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Aug30
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 Last year, in The Great Writing Music List, Part One, I asked all my readers "what do you listen to when you write?" That's one of the most important questions anybody can ask a writer. A great song can inspire you, and a great album can keep you inspired. Today we are lucky. We have a novelist and leader of the rock band, Richmond Fontaine, as our special guest this week. In the conclusion of his interview, Willy Vlautin shares the music he listened to while he wrote his first novel, The Motel Life. Welcome to my deceptively simple feature, Five Easy Questions. In the spirit of Jack Nicholson's mad piano player, I run a weekly set of quality interviews with writing pioneers—delivering some practical, unexpected advice about web writing. Jason Boog:
You just wrapped up a tour with your band. How do music and writing interact in your brain? Do you have favorite records you listen to while writing? If Motel Life had a soundtrack, what would be the three most key songs? Willy Vlautin:
Writing music and fiction are two different games for me. Continue reading...
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Aug30
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"We took the bad luck and strapped it around our feet like concrete. We did the worst imaginable thing you could do. We ran away. We just got in his beat-up 1974 Dodge Fury and left."That's the opening of Willy...
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Are you friends with your sources?The Huffington Post explores a tricky twist of digital-era journalism, comparing different articles about the ethics of being Facebook friends with your sources. Ben Smith at Politico says "No way," and Poynter.org and CBC agree....
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Aug29
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Besides playing in the rock band, Richmond Fontaine, our special guest this week has worked as a warehouse worker, house painter, and writer. Today, Willy Vlautin explains how he survived the lean years to write his first novel, The Motel...
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How many journalism jobs are there, really? Over at the PBS blog, MediaShift, journalist Mark Glaser has some encouraging news for fledgling writers. He claims that there are plenty of journalism jobs to be had, we are just looking in the...
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Aug28
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"Well, I want to hear [a story] about me, I guess. Something good, where I get married or at least get a girl. Maybe I'm famous or something. You could make me rich if you want." That's an excerpt from Willy...
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Aug27
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"Bad luck, it falls on people every day. It's one of the only certain truths. It's always on deck, it's always just waiting. The worst thing, the thing that scares me the most is that you never know who or...
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The war is over. Finally literary bloggers and literary newspaper sections are combining forces, instead of fighting with each other.You can see the truce in effect over at Ed Champion's site. He just interviewed science fiction pioneer William Gibson for...
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Aug24
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Lately, I've been re-reading my favorite books, trying to figure out how the authors make their seamless transitions from scene to scene. It seems so easy, but in my manuscript, these textual tangles are killing me!In my frustration, I went...
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Does one misspelled word a poem make?Our intrepid reporter friend Ian Daly asks that question in a Poetry Foundation cover story about the controversial one-word poem by Aram Saroyan: "lighght." This description of the poem alone is worth the price...
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Aug23
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"The panoramic view from the pro shop window was dazzling. The grounds below were carpeted with kelly green grass, and the sky above the horizon was half silver and lavender. From where she stood, she could see a couple foursomes...
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You can't keep a good novelist down. The LA Times reports on the return of Ross Macdonald, the private detective novelist who never got the respect he deserved and in my mind, holds a place in the Hardboiled Holy Trinity of...
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Aug22
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"He'd applied to eight banks in his senior year at Harvard and was invited to join seven. After working for four years at Pearson Crowell, a bulge bracket investment bank, as an analyst and later as a senior associate,...
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Where in the world is your book? A string of geographical posts about fictional settings surfaced in my reader today. (Thanks, SF Signal!) To start things off, Google blogged about how they are slowly "geomapping the world's literary information," and...
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Aug21
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"Competence can be a curse. As a capable young woman, Casey Han felt compelled to choose respectability and success. But it was glamour and insight that she craved. A Korean immigrant who’d grown up in a dim, blue-collar neighborhood in...
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How can writing school help you?We ask that question periodically over here, and today, my friends in the Know More Media network are debating the whole notion of college rankings. I say rankings be damned. Ask why you are going...
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Aug20
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"'The funny thing is that if you were a millionaire like some of these managing directors shaking down seven figures a year, you'd have known to push your way ahead and fill your plate. Rich people can't get enough of...
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Sometimes I think that novel writing is 95 percent patience. Don't believe me? Ed Champion points us to an illuminating interview with novelist Jenny Davidson, exploring the dirty, dirty job of revising a novel. If you are evading any of...
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Aug18
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There's no handbook in the world that can prepare you psychologically for the absurd pace of freelance writing. A few months ago, I was struggling to balance my day-job and my freelance work, and I stumbled upon Susan Johnston's practical interview...
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Aug17
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What happens when your non-fiction subject turns out to be a much different person than you expected?The NY Times City Room blog has an essay about Joseph Mitchell's awe-inspiring book of literary journalism, Joe Gould's Secret. Read the book. You...
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Citizen journalism has already upset a lot of traditional boundaries between journalists and regular people.Blogged book reviews are competing against struggling newspaper review sections and more citizen reporters are filtering information collected by newspaper journalists. Today, Jeff Jarvis is writing...
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Aug16
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Ack! Once again, I return at mid-day from my day-job with a late, late post. When life gets busy, I sometimes ask myself, why keep this blog? I love doing it, but sometimes it really gets in the way...
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Aug15
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Tonight I'm headed out to Film Forum to watch a 60-year-old movie (Phantom Lady) written by my favorite pulp fiction novelist. Seeing this film will do more to help my writing than an entire semester of literary theory. Reading pulp fiction...
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Aug14
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What if we are just a scrap of metafiction inside somebody's history book? Digital-era journalist extraordinaire John Tierney just published an essay that will undoubtedly float a million new science fiction stories and their hack movie versions. He talks to...
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I love reading about imaginary books inside of books, imaginary movies inside of books, and any other kind of imaginary text hiding inside a real book. These twisty bits of metafiction make a literary world more textured and mysterious.The public...
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A great twist, jolt, or symphonic scene at the climax of a novel will always leave your readers begging for more. But how do you know when your book has gone too far?Tao Lin is exploring whiz-bang endings (among many...
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Aug13
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What happens when Harry Potter faces the existential void?The final book of the series has prompted a few prominent reviewers to plug another book series with a darker, but sublime, vision of the child's imagination. If you haven't checked out...
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There are plenty of books that tell you how to become a better writer, technically. However, very few books will give you advice about how to survive while being a writer. That's why I ask every Five Easy Questions guest...
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Aug10
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How do you write on your computer without distractions? Bud Parr has some excellent advice about how to avoid checking your email and Googling sports scores while writing furiously. His essay Writing in (Computer) Isolation contains a simple way to...
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You may wonder why I get so jazzed about building video content for this site.It's simple. I am surrounded, by chance or by fate, by wonderful video folks. In the interests of sharing resources (and full disclosure), I'd like to...
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One of my favorite things in the whole world is watching movies about writers, the good ones and the bad ones. I giggle at the effortless way their pages stream out of the typewriter, I feel inspired by their struggles...
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Aug 9
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Sorry for the lax posting the last two days, I've been swamped with work at my various writing jobs. Which brings me to today's point.Are we heroes or victims of the online revolution? I constantly fret that online publishing will shackle...
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Aug 8
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What can hip-hop teach us about writing? I love writing with music. I love wandering around New York City with my personal soundtrack playing in my head. For me, storytelling and music are wrapped up together. If I'm looking for a...
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Aug 7
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Writers love to hate writing, it seems. After the MFA has generated multiple conversations over his essay, “Do You Love Writing but Hate to Write?” Recently, he added some support from screenwriter John August, (a prolific blogger in his own...
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So you've carried your characters through hundreds of pages of adventures. Maybe you are sick of them. Maybe you feel like you are losing your best friends. How do you end your novel?Professional ghostwriter Laura J. College wrote a helpful...
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Aug 6
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How do you choose the best material to read out-loud to an audience?I've spent the last four years researching that question at readings around New York City, and I appreciated the debate now raging at the MFA blog about the...
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A few weeks ago I asked, that all-important question haunting writers these days: Should you blog your novel?I spent some time exploring Na-No-Blog-Mo, a site where hundreds of writers blogged their novels for free. Blogs make sharing your work so...
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Aug 3
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"Hey all - sorry about this hiatus I'm taking, I have to crack out the next book mighty quick, and it's like chewing tacks in the sweltering sun while having someone serenade you with fingernails on chalkboards."That's a little slice of...
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Aug 2
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"[T]here was waitressing and photography school, an MFA, decent success as a short-story writer, and a downright solid career as a radio producer, which allowed her to rub elbows with the likes of Rushdie. (She currently hosts an occasional live...
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Aug 1
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"You race across the desert drinking beer and singing on the top of your lungs so you don’t have to think about the very gross thing you just did. (But you had to do it. What else could you have...
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