top of it. The Tripods trilogy by the late John Christopher. These were serialized in Boys Life magazine when I was a kid and it took me forever to find …read more…
November is National Novel Writing Month
Every November is National Novel Writing Month, an opportunity to write a 50,000 word novel. Sponsored by the Office of Letters and Light, a California-based nonprofit organization which hosts some of the largest literary events in the world, it started in 1999 with 140 participants, and last year had over a quarter million participants in …read more…
The Accidental Genius of Weasel High by Rick Detorie
All that Larkin Pace wants is a new camcorder, so he can become the next great filmmaker. But he’s too young for a real job, his parents won’t give him money, his older sister exists just to make him miserable, and his arch-enemy Dalton Cooke is trying to steal his girlfriend, who might just not …read more…
