ARCHIVE FOR Dead Darlings: Everything Novel

In her recent essay, “On Pandering,” Claire Vaye Watkins records the shock of discovering that she wrote, primarily, for old white men, members of the literati like Franzen, Roth, et al whose approval she sought and to whose tastes and experiences her fiction catered. This summer, I experienced a revelation not dissimilar, but arguably even more depressing: I was writing my novel for young white men, and not the famous kind, not the lauded writer genius kind

November is National Novel Writing Month, and Dead Darlings is the place to go for all things novel. This month, we write about comps, acknowledgements, plate spinners, and real life.

The Comp

The journey in finding a novel comp is a long and arduous one. Jack Ferris’s In Search of the Elusive Comp tells of such a tale.

Lauren Groff’s Fates and Furies elbowed out some of its competition last Wednesday when the National Book Award announced its 2015 finalists, but of any writer I know, I don’t expect such adulation to go to Groff’s head. I first met Lauren at the Bread Loaf Writers’ Conference where she was a fellow and I had somehow earned the nickname “Buffy the Copy Machine Slayer” in my role as conference office staff

We are staring down the end of the year, which brings good things (many days off work), bad things (the reckoning of not reaching your resolutions set at the beginning of the year), and things we just aren’t sure about (snow). In September, Dead Darlings dealt with beginnings, middles, endings, and after endings.

In Discovering the Big Easy: Writing What You Might Never Know, Sarah Colwill-Brown addresses a question asked at the very beginning of a writing project—to write what you know or not.

Once the many drafts have been completed and your novel is finally done, it’s ready to ...

It’s school time! At Dead Darlings HQ, we welcome back the students while hoping they quickly learn the direction of the one-way streets around our fair city. If you find yourself stuck behind a confused student, kill some time and read the latest from Dead Darlings.

Harness the Hate

Have you ever hated your novel in progress so much you wanted to toss it in a drawer forever