Actress and writer Maya Sondhi. Fans of Line Of Duty will remember the moment in series five when PC Maneet Bindra had her throat slit and was left to bleed out on a jetty. While the shocking scene was the unequivocal end of Bindra, it was not the full stop on the relationship between Maya […]
Dear Readers: Letter writer “Single By Choice” asked for advice relating to his choice to swear off dating after an erectile dysfunction diagnosis. Many responses poured in. What struck me about every single one of the responses was how empathetic and solution-focused they were. I’m sharing five of the replies in hopes that they inspire […]
I wasn’t always a slow writer. I had to train myself to be one. In graduate school, I only wrote for deadlines, avoiding writing until I had to turn in a story for workshop. After I graduated with an MFA in the early 2000s, I worked as a secretary in the office of the Creative […]
The cover of “Women’s Hotel” shows an illustration of a light pink, 11-story building with many windows, and red awnings on the ground floor. The author’s name appears in black type along a yellow strip running down the right side of the building. WOMEN’S HOTEL , by Daniel M. Lavery It’s the 1960s, and New […]
Earlier this year, the Cannes Film Festival observed a heroic first: the director who won the Palme d’Or, the event’s highest honor, dedicated the prize to “all sex workers, past, present, and future.” No one familiar with the director, Sean Baker, could have been too surprised. Baker has spent his career—up to and including his […]
Why is it that when so many of us sit to write, we look outward for motivation? We look for a muse. Why, instead, don’t we look inside ourselves? ( Fracturing Fairy Tales to Jumpstart Your Writing .) Inside our hearts and minds are vast memories and feelings that transcend time and space, fusing themselves […]
This first appeared in Lit Hub’s Craft of Writing newsletter— sign up here . Stream of consciousness is not a literary affectation as many like to think, but the way our brains naturally work; traditionally we’re taught that narrative fiction requires breaks and quotation marks and chapters to be accessible, that dense, unbroken novels with […]
In my latest novel, The Colony Club , I begin with one character, Daisy Harriman, in 1968, just her and a young reporter as she looks back over her life. She’s old, subdued but proud of her achievements. It’s an intimate scene, only two people in the spotlight. That scene cuts to a much more […]
The 1977-78 cast of “Saturday Night Live,” which is now in its 50th season. The story of the making of the show’s first episode is the subject of the new film “Saturday Night.” “Saturday Night Live,” the late-night NBC comedy-variety show now in its 50th season, generally prefers to mine its material from other people’s […]
In today’s world of tweets, texts, and sound bites, fiction writers often feel pressure to focus on elements like fantastical world-building, steamy scenes, and rapid-fire plots to keep readers engaged. While these can certainly make for exciting stories, the most enduring novels offer something more profound: emotional connection. Since the dawn of storytelling, readers have […]
