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Beth Kephart has done something extraordinary with this huge and messy thing called memoir—roping it into submission with her typically beautifully writing. There is authority here, scholarship, challenge. In this well-organized book, every example is a precious stone to turn over and to learn from, particularly in terms of crafting a voice and finding one's way in. Too many students think memoir just happens. Nothing ever just happens. Memoir is an academic field. This should become the seminal text.

Buzz Bissinger, author of Father's Day, A Prayer for the City, and Friday Night Lights

Take a peek into the ‘Jersey Shore’ Season 4 digs in Italy… (Yeah, we’re a little jealous, too, though we’re not sure we’d want to live there at the same time as the cast based on what we know goes down in those... Read the rest of this post

Anybody who’s read of my love for Friday Night Lights knows I grew up rooting for the Cowboys. But did you know there’s another, better, more authentic way to make nachos than the soggy pile-up we’re all used to?

All mysteries (and recipes) revealed in “Football and Nachos, the Texan Way,” my contribution to The Awl’s pre-Independence-Day Made in America series.
 

Image courtesy of the indispensable Homesick Texan, who’s on top of your Friday Night Lights dinner needs

This week in books! A little late!

First up, there's going to be a JACOB WONDERBAR book party!! And you're invited! The publication of WONDERBAR is just over two weeks away, and on Friday May 13th I'm going to be hosting a reading/launch party at Books Inc. Opera Plaza here in San Francsico. Please come! Mark your calendars! Bring your friends! Bring corndogs! (Okay, corndogs are optional.) May 13th, 7pm, hope to see you there.

Oh, and I also had an interview over at Not an Editor, where I talk about the editing process.

In publishing news, some sad news as yet another memoir has been exposed as perhaps lacking on the truthiness scale. This time it's THREE CUPS OF TEA author Greg Mortensen. INTO THIN AIR author Jon Krakauer published an expose about some of Mortensen's stories, including wandering into a village after being lost climbing K2, and being kidnapped by the Taliban. Among the reactions, Laura Miller at Salon wonders what's the big deal, Jessa Crispin tackles Miller and points out the casual racism of claiming you were kidnapped by Taliban, and Ta-Nehisi Coates wonders if publishers are ever going to have to start fact-checking memoirs, noting how easy it is to spin fiction and claim it's true.

One of the greatest shows on television is entering its final season (or, at least, for those of use who don't have Direct TV) and I'm definitely going to miss it when it's gone. The Millions surveys the literariness of "Friday Night Lights" and places it alongside The Wire and Mad Men in the genre of "TV for readers."

Speaking of readings, Lisa Brackmann passed along a hilarious post from The Onion, and the headline says it all: Author Promoting Book Gives It Her All Whether It's Just 3 People Or A Crowd Of 9 People.

Congrats to the Pulitzer winners! Jennifer Egan came away the winner for fiction with her novel A VISIT FROM THE GOON SQUAD.

In e-book news, Amazon announced that it would soon allow library lending on the Kindle, a feature that already exists on the Nook. And although a small UK publisher previously published an article in the Guardian bemoaning Amazon's terms, another small press came to Amazon's defense with an article saying Amazon isn't the enemy.

In writing advice news, agent Rachelle Gardner has a terrific post on 6 things writers can learn from Ernest Hemingway (having just read A MOVEABLE FEAST myself I found

Dang, y’all. I started streaming the first season of Friday Night Lights at 11 o’clock Saturday night and apart from sleeping and eating haven’t done much since but keep selecting the next episode on Netflix.

I hear it’s a great show even if you don’t like football. What with the Dallas, Miami, and Gainesville in my background, I can’t speak to that — one of few things my parents agreed on during my toddlerhood was that we rooted for the Cowboys — but I do know I haven’t been so taken with a show about high school since Freaks and Geeks.

Miranda Popkey’s praise at The Paris Review Daily for, among other things, the way Friday Night Lights “expertly … dramatized those moments when adolescents, almost unconsciously, begin to act like adults,” is what convinced me to watch. I’m just hoping to forget everything she says about season four by the time I get there — which, at this rate, should happen in about three days.

Anyhow, I’m in that jittery, new-love stage and feel like talking about it. Other conversion anecdotes (just discovered Nancy Franklin’s) are welcome, but no spoilers please.

'Glee' moves one step closer to multimedia domination.. (Fox is teaming with Little, Brown to publish a book series, the first of which will be a "Glee" prequel, a Glee-quel if you will, out in August. Bets on when we'll see "Glee: The Movie"? Also... Read the rest of this post

1. I've been watching Friday Night Lights on DVD--just finished season 1--this show is amazing. The writing and acting are fantastic. I care about every character, and my heart is in my throat every episode. Happy sigh.

2. I confess to a teensy crush on Friday Night Lights' Coach Taylor (Kyle Chandler), Tim Riggins (Taylor Kitsch), and Matt Saracen (Zach Gilford). Please tell me I'm not alone in this. Just look at these cuties!

3. Almost ready for my mother-in-law's visit. Nothing like the last minute. I'm cleaning, I'm cleaning. I'm tired, I'm tired. She'll be here tomorrow!

4. At least visitors offer some motivation for cleaning. 

41/2. Enjoy the weekend!

I was listening to NPR yesterday afternoon and heard the intro to All Things Considered's new series on high school football, its prominence in American culture and role it plays in our communities. One of the reporters added that the series will... Read the rest of this post

'Pedro' (a scripted biopic based on the life and impact of the HIV positive "Real World" housemate. Plus, MTV renews the reality series for four more seasons And Anastasia's favorite "Friday Night Lights" gets a pass for two more years) (USA Today)... Read the rest of this post

At the end of each chapter of The Graveyard Book I've drawn a little headstone, with the number of the chapter on it.

I just drew the little headstone for Chapter 7. After one hundred and eleven handwritten pages. There's a lot wrong with it, there are bits that need to be expanded (or, in the case of one scene, written) bits that mean that I need to go and change or expand moments earlier in the book. The prose is a bit more pedestrian than most of the other chapters, and I'll need to play with it or leave it. But it's done -- and it's huge. Which, for something that, if this was a film, would be the entire Third Act, is not really surprising. As I said, it's done, and I got back to the house from the gazebo to find my assistant Lorraine still typing out from photocopies what I'd handwritten earlier in the week, an hour after she would normally have gone home, and only still typing because she wanted to know what happened next. She glared at me, and told me I had to keep writing...

Right. Now I have to think about Chapter 8 a bit. I think I may need to sit down and list everything that has to happen before the book can end. Plotting by list can sometimes be extremely useful.

(The oddest moment of today was finding a slip of paper in The Graveyard Book book I'm writing in, on stationary from the hotel I was in in Budapest in June, which listed everything that needed to happen in Chapter 7, including the climactic denouement which I was very proud of having come up with last week. Not sure whether this says something about my rubbish memory, or about the sometimes inevitable nature of storytelling. As in, "Of course it went there, because that was where it was going to go.")

Are you spending too much time agonizing over every sentence of your novel? Do you have a deadline?

Thousands of writers are killing themselves right now over National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo), trying to write 50,000 words in a month. A number of our readers are taking the challenge, including Jodi Vander Molen, The Writing Geek and Monica Flores.

Jodi weighed in with some overwhelmed thoughts: "I have heartburn. I find myself crunching word count numbers a lot. I usually write poetry, not exactly a quantity sport. What was I thinking?"

This is what I say--The beauty of NaNoWriMo is that you stop worrying about crafting perfect sentences and pitch-perfect dialogue. You just write and write, and let the novel figure itself out. That's a difficult, rewarding route that most writers never take. 

Novelist J.A. Konrath is struggling to complete 50,000 words in 24 days--pounding out another installment of his Jack Daniels crime series. He has some words of wisdom for writers stuck in the early stages of the process, swamped by plotting. These are words to live by:

"Think about the worst thing that can happen. After you've written a character for a few dozen or hundred pages, and have gotten to know her like a family member, you're going to better understand her goals, fears, and motivations. Think about the most horrible thing that can happen to her, then make it happen."

Hi all,

I blogger friend from Live Journal (http://kara-gnome.livejournal.com/) directed me to this post. I found the exercise very helpful and will definitely try it later this weekend when I work on the plot of my novel. It couldn't have come at a better time, as I'm working on a proposal that includes a detailed outline.

The title of the post is: An Exercise in Plotting: The Seven Sentence Story
http://jimvanpelt.livejournal.com/#asset-jimvanpelt-81347

Hope you find it helpful as well!

Cheers!
Mayra

"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 Vlautin's road novel, The Motel Life. It follows the trail of an alcoholic storyteller and his brother, running from a horrible accident. Like any good pulp fiction novel, these characters can't escape their mistakes, and the freedom of a road novel collides with the punishment of a noir novel.

Today, Vlautin is our special guest, explaining how he structured his deceptively aimless road novel, part of 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:
Your book has such an effortless, real-time feel as your characters pinball through the world. How did you outline/plot the journey of Motel Life? How do you manage these seemingly random transitions between settings without losing your readers?

Willy Vlautin:

You know, I guess I just followed my gut on plot. Continue reading...

I am always up for time-killing activities on the web, and Becky over at Book Reports has found one that is actually useful. This little site, Xtimeline.com lets you create a timeline for a project. You could use this for scheduling your baby’s developmental milestones, or as Becky points out, you could use it to timeline your story’s plot. I know that in my thesis, there are instances where time doesn’t match up because I’ve forgotten how long I’ve said things have happened. I plan to use this nifty system to chart my thesis. You could use it for your books too. If you want to see how others have used the site for fictional works, look at the Star Trek History or the Harry Potter one.

"Kafka's writing will always make one feel a little foolish, a little tongue-tied. One will find oneself standing there in a kind of baffled wonder that will insist upon a slightly new mode of perceiving, a slightly new way of speaking." 

That's a passage from textual maze of Lance Olsen's new novel, Anxious Pleasures.

Lance Olsen literally wrote the book on writing, a handbook for fledgling writers called Rebel Yell. In addition, he has written nine novels and his work has appeared in scores of magazines.

This week he is our special guest, discussing his new book and sharing tips for fledgling writers.

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 publishing.

Jason Boog: 
Anxious Pleasures criss-crosses, time, space, and different writing styles. How did you outline this novel? In other words, how did you plan (and keep under control) this complicated weave of text as you wrote? Any general advice for outlining and plotting novels?

Lance Olsen:
Unlike many writers, I outline vigorously before launching a novel. Continue reading...