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Tuesday, April 01, 2014

On Literary Cravings and Aftertastes

Want to make your writing shorter? Revise more. At The New York TimesDanny Heitman discusses the art of brevity. “Like passengers in a lifeboat, all the words in a concise text must pull their own weight.” Pair with: Our own Edan Lepucki’s essay on the challenges and benefits of brevity.


“The voices you hear when you sit down to write lead you to believe that you’re a character in the novel you’re writing even though metafiction hasn’t been invented yet.” If this applies to you, you might be in a Muriel Spark novel according to Maud Newton’sarticle at The Toast. We aren’t surprised that Newton wrote this because Spark made her 2010 Year in Reading post.

I had a voracious appetite to consume certain books I’d read long ago, revisiting passages that had always been especially moving. Or — and this was fun and also eerie in its accuracy — I found myself submitting to cravings for books I had never before read but the combined language, plot, and characters of which turned out to produce the perfect meal of prose for this pregnant bibliophile. Amazing Grace