Authors Electric

  Okay, so, first off, the link if you're interested in learning more:  https://www.bookcritics.org/emerging-critics/fellowship/ Secondly, to my second point, why is it important to be a good reader and read good books? Of course, you already guessed the answer, because it makes you a better author. When I do work as an editor, I see less expert writing very often, and, after decades as a college writing professor, I had already had a lot of experience with that. When writing is not at its peak, there can be a lot of reasons for it. And, unbeknownst to you, I had just written a long-winded explanation about that. And then, following my own advice, I read it over, and decided less is more; screw the lecture. So, to be a better writer on your own, read better books, and then study them, and then ask yourself, "What makes this writing so good?" That's the meat of what I want to convey here. Now to stop blathering away, and give you one small example of what I mean. One o...

The Shanghai Quartet is going to be my magnum opus: four interlocking novels spanning a quarter century of Chinese history. Volume one was my my debut novel, The Dancing Girl and the Turtle . I’ve just finished the manuscript for volume two, Peace Court . While I await feedback from my beta readers, my mind wanders to volume three. I see Laogai as a collection of interlocking short stories. But what exactly is that and, more importantly, how do I write them? Definition   Writing short fiction is notoriously difficult. You have to accelerate from zero to sixty miles an hour in the space of a few sentences. A short story is often more about what’s not said than what is. According to author Baird Hunter , that’s what makes the short story so powerful. the ambiguities on which short form often insists, in the white spaces of section breaks and in the big dark void at the end. But not all writers can carry off the short form. Author Sonja Chung is embarrassed...