Devoted to publishing, publishers and to those who craft the written word

It is a rare thing to take a peek inside the mind of a writing judge. 

Besides being one of the first interview victims on this site, Jeff VanderMeer is a web-savvy speculative fiction writer offering book and music recommendations, exercise tips and plenty of writing advice over at Vanderworld.

He just published an essay about the state of writing craft in genre fiction, wisdom he gleaned from reading hundreds and hundreds of pages of entries for the Best American Fantasy awards.

He came to some negative conclusions, and everybody should take his advice to heart, re-considering everything from paragraph style to dialogue. The essay has generated plenty of comments already.

Edward Champion published an interesting rebuttal to the essay, arguing that we shouldn't ask all writers to build the same dense paragraphs. Listen to this:

"Charlie Huston’s Caught Stealing: a novel in which nearly every paragraph is used to advance the story. If Huston had paused to embed what VanderMeer identifies as “intellectual life” within his paragraphs, then the book’s hard visceral thrust would have been lost."