Novel in the Middle | Joseph Harris | Substack

There’s a question most writers dread: “What is your story about?” This, we feel, is ridiculous. How are we supposed to reduce hundreds of pages to a few sentences? It seems unfair, or impossible. And yet we do it all the time when describing our favorite books and movies. We…

Sep 22, 2021

How plot holes are really opportunities

Mar 9

Dec 2, 2022

I suspect most novelists start on one side or the other. Either they love literary fiction for its depth, or they love genre fiction for its brute-force…

Nov 25, 2022

The trouble with Twitter isn’t that it’s full of inanity and self-promoting jerks. The trouble is that it’s a solution to a problem that shouldn’t be…

Oct 7, 2022

The Rings of Power doesn’t have any right to be good. It’s funded by a megacorporation, for one thing. I don’t say that to demean big businesses or…

Sep 27, 2022

I believe that if a writer can return to the world more than what the world has given him, then he has earned his keep, not only as a writer, but also…

Sep 9, 2022

Learning is a process of trial and error, and that's what makes writing hard

Jul 29, 2022

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