Over the past few weeks, I’ve read Dr. Seuss’s The Grinch to my kids roughly a million times. It occurred to me, sometime around reading 550, that the story perfectly illustrates how to structure character-driven fiction. Why do I consider this character-driven fiction (as opposed to plot-driven)? Because the tension of the story derives out […]

Recent debates about the value of e-books has brought to light conversations about what books are really worth, and what it takes to make them. Readers who argue that e-books should be cheap are thinking of them merely as bits of data, which suggests that the value of hard covers or paperbacks lies in the […]

I’ve never had a “real” job in my life. Which is to say, I’ve never had a job that provided a salary, benefits, or paid vacation or sick time. (Okay, once for six months, while I was living and teaching in China I had all those things. But never here in America.) Since college, I’ve […]

Writers, especially of literary fiction or fiction that is difficult to categorize, often bristle at the question of whom they are writing for. It sounds like a marketing question, a question of making the highest number of readers happy at the expense of their vision, their art. I understand the knee-jerk reaction to say that […]