Marie Bacigalupo
by mbacigalupo | Jan 1, 2016 | Fiction, novel
Happy New Year to everyone! One of my holiday presents this year was Mohsin Hamid’s The Reluctant Fundamentalist, a novel praised for its innovative form. In fact, the form Hamid uses is an old one—the dramatic monologue—a convention I studied many moons ago as a...
by mbacigalupo | Dec 1, 2015 | Fiction, novel, novella
This month I turn again to John Gardner for inspiration, paraphrasing his comments on plot generation in The Art of Fiction. Last time, we talked mainly about short story plotting. As Gardner points out, writers labor over plot (as if we didn’t already know!). Trying...
by mbacigalupo | Nov 1, 2015 | Uncategorized
Plot has always been a particular challenge for me, and I know I’m not struggling alone. For step-by-step guidance on the process of plotting, I turn this month to John Gardner’s classic, The Art of Fiction. For this post, I excerpted and paraphrased pertinent...
by mbacigalupo | Oct 1, 2015 | Advice, Fiction
There’s no lack of advice—on the Web, in books and magazines—for writers trying to improve their craft. It’s hard to sift through the sheer mass of it to uncover what’s likely to work for you. Maybe I can help by sharing suggestions that worked for me. 1. Know...
by mbacigalupo | Sep 1, 2015 | Fiction
The novel has been around for a long, long time. I suspect that’s because it responds at length to our deepest human need for storytelling. It’s not surprising, then, that it’s my go-to genre when I need a fictive fix. Ever since I opened the pages of Louisa May...
by mbacigalupo | Aug 2, 2015 | Fiction
The short story is a source of consternation to many struggling writers. The definitions, word counts, how-to’s differ from commentator to commentator. So what’s a writer to do? She can start by getting down to basics. In his review of Hawthorne’s Twice Told Tales,...
by mbacigalupo | Jul 1, 2015 | Fiction
After winning First Place in the Writer's Digest competition with my story, "Evacuation," the magazine interviewed me for its July/August 2013 issue. Below is an excerpt from that interview: WHO HAS INSPIRED YOU AS A WRITER? Although you may not find evidence...
by mbacigalupo | May 28, 2015 | Fiction
Welcome to a blog designed to celebrate the joy of fiction. Here practicing and aspiring novelists and short story writers, as well as admiring readers and thoughtful commentators may, and I hope will, give voice to their ideas and practices, successes and failures,...
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