Ok, so I'm starting to regret including a bunch of literary fiction in my list of greatest novels. I'm also starting to come to the conclusion that literary fiction in general involves trying as hard as possible to avoid anything resembling plot. These two things may or may not be related. Falconer is a novel written by John Cheever and published in 1977.

So… because I don’t have enough things on the go at any one time, I’ve decided to resurrect an old tradition. Flash fiction challenges! Every week I’ll post a prompt. ItR…

So... because I don't have enough things on the go at any one time, I've decided to resurrect an old tradition. Flash fiction challenges! Every week I'll post a prompt. It's up to you to respond to the prompt in whatever way you see fit - any genre, any style. The only real requirement is that you come in under…

First of all, let's get something straight. If you have trouble sitting down to your writing, if you put it off, if you struggle to get words on the page when you do manage to sit down to write; it's not entirely your fault. Let's get something else straight as well, though. The meme of the tortured writer completely at the whims of "the muse", only able to write in fractured moments, adrift in the ether...

Boy, this is starting to become a habit. Yet again, I'm reviewing a book I couldn't (or wouldn't) finish. In this case, it's a book from a series I read many moons ago when I was a young'un. I remember enjoying them well enough at the time, though I did find certain aspects of them mildly annoying. To be fair, I wasn't the most discerning of readers.

Classic fairy tales and short stories, the way they were originally published.

Classic fairy tales and short stories, the way they were originally published.

YouTube video by Not the Same Old Story

I was looking forward to this book tremendously as soon as I looked it up. It's got an unusual (possibly unique) story structure, it's loosely centered around the world of punk rock and the music industry, and it's relatively (by comparison to some of the books on my reading list) new. I suspect it was partly my anticipation for this book that made…

Having just finished Steven Pressfield's The War of Art, I really wish I hadn't bothered. Don't get me wrong, it isn't a terrible book, it just that, much like Elizabeth Bowen's The Death of the Heart, it isn't a particularly good one either. And I had such high hopes for it, as well. Everything I've ever read about this book has been overwhelmingly positive.

A while back I had begun working on a series of non-fiction books I called the Book Club Companion series. The idea was to read and review current popular fiction, and then write some pop-literary …

This hasn't always been the case, but when it comes to modern fiction it's an inviolable truth that its your characters who make or break your story. Readers are happy to forgive any number of unforgivable plot sins and will cheerfully overlook absurd consistency errors and even *gasp* second rate prose - just so long as you can get them to care about your characters.