ARCHIVE FOR Dead Darlings: Everything Novel

It’s a new year and around Dead Darlings headquarters, we are brushing off old things, learning new things, and thinking about a lot of things. We would like to wish everyone a happy new year filled with writing. To get those creative juices flowing, check out some of our favorite posts from December.

Learn Something New

As we head into this year’s holiday season in New England, it’s kind of hard to imagine Santa’s sleigh going anywhere because it’s so, well, warm, kind of balmy even. So instead of hunkering down by the fire with your eggnog and waiting for the year to end, write! Dead Darlings has some good posts to help you get started.

Do Your Research

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