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Craft Rants

The View from Inside: On Adding Interiority to Your Fiction
Plus, five years of Counter Craft and a subscription incentive
 • Lincoln Michel
What Not Reading Does to Your Writing
More thoughts on "TV brain prose" and why reading is, yes, useful for your writing.
 • Lincoln Michel
Surf's Up in Slop City
How should authors navigate a world with disappearing books coverage and a rising flood of AI slop books?
 • Lincoln Michel
Why Literature Needs a Punk Rock Mindset
The Washington Post shutting down its books coverage is a reminder that we have to do it ourselves
 • Lincoln Michel
Why "Plot" Isn't a Four-Letter Word
On teaching yourself plotting and part one of an attempt to describe my "Principles of Plotting"
 • Lincoln Michel
Don't Draft Shakespeare into Your Genre Wars
Plus asshole autofiction and a history book recommendation to understand the chaos of the news
 • Lincoln Michel
Books as Art Projects
On books you want to hold in your hand or slip in your pocket
 • Lincoln Michel
Shirley Jackson and the Eerie Omniscient Narrator
Some thoughts on the horror classic The Haunting of Hill House
 • Lincoln Michel
Style Is More than Sentences
In defense of style and the infinite possibilities of storytelling
 • Lincoln Michel
Criticism in the Age of AI
Will the proliferation of LLM text change how we think about human-authored books?
 • Lincoln Michel
The Grand Ballroom Theory of Literature
On literature as an unending conversation, genres as dialogues, and writing as adding your voice to the chat
 • Lincoln Michel
Why You Should Still Build Your Raft of Art in the Sea of Slop
A little cri du coeur about working on your work and avoiding all the noise
 • Lincoln Michel
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