While there are have been plenty of hugely popular series in recent years—Fifty Shades of Grey, Harry Potter, The Hunger Games, and Divergent come to mind…the series is also a hallmark of literary history. Sherlock Holmes! Nancy Drew! The Hardy Boys! Jeeves and Wooster! Readers just can’t get enough of the same good characters in new situations. Some […]
Writing fiction is a lot like playing chess: very few people actually understand how it’s done, and most seem to think it involves randomly moving things around and shouting out words (checkmate!). There are a finite number of moves, pieces, openings, and endgames, and the trick isn’t to invent a whole new way of playing, but […]
The novel is a big canvas. It allows for complexity and a deep dive into character—ample space for readers to explore and contemplate. The price for this experience is time—it can take several hours to several months to read a novel, depending on its girth. It’s easy to assume a short story would be less […]
Everyone loves a good mystery, but a with everything else in life, there’s a hierarchy to the genre, ranging from thrillers who make no effort to hide the identity of the killer, to the most hardcore of all mystery types: the locked-room whodunnit. What is a locked-room mystery? Exactly what it sounds like: a crime (usually a murder) is committed […]