Lit Drift: Storytelling in the 21st Century

Your Heart’s Been Skewered. When Is It Okay To Write About It?

Jessica Digiacinto — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 16:21:36 +0000

Writing about heartbreak is supposed to be the writer’s forte. It’s something most people just expect. Writers have the unique ability to turn a heart-smashing, psyche-damaging event into something beautiful and moving. Right? Well, maybe. But we’re also human, so we have to go through that heart-smashing, psyche-damaging event just as much as the next person. [...]

Swishin’ and Dishin’ … and Reading

Morgan von Ancken — Thu, 11 Mar 2010 02:53:02 +0000

What does a young writer look like to you? Conjure up an image in your mind. What do you see? Thick black glasses? A fuzzy sweater, holes conveniently poked near the ends of the sleeves for easy thumb access? A hunched, pale little person, jittery from too much coffee at the temp agency where they [...]

This Week: David Foster Wallace Doodles on Cormac McCarthy’s Face, Visualizations of Famous Movie Quotes

JK Evanczuk — Wed, 10 Mar 2010 12:25:10 +0000

Awesome: visualizations of famous movie quotes, via kottke. What is the worst sentence you ever wrote? The David Foster Wallace audio project. Speaking of whom, you’ve probably already heard that UT-Austin recently acquired Wallace’s archive. But it’s worth a mention here regardless, if only because of these doodles David Foster Wallace drew on Cormac McCarthy’s face: What it [...]

I Wouldn’t Call It “Cannibalizing,” Just Recycling

Tanya Paperny — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 15:47:53 +0000

There’s a great post from Mark Gluth over at HTMLGIANT right now about cannibalizing your own writing (warning: before you go read the original post, beware that the image on the post is rather gross): The pest control guy told me about rats that cannibalize dead rats. He’s seen cats that eat cats. Then I read [...]

“No Masterpiece Was Ever Created By Committee”

JK Evanczuk — Mon, 08 Mar 2010 12:13:12 +0000

So proclaims The Guardian’s Jonathan Jones, which seems odd to me. Seriously? I’m trying to think of counterexamples, but I’m coming up with nothing. There’s the theory that Shakespeare’s plays may have been actually composed by a group of people, but as that’s only a theory, I’d be interested in hearing some better-documented examples of [...]

Free Book Friday: They Is Us by Tama Janowitz

JK Evanczuk — Fri, 05 Mar 2010 16:05:37 +0000

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Penny for getting a free copy of Black Boxes by Caroline Smailes. This week, we are giving away a copy of They Is Us by Tama Janowitz. Oryx [...]

Robot and Juliet

JK Evanczuk — Thu, 04 Mar 2010 11:52:26 +0000

I was inspired by Jacket Copy’s classic literature web movie and so put together one of my own using the simple (and free) online animated moviemaking tool xtranormal. Below is a video featuring part of a scene from Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet–with the titular characters as robots. Xtranormal only has sterile, computer-generated voices to provide [...]

Vonnegut Interviews Himself, Silly (But Still Good) Tips for Writers

JK Evanczuk — Wed, 03 Mar 2010 12:21:29 +0000

Vonnegut-inspired needlepoint. Speaking of, here is an interesting interview with Kurt Vonnegut, which The Paris Review composited from four interviews done with the author over the past decade, so it’s more like an interview “conducted with himself, by himself.” Via The Rumpus. Here is a question I would like an answer to: why is there no Jewish [...]

Free Book Friday: Black Boxes by Caroline Smailes

JK Evanczuk — Fri, 26 Feb 2010 17:02:53 +0000

Welcome to this week’s Free Book Friday, wherein we give you the best titles in indie publishing for the low low price of nothing. Congrats to last week’s winner Kerry for getting a free copy of Survival By Storytelling Issue One from SBS Magazine. This week, we are giving away a copy of Black Boxes by Caroline [...]

Electric Literature Vol. 3: Twitter Fiction Featured in Lit Mag

Toby Shuster — Thu, 25 Feb 2010 17:59:39 +0000

In the introduction to the third volume of the literary journal, Electric Literature, the editors lament the decline of traditional reading. Yet they also recognize the fact that we are all now reading more than ever, and at a faster pace: tweets, blogs, texts, and, yes, books. So instead of publishing a death notice for [...]