Oklahoma was where it all went wrong. Alex steered the juddering van to the shoulder, and, with his dog Munson howling along in the seat beside him, he cursed ­everything.

At thirty-three—having misspent his twenties dithering and drinking too much—Paul Wakeling was proud of how far he’d come. He was married, a new father, three years sober, and had recently gotten hired on as an adjunct at the Big Local University.

Controlling a sentence—controlling this sentence, as I type—is for me the best, most pleasurable work there is.

  There comes a point in every reader’s life when they must make peace with all the books they’ll never read. This is true even for the most voracious reader in the world. They say Alexander Pope was the last person to have read every book…

  A curious feature of most dystopian fiction is that it begins in medias res. It’s a stylistic convention of the genre, and it applies to most dystopian lit that comes to mind, from Nineteen Eighty-Four to Brave New World to Never Let Me Go. As …

  The definition of what qualifies as “chick lit” (an unpleasant term, besides which, I’ve personally always thought if you were going to coin a sexist word for women’s books, chicktion has more pizzazz, but I digress) is, in its purest for…

Why are there so many bars in my novel?Novels are long, and you have to fill them with stuff, and that stuff tends to accumulate in patterns, laying bare your preoccupations. If you’re hung up on something, there’s a good chance it will appear, s…