May Book Roundup
This month was a fiction extravaganza! Which was lovely, to immerse myself in so many different worlds. This month’s list reminds us why it’s good to get out of any ruts we might be in, reading-wise, and be open to all kinds of stories. If you only read literary fiction, or subsist on a steady diet of cozy mysteries, or only read nonfiction, I invite you to pick a genre or an author you haven’t read before, and try it. You might even go to your library and ask them for suggestions (my local library is still not fully open for browsing, and they’ve been putting together “to-go” bags of books they pick off the shelves for you based on the criteria you give, which is a fun way to find new books and authors you might not have gone for otherwise).
Resources for Writing the “Other”
With May being AAPI Heritage Month (and this Friday’s World Day for Cultural Diversity) it’s a good opportunity to bring up a real challenge for writers – writing the Other. “Other” can be anyone whose identity you don’t share, whether through gender, sexual orientation, ethnicity, race, age, disability, etc. Writers have come under much more scrutiny these last few years in their attempts to create a diverse cast of characters in their work, and with good reason: while representation is important, equally important is accurate representation that avoids stereotypes. This is especially true for marginalized populations who historically have not only been under-represented but misrepresented in many ways.
Can You Ever Have Too Much Voice?
Last week I talked about the novel Sunshine, by Robin McKinley. I liked the story, but found the rambling, digressing, and occasionally convoluted nature of the writing distracting to the point where I occasionally skipped passages – which I almost never do. Why? Aren’t we told, over and over again, that we must have “voice” in our writing? What is “voice” anyway, and can you have too much of it?
What Fiction Writers Can Learn from Poetry
It’s National Poetry Month! I often feel like poetry is seen as “literary” and cut off from the popular imagination. Robert Pinsky’s The Favorite Poem Project and NPR’s recent invitation to submit poems via Twitter and TikTok help bring poetry back to the everyday. Fiction and nonfiction get far more attention from the media and the public, of course, and often people, even writers, fall firmly in the prose or poetry camps.
However, there is a lot prose writers can learn from poetry. Especially if you’re feeling like your writing is a little stale, you can learn to play with words again by paying attention to some of the techniques poets use.
Why Should I Care? How to Build a Character Readers Root For
In my last blog post, I talked about doing writing (and other) Challenges and how they can be good for us, sparking motivation to achieve our goals. (I am, by the way, still going strong on my Challenges I described – yaay me!). In order to succeed at a daunting Challenge we have to have a powerful desire behind it. If the goal is to write for 100 days straight, or train for a marathon, there must be a why behind it. And the why has to be compelling enough for us to keep going, even when we’d rather sleep in, or binge-watch a series on Netflix.
But what about our fictional characters?