Counter Craft

Lincoln Michel
fiction craft, publishing demystification, weird books
Created 11 Feb 2021
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  • Conflict Is Only One Way to Think About Stories
    07 Apr 2022 • 10 0
    If you’ve been reading literary Twitter this week, you’ve almost certainly seen a lot of, uh, conflict over the question of conflicts in literature. Are all stories driven by conflict? Or is that clai...
  • The Grotesque Sublime
    30 Mar 2022 • 12 9
    For the last few weeks, I’ve been teaching a unit on horror fiction with a focus on horror effects. One of the things I love about horror fiction (and it’s ancestor Gothic fiction) is the how the theo...
  • The One Rule of Fiction Writing
    13 Mar 2022 • 24 3
    As the title of this newsletter implies, I’m not a fan of writing rules. Every claim someone makes about how fiction works can be rebutted with counterexamples. Character is fundamental. . . except wh...
  • Processing: How Matt Bell Wrote Refuse to Be Done
    07 Mar 2022 • 6 1
    I’m often wary of craft books. Many seem to fall into two camps: overly vague and offering more mysticism than practical advice, or else so specific they impose one writer’s individual aesthetic and p...
  • When Science Fiction and Fantasy Envisions Life Beyond Capitalism
    23 Feb 2022 • 15 20
    In 2014, the legend Ursula K. Le Guin was given a Medal for Distinguished Contribution to American Letters by the National Book Foundation and delivered what I’ve heard (accurately) described as a bar...
  • What We Lose When We Lose Literary Magazines
    16 Feb 2022 • 15 8
    This week CNN.com, of all places, had an article on a depressing trend: the death of literary magazines. It’s not only independent lit mags that are disappearing, but so are university-funded magazine...
  • Do Blurbs Actually Work?
    11 Feb 2022 • 7 5
    “Luminous, sui generis, and above all brave. This newsletter is a work of startling originality.” - The New York Review of Newsletters “Counter Craft is like the bastard child of William Shakespeare, ...
  • Some Words About Word Counts
    06 Feb 2022 • 13 0
    For most of the morning, Twitter has been fighting about one of the seemingly dullest things: book word counts. An editor at a commercial-minded independent press tweeted that it broke their heart to ...
  • Why You Need to Read Fiction To Write Fiction
    26 Jan 2022 • 27 12
    Piles of French Novels by Van Gogh (1887) Recently, literary twitter was abuzz with one of those ridiculous debates that pops up every few months: Do you actually need to read books to be a write book...
  • Notes on the Speculative Epic
    19 Jan 2022 • 20 16
    Yesterday, I had the pleasure of reviewing How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu for the New York Times. It’s a beautiful and mournful book about grief and loss in the wake of a global pande...
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