By Jennifer Carr I was recently having coffee with an editor in New York, who was giving me some advice (and a pep talk) about finding a literary agent. One of the things she said was like lightning into my analytic brain: literary agents are like real estate agents. They want to move a product […]
How are creative writing exercises different than writing prompts or story generators? Good question. Creative writing exercises are designed to teach a technique. They are highly specific, more specific than creative writing prompts, and much more specific than story generators. Creative writing exercises for adults are not designed to lead the writer into crafting a full […]
One of the hardest things about literary magazines is dealing with the overwhelming number of them. You can’t keep up-to-date on all of them, so how do you decide which are really worth your time? Of course, everyone knows about Poetry Magazine, and I’d like to hear of a writer who isn’t on the New Yorker email list, but there are so many wonderful, small publications out there, just […]
The instructions for these 52 picture writing prompts are simple: write a story combining some element of all three pictures. It can be crazy or funny or wild, but you have to incorporate some element of all three images. There’s a scientific reason for why three pictures work better than a single image: because creativity […]
I hope these 37 creative writing prompt pictures of emojis either make you laugh or write. Preferably both. They’re meant to be suggestive, not to sketch out the entire story. Some of them just have a premise, while others suggest a possible ending. Feel free to change whatever you need to in your story to make […]
Most story idea generators are awful. They offer these mash-ups of random details that don’t make any sense, and require the writer to sift out the irrelevant details and find the connections. Or worse yet, they make you fill out some kind of form to get a nonsensical outline. This story generator works differently. Each prompt […]
1. Flaunt Your Genius Do you know obscure 18th century French authors? Why of course you do, and now is the time to namedrop them. Do you know critical theory? Why of course you do, and everyone will be impressed if you use a poststructural framework to analyze the book. Nobody thinks writing a book […]
8. Whatever Easily the most forgettable of Michel Houellebecq books. Remember Houellebecq was a philosopher and a poet before he became a novelist, and this early novel was a stepping stone into his new choice of profession. It has some of the seeds of later Houellebecq — loneliness, sexual frustration, philosophical asides — but lacks the […]
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I’ve added a new page in Bookfox, one that I hope will give you a great deal of pleasure: The Most Beautiful Sentences in Literature Currently I have 100 authors on the list, but I might get sick of a few of them and boot them off in favor of new talent. I made this list […]
