Author of AMERICAN POP, PLAY PRETTY BLUES, and THE QUEEN CITY DETECTIVE AGENCY snowdenwright.substack.com
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The Lemannaissance is upon us! Thank you so much to everyone at the @oxfordamerican for shepherding this piece into publication. Jackson folks: Nancy and I will be in conversation this Wednesday at @LemuriaBooks!
oxfordamerican.org/oa-now/na…
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I'm glad that Scott Colom ad was successful, but it kinda bothers me how, in the intro, Cindy Hyde-Smith doesn't actually say, "Pick another protein." I feel like Elaine telling George, "See, there are no jerk stores. It's just a little confusing, is all."
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For anyone who loves Nancy Lemann's Lives of the Saints, I give you Barbara Trapido's Brother of the More Famous Jack.
"The dialogue is Stoppard-level. If these characters were dogs, they would be constantly lifting their legs at one another."
nytimes.com/2026/10/12/books…
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Oh, not putting dialogue in quotation marks forces readers to focus and parse the text? So do Wingdings, my dear
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He's being hyperbolic with one-per-book, but avoiding cliches is a core tenet of quality writing. Interrogate your rationalizations, I advise my students, and the people angry at Franzen for this clip are rationalizing themselves into not having to do the work of avoiding cliches
"You get at most one cliché per book."
Jonathan Franzen doesn't finish most books people send him. He reads until the second cliché, then stops.
"People send me a galley of a book that's coming out. I read along until I get to the second cliché, and I say, thank you."
"They tell me this is not an attentive writer. Aren't you aware that that's a cliché? Didn't it occur to you to stop and take 20 minutes to find a better phrasing than that?"
"You can also have borrowed feelings, borrowed ideas, borrowed situations. Sentiment can be clichéd, or unearned."
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I tend to find autofiction--not to be confused with autobiographical fiction--unappealing because, in execution and in expression, it's pure solipsism. "My thoughts are so interesting," an autofiction writer thinks, "that I don't need anything interesting to happen in this book!"
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Excited to dig into to the latest novel from Pulitzer Prize winner Hernan Diaz. I’ll be in conversation with him at @SquareBooks on October 13th. Hope to see y’all there!
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So many online arguments these days sound like--
Person A: This orange is rotten!
Person B: That orange can't be rotten, because this apple is rotten!
They should come up with a name for this kind of argument. What about, what about . . . eh, I can't think of anything
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Beware conflating a film's "writing" with its "dialogue." They are not the same thing. Dialogue is a tiny part of screenwriting. I'm talking, like, one-percent tiny
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Vampire Lestat writers' room:
Tell me the most exciting parts of the book.
Wolf attack?
Cover it in a 45-second flashback.
His being turned?
45 seconds.
Nicki's death?
45 seconds.
Vampire queen awakens after 2,000 years and attacks a stadium of vampires?
I don't think we need it
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The Odyssey is great. I recommend you watch it while constantly checking your phone like the 50-year-old man sitting next to me did until I asked him to grow up
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Writing professors, please check for this error in your bios: If you note a city and state, separated by a comma, and the state isn't followed by a period or comma, your punctuation's wrong. My advice? Fix the mistake and be unfathomably ashamed, in the order of your choice
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I'm not sure it's useful to compare these two. One is third-person omniscient and very, very earnest. The other is first-person and obviously satirical. They're doing different things in different ways.
If you're wondering why fewer people read literary fiction today, compare these two novel openings.
One was originally self-published.
The other reflects the dominant style in contemporary publishing.
The difference is night and day.
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What a lovely review! Thank you so much to @BookOfTheDayUS
Today's #BookOfTheDay is The Queen City Detective Agency by @snowdenwright
Grab your copy — Amazon link in the replies 👇
#BookTwitter #MysteryBooks #ad
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My best advice for not-yet-successful writers: Learn grammar. That puts you ahead of 99% of successful writers
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Me: Modern readers are crazy for wanting perfectly kind and decent protagonists. People like that don't exist!
Me after watching both seasons of Jury Duty: Okay, two people like that exist.
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Although I liked the first season of Beef--haven't watched the second--the idea of an anthology series centered and titled around "conflict" is hilarious. It's like a composer doing a series of symphonies on "sound," a choreographer doing a series of ballets on "movement"
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Neil McCauley: There's a flip side to that coin.
Vincent Hanna: What, like all coins?
#SnarkyHeat
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