So last September (yes, 2022 not long after I finished my MFA) I started thinking a lot about plot as I struggled with Arizona. The story still wasn’t quite right and I couldn’t figure out what was not clicking. As I was thinking through what I was aiming for–what would make it feel like a […]
Today’s Story Course comes from a lesson I learned from reading: why dialog and character interaction are so important to reader engagement. Authors are (for the most part) more in love with their main characters than their readers are. This may seem obvious. Writers spend (mostly) years with their characters, discovering their world and writing […]
The last Twilight movie is almost upon us and so my sister and I had a marathon this past weekend to prepare. For some reason just before we started Breaking Dawn part 1 we were talking about vampires or something and I commented that our current societal concept of vampires is from Joss Whedon. That […]
So, two stories now, that originated as Twilight fan fiction, have become actual books. With names changed and seven figure deals. The whole idea of it raises, I think, problematic and interesting questions. Obviously, at some level, all works of fiction play on central, common themes. Authors retell fairy tales and ancient mythology and rework […]
HarperTeen has recently released four Jane Austen classics with Twilight-esque covers. They’ve also released Wuthering Heights and Romeo & Juliet with similar covers.